You May Be Going To Government-Organized Fashion Events Soon

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Image via Supply Chain Visibility

If Anna Wintour is the queen of fashion, a new king Michael may have just emerged. And no, it's not Kors—it's Mayor Bloomberg.

With foreign competition increasing and the internet slowly becoming a convenient and cheaper outlet to obtain goods, Bloomberg has instated six new Manhattan-based fashion initiatives geared towards helping young hopefuls get their foot in the door and offering assistance to emerging talents with potential for growth.

The first, New York City Fashion Draft, will allow students worldwide to come to the city and meet with companies for purposes of fashion recruitment. Fashion Campus NYC, which is also geared towards industry hopefuls, is a set of business seminars that also covers information about living and working in Manhattan, while New York City Fashion Fellows gives thirty emerging talents in the business end of fashion management access to networking and mentors.

For those more established in the industry, there's the NYC Fashion Fund and Institute, which provides business assistance for up-and-coming designers and manufacturers, Project Pop-up, an annual competition for creative retail concepts with a possible pop-up store as the end prize, and Designer as Entrepreneur, which, as its name implies, helps designers expand their business knowledge through finance-related seminars.

Though the initiatives sound like the type of events that a well-coordinated fashion school or company would organize, it makes a ton of sense for the city to step in to boost the business end of New York's fashion community. In New York, more than 5% of the city's workers have apparel industry jobs and over half a million people travel to New York annually for fashion-related reasons, meaning that there likely three other people on your morning train who know what a shift dress is. We suggest chatting up everyone around you until you find out which ones they are.
· City Hall Makes Fashion A Priority [WWD]
· Bloomberg On a Mission to Boost the City's Fashion Industry [Thread NY]