By Charles Mgbolu
Merci, Paris! is on the lips of many guests as the Paris Fashion Week season concludes in grand style, with the host Palais de Tokyo (The Tokyo Place) welcoming more than 30 international designers in the week-long event.
The show, which ran from September 25 to October 3, saw celebrities, designers, and trend addicts thrown into a colourful mix as collections after collections were unveiled on runways.
The marble slabs of the Palais de Tokyo, a cultural arcade, were punctuated with the timed footfalls of fashion models wearing collections from international designers such as Chanel, Miu Miu, Anna, October, Xuly Bet, and Christian Wijnants, to name but a few.
Organisers also said it gave a beaming spotlight to emerging designers, bringing together brands selected for their creativity and development potential.
Ten designers from Ghana, Nigeria, Columbia and Côte d'Ivoire also presented their collections at The Folklore Connect’s debut showroom, which was unveiled at the event.
According to organisers, Folklore Connect is a wholesale platform that provides a platform for diverse brands in global markets to manage and scale their wholesale businesses and retailers with a marketplace to discover and shop these brands.
The African brands featured include Wanda Lephoto, BruceGlen, Cynthia Abila, Duaba Serwa, Florian London, Israella Kobla, Kente Gentlemen, Fruché, Rendoll and The Lulo Project.
The event also saw fashion, movie, and music stars strut the runway as guest models with Nigerian Afrobeat singer Seun Kuti, son of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, on the runway on Day Seven of the Paris Fashion Week.
Wearing a straight face, he wore a piece called "Stuntman on Set" that featured a white and green bodysuit with a flag-style striped with blue and green hues.
Back in 2018, Wizkid hit Milan Men's Fashion Week in a Dolce & Gabbana collection.
Afrobeats singer David Adeleke, aka Davido, was also a guest runway model in 2021 for Puma, and presented his own viral catwalk at the New York Fashion Week for that year.
