As commuters made their way to work yesterday morning, those passing the Town Hall steps saw five willowy models wearing flowing gowns by Melbourne designer Toni Maticevski. The stunt was aimed at spruiking Fashion Festival Sydney, which opens on Tuesday as a week-long event aimed at driving retail sales throughout the central business district and beyond.
The festival could not come at a better time. Earlier this month, the Herald revealed retail sales had collapsed in NSW in a year in which the rest of Australia had inched forward. While Australian sales rose just 2.6 per cent during 2010-11, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures obtained by the Herald showed the volume of food bought in NSW over the year fell about 1 per cent, patronage of cafes and restaurants dropped 8 per cent and the volume of clothes and shoes bought fell 6 per cent.
For dwindling apparel sales, the general manager of IMG Fashion Australia, Daniel Hill, says the festival is part of the answer.
''The whole purpose of the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Sydney is to bring fashion retail to the forefront of people's minds at a time when the spring-summer collections are going in store,'' Hill says. ''They are fully priced and they are new season clothes.''
Unlike Australian Fashion Week, which is industry-only, the festival is a consumer event to which any member of the public can buy a ticket. Runway shows featuring some of the best collections from fashion week by designers such as Dion Lee, Alex Perry, Josh Goot and Therese Rawsthorne are the lynchpin of the event at the Town Hall, as IMG owns both fashion week and the festival.
''We are trying to give the public an experience of Australian Fashion Week, which they can't ordinarily attend,'' Hill says. ''We like to reproduce a little bit of that magic and give it back to the public but we do it in a such a way that the clothes are styled to be more wearable, rather than the creative spikes that you see during AFW.''
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