The Bloom runway, dedicated to young designers, once again took on a major role in the event’s calendar. The 51st Portugal Fashion includes in its calendar shows with four national designers and brands and five African designers and brands, under the CANEX project. In addition, the finals of the international contest for new talents Rebelpin […]
The Bloom runway, dedicated to young designers, once again took on a major role in the event’s calendar. The 51st Portugal Fashion includes in its calendar shows with four national designers and brands and five African designers and brands, under the CANEX project. In addition, the finals of the international contest for new talents Rebelpin by ACTE and the Bloom Portugal Fashion powered by Zeitreel Sonae took place.
Regarding the new national talents, this edition of the Bloom project showed the creations of the designers Maria Carlos Baptista (day 12, at 20h00, at the Monastery of São Bento da Vitória) and Diogo Van der Sandt (day 13, at 10h30, at ESAP) and the brands AHCOR (day 13, at 12h30, at ESAP) and HUARTE (day 15, at 18h30, at the Soares dos Reis National Museum).
Maria Carlos Baptista studied Fashion Design at Modatex, in Porto, and in 2020, with the collection “Arquétipo”, she won the Bloom Portugal Fashion Competition. The designer participated digitally, in partnership with ModaLisboa, in the Paris Fashion Week in 2021. Maria Carlos Baptista explores, with her brand, the relationship between body, space and matter.
Diogo Van der Sandt began his career at the Escola da Árvore, in Porto, and then attended the Fashion Design course at Modatex, in the same city. He made his debut on the Bloom runway in 2020, as one of the winners of the New Creators PFN competition. Moving in the universe of haute couture, Diogo Van der Sandt develops very structured collections, rich in details and worked silhouettes.
AHCOR is the brand created in 2019 by Sílvia Rocha, a designer who graduated, in 2015, from the Fashion School of Porto and, in that same year, interned with the creator Hugo Costa. In 2017, she continued her training at Modatex, in Porto, where she attended the Fashion Design course. In 2019, Sílvia Rocha presented her final year collection at Portugal Fashion and, the following year, she was one of the finalists in the Bloom Competition. In January 2021, she received the invitation to join the group of young designers of Portugal Fashion’s Upload platform, where she presents her collections since then. The exploration of volumes, the mixture of materials, colors and textures, the use of dead stock are a constant in his work.
Born in 1991, in Logroño, Victor Huarte started his degree in Fashion Design at ESDIR school, in Spain, in 2015, but through the Erasmus program he moved to Portugal in 2017, where he finished his degree at ESAD, in Matosinhos, one year later. In July of the same year he won second place in Troficolor’s young creators competition, and in 2021 he was awarded an honorable mention in the Bloom Competition. That year, he signed a capsule collection of ten pieces and unisex accessories for Salsa and joined the menswear design team of this brand from the Sonae universe. In the 51st Portugal Fashion will reveal his new collection with the homonymous brand HUARTE.
More than 10 years in Bloom
Portugal Fashion already has a long history of competitions directed to young designers, since the Alliance Program, created in 2004. By the way, the launching of new fashion talents is one of the great objectives of Portugal Fashion, that in October 2010, in its 27th edition, developed, for this purpose, the Bloom platform. Since then, Bloom has already enabled the presentation of collections to about 100 young designers and brands and nearly 200 students from nine fashion schools.
Some bloomers have participated in international fashion shows and showrooms with the support of Portugal Fashion or its complementary commercial project, the Next Step, thus marking their presence in important fashion fairs in London, Paris, Milan, Vienna, Copenhagen, Rome or Madrid, for example. Moreover, there is no shortage of examples of young designers who, after their apprenticeship in Bloom, have consolidated their careers and today stand out in the main Portugal Fashion calendar. Such are the cases of Carolina Sobral, David Catalán, Estelita Mendonça, Hugo Costa and Susana Bettencourt.
