Advertisement
Fashion
LifestyleFashion & Beauty

Singapore online fashion festival The Front Row to give smaller local brands a digital boost

  • Singapore’s ‘godfather of fashion’ Daniel Boey wants his virtual show this month to help labels quietly doing great work amid difficult retail times
  • Cult favourites such as Africa-inspired OliveAnkara, menswear brand Graye and contemporary womenswear label Ginlee Studio will all feature

Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Singapore’s “godfather of fashion” Daniel Boey founded The Front Row online fashion festival, which will feature a range of virtual fashion shows and presentations.
Karen Tee

He may be dubbed Singapore’s godfather of fashion but it took the pandemic to reignite Daniel Boey’s passion for the industry. A tireless champion of the local scene, Boey has been conspicuously absent from fashion for the past few years – though that’s not quite how he sees it.

Advertisement

“I was never actually away from the fashion scene. Other aspects of my work simply took centre stage because there were more exciting projects that [meant] we could stretch ourselves creatively,” says the famously outspoken Boey.

That includes his creative agency producing the Singapore Fintech Festival for three years, while he has also written four books since 2014 and been immersed in dog shelter work and fundraising, in part inspired by his adoption of a shelter dog.

“Fashion events – and especially fashion weeks of late – have mostly swung away from focusing on the creativity and work of the designers and veered towards a circus of celebrities, champagne, parties, red carpet and outrageous street style. It was more about getting photographed than about the actual pieces on the runway,” he says.
Models posing for a shoot for The Front Row.
Models posing for a shoot for The Front Row.
Advertisement

When the pandemic hit, Boey began to take stock of how various industries were reacting to the crisis.

“I saw how the theatre industry was banding together, the music industry was creating digital showcases for themselves and how corporations and businesses were migrating to the virtual world to conduct their businesses,” he says. At the same time, Singapore’s relatively small fashion market was facing a potentially devastating downturn amid a plunge in consumer spending and the sudden decimation of the tourism industry.
Advertisement