The world’s top Vietnamese fashion designers will come together for the first time for Viet Fashion Week, set to take place on Oct. 3 at the Asian Garden Mall in Westminster, Calif.

Viet Fashion Week is the first international Vietnamese fashion show featuring 140 designs created by eight talented Vietnamese fashion designers. The two-hour fashion show will showcase the latest collections from Calvin Hiep, Thai Nguyen, Jacky Tai, Peter Phan, Vicki Nguyen, Cynthia Bui, and the Sachika Twins, with performances by popular Vietnamese vocal artists.

70 models will walk the 200-ft. runway showing off these latest collections. The models will also be showing off their nails with high-fashion nail art complementing each of the designers collections, created by CND educators and students from Advance Beauty College.

Viet Fashion Week event director Tracy Pham has acted in comedy skits for Van Son and Asia and has directed over 200 fashion shows in the past 16 years. She has also been a pageant director for Miss Global, Miss Vietnam Global, and Miss Vietnam USA.

“My goal for Viet Fashion Week is to help Vietnamese designers get international exposure and give them a launch pad to get recognized in the mainstream. There are so many talented Vietnamese designers, but they are not recognized because they can’t afford to pay to be part of large fashion shows like New York Fashion Week,” Pham says. “And if the designers are already big, they still need support from the Vietnamese community to help make them a household brand.”

Pham is working alongside creative director ViktorNL (Victor Nguyen-Lieu) who will be working with the designers to help bring their collections to life and also bring something new to the runway. “Viet Fashion Week is a stepping stone for uniting and promoting Vietnamese-American talent. The designers can launch their careers on their own, but we want them to have a platform to come together and promote themselves and to have people recognize what they do. Hopefully we can grow bigger next year and include more designers and more models,” Nguyen-Lieu says.

Viet Fashion Week will serve as a platform to show the world just how vital and influential the Vietnamese fashion industry is and to inspire and cultivate creativity. For more information, visit www.vietfashionweek.com.

— Kim

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