Speech by SCED at FFFRIDAY Music and Exhibition Kick-off Ceremony (English only)
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Edith (Chairlady of Fashion Farm Foundation (FFF), Ms Edith Law), distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Fashion Farm Foundation is a strong advocate and incubation cum co-working space for fashion design and related professions.
The Foundation provides a distinctively creative platform for fashion designers to come together under the same roof - to synergise ideas, to identify themselves as a cluster, and also to set sail together to the shows, exhibitions and catwalks both locally and internationally, the Paris show being a recent and successful example.
If there is any synergy or co-branding effect between Hong Kong and fashion design, it must be the conducive soil and climate that have nurtured this highly versatile creative industry. And there is no better illustration than what FFF represents.
As your name suggests, what FFF is doing is to "farm" by nurturing the fashion design trade.
Fashion has great prospects in Hong Kong because we believe we have the soil, the climate and the ecology that can nurture the trade to bear fruit.
With the long-established and strong textiles and garment industries as the backbone, Hong Kong has the capacity to carry fashion design, giving it all the support needed.
We have also got a reservoir of talent, home-grown and internationally trained as well, in fashion design. Credits go to the various design schools in Hong Kong who nurtured the pool of designers, and these include PolyU (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), HKDI (Hong Kong Design Institute), SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design), HKU SPACE (University of Hong Kong School of Professional and Continuing Education)'s collaboration with Central Saint Martins, just to name a few.
But we have more, the Fashion Design Incubation undertaken by the Hong Kong Design Centre, and the host today, FFF, signifies the public and private participation. These are the seeds sowing work done for the industry.
There will be more, as you have seen in two ideas highlighted in the Policy Address. First, the $1 billion injection into the CreateSmart Initiative, and the other building a fashion design base leveraging on the vibrancy of Sham Shui Po for fashion.
These are no small money or ideas, and are meant to irrigate the mushrooming of fashion design talents with a view to seeing fashion to blossom and bear fruit.
But if you ask me what matters most to the fashion design industry in Hong Kong, I would say it is the fun and fortune it brings. Fortune not just in the sense of earning or a dollar sign but a prospect of future opportunity for young people who are driven to this trade because of the fun of it, the fruits it can bear and a future that is attainable given the sweating in farming for it.
So, have fun, and happy birthday to FFF.
Thank you.
Ends/Friday, November 10, 2017
Issued at HKT 19:56
Issued at HKT 19:56
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