Camera Moda — Milan Fashion Week

The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana — the National Chamber for Italian Fashion, known as Camera Moda — is the non-profit making association which disciplines, co-ordinates and promotes the development of Italian fashion. The association's own account is kept below as the record, and its website, cameramoda.it, is linked from this page.

The association represents all the highest cultural values of Italian fashion. It aims to protect, co-ordinate and strengthen its image, both in Italy and abroad, and it is the point of reference, as well as the preferential mouthpiece, for all the national and international initiatives aimed at valuing and promoting Italian style, customs and fashion.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not photographs from these shows.

Organizing Italian Fashion Since 1958

Right from the year of its foundation, in 1958, the association has pursued a policy of organizational support aimed at the knowledge, promotion and development of fashion through events with a highly intellectual image in Italy and abroad. One of the objectives of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana is the organization and management of the events that present Italian fashion to the world — above all Milan Fashion Week.

That makes Camera Moda the Italian counterpart of the institutions recorded across this guide: the French federation that schedules Paris, the FDCI that manages India Fashion Week, and the British and American councils those bodies were modelled on. Each does the same invisible work — setting dates, sequencing shows, gathering the press and buyers — and Italy's chamber has done it longer than almost any of them, which is part of why Milan's week holds its place among the world's great fashion weeks.

Milan Fashion Week

Milan Fashion Week, the chamber's principal stage, is held semi-annually in Milan — spring/summer in February–March and autumn/winter in September–October — and in Italian it is the Settimana della Moda. The full Milan account in this guide, linked above, works through the event in depth: the houses, the venues, the street style and the process by which designers earn a place on the schedule the chamber keeps. The Camera Moda photography page at the Fashion Week Photos site is linked from this page as well.

The Mouthpiece of Italian Style

The association's self-description — the preferential mouthpiece for all national and international initiatives aimed at valuing and promoting Italian style, customs and fashion — claims a representational role beyond event management. Camera Moda speaks for Italian fashion to the world: to foreign press, to other fashion capitals, to the institutions of the industry. Protecting, co-ordinating and strengthening the image of Italian fashion, in Italy and abroad, is cultural diplomacy conducted by a fashion chamber.

The longevity matters to that role. An association founded in 1958 has carried Italian fashion through every era from the post-war birth of Italian ready-to-wear to the luxury conglomerate age, and its calendar — the Milan weeks recorded in this guide — remains the industry's Italian front door.

The Italy fashion industry pages linked from this page extend the chamber's story into the country's regions and sectors — textiles, knitwear, leather and the manufacturing districts whose work the Milan schedule presents — for readers who arrive at Camera Moda through the runway and stay for the industry.