It seems that just about every city in the world now has a fashion week or a fashion festival. Some are hosted primarily to gain the attention of the fashion industry – and we’ll soon witness just how well they do that when the spring 2012 fashion showings kick off in Paris, New York, Milan and London. Others are consumer focussed: it’s their intention to get those of us who frequent each particular city’s shops to spend our money on current season threads. These second tier fashion weeks and festivals have a much harder task at hand: in needing us to spend, they first need to get our attention. Given that they’re often scheduled to conflict with their foreign cousins and that they never book the same calibre of model, that’s no easy task. The forthcoming Melbourne spring fashion week will, for instance, clash with New York.
How then to do they make a blip on our collective radar?
That usually comes down to some form of celebrity endorsement. Effectively a ‘face’ of the fashion week, if your city secures the right face it has the potential to have fashion retailers’ cash registers ringing.
For it’s spring 2011 season it would seem that the Perth Fashion Festival has just the right face: Nicole Trunfio.
Born in the same Australian state of which Perth is the capital, Nicole Trunfio provides an interesting prospect for the Perth Fashion Festival. At once she represents a local talent, but more so a youthful and fashionable one. Normally the latter attribute would be where it ends – we’re in an era where simply being a model, no matter how unknown, is often enough to be hired as the face of a fashion festival. Trunfio has something else however: international appeal.
In hiring Nicole Trunfio to head the promotional campaign for Perth Fashion Week its organisers have garnered precisely what every second tier fashion week needs: international attention.
You can see Nicole Trunfio’s campaign for the Perth Fashion Festival as photographed by Russell James by clicking on the thumbnails above and browsing through the gallery.
