CARLOS MOEDAS

Mayor of Lisbon

Lisboa Fashion Week is a highlight of our city’s cultural agenda. With its constant ability to reinvent itself, Lisboa Fashion Week is an attraction for fashion lovers and curious alike, a space for experts and novices, a city festival where everyone is welcome. Above all, it is a symbol of the culture of our Lisbon: a city shaped by the ongoing intersection of tradition and innovation. 

From this intersection springs a singular identity, as the motto of this 63rd edition tells us.  The identity of a city that is affirmed by the sum of so many cultures that meet here and that has always been proud of this intersection. Lisbon’s soul lies precisely in this encounter: the encounter between people, the encounter between cultures, the encounter that only diversity can provide.

Lisboa Fashion Week embodies the soul of Lisbon, this meeting point culture. Not only because of the thousands of locals who come here to appreciate, discuss and study the art of fashion, but above all because it is a place where innovation and art meet in a unique fusion of creativity and tradition. 

When this innovation meets talent, it generates truly unique forms of art. That’s why the presence of the Sangue Novo young designers competition at MUDE is so symbolic. This house of innovation — a long-standing endeavour that was permanently postponed until this year it finally saw the light of day — is the ideal stage for a week that wants to be disruptive, innovative, and unique. MUDE is a meeting point between culture and innovation, between design and sustainability, between modernity and the identity of Lisbon. An emblematic stage for Lisboa Fashion Week, at the service of our Lisbon, always singular.

I’ll wait for you at Lisboa Fashion Week!

EDUARDA ABBONDANZA

President of Associação ModaLisboa

It’s harder to identify singularity when we’re talking about ourselves. This difficulty is deepened when we have been so many different things, when we are so many different people, when we speak to so many different audiences. But it’s precisely here, in diversity, that we find that uniqueness that is so complex to describe: managing to consolidate, edition after edition, a Lisboa Fashion Week that belongs to everyone. Which, because it is also a product of its city, is for everyone.

I welcome you to a ModaLisboa that we have designed, in co-organisation with the Municipality of Lisboa, to be SINGULAR. So that it has the best of design and the best of ethical and responsible production on its fashion shows, multiplied by as many identities as there are Designers. So that it doesn’t just talk about innovation, but shows it, materialises it, exhibits it. And to have new locations in multiple parts of Lisbon with open doors to anyone who wants to think about the present and the future with us. This is undoubtedly a different Lisboa Fashion Week. Transformed with and by its city. And it’s SINGULAR because it knows that change is the driving force behind the fashion we work on.

I know this is supposed to be a welcome, but it must always also be a statement of appreciation: to the venues that welcome us in the transformation — the new ones, like Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes or Locke de Santa Joana, and the ones that remain our home, like the Pátio da Galé and MUDE —; to the sponsors, partners and industry associations that elevate Lisboa Fashion Week into the multidisciplinary and aggregating event that it has become; and to the people, each and every one, my team and our audiences, for believing that we can continue to change the city, to work in culture, to move mentalities, to be SINGULAR, after all.