This aerial photo taken on August 25, 2023, shows a view of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, southern China. [Photo/Xinhua]
SHENZHEN — Top Italian fashion school Istituto Marangoni recently expanded its presence in China by doubling the size of its campus in the southern Guangdong metropolis of Shenzhen to further promote the tech hub’s fashion industry.
The fashion school plans to relocate its Shenzhen campus from Nanshan District to a new campus in Futian District, which will be about twice the size of the original.
“Our total student population will also at least double,” said Robin Fan, president of the Marangoni Institute Shenzhen, at the signing ceremony for the Shenzhen campus relocation.
Fan said the school expects to welcome its first class of freshmen to the new campus in September this year, and has already received inquiries from students from China, South America, Europe and elsewhere.
In 2016, with the joint support of the Italian government and the Shenzhen municipal government, the Marangoni Institute established its Shenzhen campus in Nanshan District.
The fashion school offers a variety of courses in the areas of fashion design, fashion communication, fashion management, luxury brand management and marketing.
“If you want to know about women’s clothing in China, you should visit Shenzhen, especially Futian,” Fan said, adding that since China’s reform and opening up, Futian has attracted a large number of women’s fashion brands, showing Shenzhen’s advantages in the fashion industry in addition to technology and finance.
Futian District is home to more than 2,000 fashion brand enterprises, including domestic and internationally renowned brands such as Koradior, Marisfrolg, Ellassay and Yinger. The district’s fashion industry is valued at more than 120 billion yuan ($16.89 billion), accounting for about a quarter of the total size of Shenzhen’s fashion industry.
According to a survey report on Shenzhen’s fashion industry released in March last year, the metropolis has developed into one of the country’s fashion industry bases with the most comprehensive industrial sector, the most original brands, the most developed industrial support and the most prominent agglomeration effect.
Currently, the industrial scale of Shenzhen’s traditional fashion sectors, such as clothing, watches and jewellery, and emerging fashion sectors, such as home appliances and creative design, both exceed 1 trillion yuan, the report said.
Emanuele Colombo, Education Director at Istituto Marangoni Shenzhen, has lived in Shenzhen for nearly two years and feels that the city’s fashion industry is very dynamic.
“We believe that there are many trends emerging from this place that will have an impact on China and the world,” he said.
“Shenzhen is a very open coastal city with various sources of inspiration and is also a friendly city for young local designers to build their brands here,” he added.
According to Fan, the Shenzhen campus will become an important bridge connecting China and Italy and even the global fashion industry, bringing high-level international market education concepts, international market ideas and global fashion resources, and creating a platform for talent training, foreign exchanges and fashion innovation in Shenzhen.
“The Marangoni Institute has always been committed to nurturing designers with creativity, skills and forward-thinking ideas, and we hope to see more fashion designers emerge from here and make their mark on the international stage,” Fan said.
Xinhua News Agency
