The 2018 Guangdong Fashion Week for the spring collection launched at the Zhongsu Friendship Tower in Guangzhou on March 18.

This year's fashion week will highlight the resource integration of Guangdong province, Hong Kong, and Macao to usher in a new fashion culture in the region. Guangzhou, an Alpha-class global city according to the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network, serves as an international platform for the exchange between China and the West on original fashion designs.

Guangdong Fashion Week will showcase China's intangible cultural heritage.

The site where the opening ceremony was held on the night of March 18 was built as a fashion space filled with a sense of illusion and technology. A full house of fashion designers, internet celebrities, and fashion lovers watched the catwalk to see what the latest trends would be.

It is said that as many as 110 exclusive domestic and overseas designer brands will directly participate in the fashion shows held during the week.

The organizing committee of the Guangdong Fashion Week will make special efforts to promote China's intangible cultural heritage during the event this year and in the years to come. Intangible cultural heritage will serve as an international name card for Guangzhou's fashion industry, presenting original designs inspired by China's heritage to the entire world.

A model at the opening ceremony of Guangdong Fashion Week, held at the Zhongsu Friendship Tower in Guangzhou on March 18. [Photo/Xinhua]

When talking on the diversification and crossovers reflected in the fashion circle in 2018, Zhao Huizhou, China's top fashion designer and member of the council at the Asia Fashion Federation, believed that the great merger of various styles across the world will be the future trend of the fashion industry, which requires designers to have very deep insight into culture and a strong ability to make conversions. "Intangible cultural heritage is what Chinese fashion designers could depend on to make real breakthroughs," Zhao added.

An ancient skill becomes fashionable.

After her personal design show at Milan Fashion Week, Zhao came to Guangzhou for the closing show of the Guangdong Fashion Week. Named as an ambassador for the promotion of intangible cultural heritage, Zhao said that the previous shows of China's intangible cultural heritage were only focused on its protection and preservation, now they look to modernize intangible cultural heritage through new designs on fabrics, colors, and models.

Zhao will bring three pieces of fashion artworks inspired by intangible cultural heritage. "I derive these back-to-the-ancients colors from the Dunhuang frescoes. They retain the gray scale within high-saturation bright colors, resembling the internationally trendy colors," Zhao said, "The reinvention of cultural heritage can learn from the new age and realize the requirements that modern society has."