Lady LUX

Rosemount Australian Fashion Week has a new name and IMG has a new partner.

IMG has just inked a multi-year deal with Mercedes-Benz giving the luxury car company naming rights to Rosemount Australian Fashion Week – the country’s top fashion event – plus the consumer-geared Sydney Fashion Festival. The events will now be called the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia and the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Sydney, respectively. Mercedes-Benz and IMG will kick off the new partnership come August.

As operator of the two affairs, IMG Fashion, along with then naming rights sponsor Rosemount, celebrated the fifteenth annual Australian Fashion Week last year. In 2008, the companies collaborated to create the first Sydney Fashion Festival

“We are excited to once again align our brand with this premier industry event and continue to strengthen our brand’s global commitment to fashion,” Gavin Allen, general manager marketing of Mercedes-Benz Australia/Pacific, said in a statement. “We look forward to a successful Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Sydney partnership, celebrating the continued pursuit of Australia's design excellence.”

The car firm’s involvement in Australian Fashion Week dates back to 1996 – the inaugural year – when Mercedes-Benz became the original naming rights partner, an honor later passed to Rosemount in 2006. IMG Fashion has also joined forces with Mercedes-Benz on other international fashion extravaganzas, including the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Weeks in New York and Berlin.

Boasting more than 30,000 annual visitors and often more than a hundred designers, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia is an industry-only high-fashion affair that presents ready-to-wear lines of emerging and established designers to buyers and media from around the world. In contrast, the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Sydney, which last year highlighted 22 collection shows and 50 cultural events, was created to engage consumers and celebrate Sydney’s fashion and retail opportunities.

“Rosemount’s energy and extensive commercial marketing activity around our events has helped to achieve a significant growth in the awareness of these important industry and consumer platforms,” Peter Levy, senior vice president and managing director of IMG Fashion Worldwide, said, in a press release. “Partnering with Mercedes-Benz signals a new chapter and presents an exciting future for Australia’s fashion community. Mercedes-Benz is immensely experienced and knowledgeable in the fashion space, and it certainly gives us great confidence in what the future will bring.”

Tagged in: australia, sydney, fashion festival, mercedes benz, australian fashion week, rosemount, naming rights, img,