São Paulo Fashion Week - here's to the designers

Gisele for Colcci São Paulo Fashion Week is drawing to a close as I write and, in the UK at least, much of the focus has been on the celebrities and models at the catwalk shows. Gisele Bundchen, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Lea T are just some of the names grabbing the headlines, but is this kind of attention a good thing for SPFW? Neon On the one hand, it gets people talking and raises the profile of the event to an international level. It attracts key fashion journalists from outside Brazil, who filter the information down to buyers and the general public alike. But it’s important that celebrities don’t overshadow the clothes or – worse still – that they compensate for a lack of design direction. Animale Fortunately, I don’t think the latter is the case at SPFW, which showed some standout collections. But the organisers, Luminosidade, need to think about how to promote the event next season. They need to look at raising the profiles of the designers themselves so that fashion journalists refer to Reinaldo Lourenço, Oskar Metsavaht and Alexandre Herchcovitch in the same breath as Phoebe Philo, Christopher Bailey and Stella McCartney. Maria Bonita It won’t happen overnight but Luminosidade has already made great strides in raising the profile of SPFW and Fashion Rio in a relatively short space of time. Equally, Brazilian designers must take great confidence from the spotlight that Brazil is finding itself under and push creative boundaries so that they can sit alongside those international names. And fashion journalists need to go beyond the celebrities to report much more in-depth on the collections themselves. Reinaldo Lourenço My favourite collections this season were by Neon (epitomises a Brazilian aesthetic), Animale (sexy and fluid), Maria Bonita (easy, feminine tailoring) and Reinaldo Lourenço (accomplished, with a unique handwriting). Which were yours? Alexandre Herchcovitch Amapo