Fashion for everyone

Nominate six young upcoming designers, invite them to Zurich to present their upcoming collection on the runway and choose one winner in the end, that gets the Swiss Textiles Award and 100'000 Euros prize money – that's what the Stella Contemporary Fashion Award 2009 was all about in short. Marking already its 10th anniversary, they also invited all the past winners from previous years and gave Rodarte the opportunity to once again show their upcoming collection on the runway. Previous winners are Rodarte (USA), Marios Schwab (GB), Bruno Pieters (BE), Christian Wijnants (BE), Haider Ackermann (BE), Raf Simons (BE), Benoît Missolin (FR), Tran Hin Phu (CH), Daniel Herman (CH). Such an event to be happening in Switzerland is quite remarkable, since the fashion industry is very little compared to other parts of the world. The winner of the Swiss Textiles Award was chosen by an international jury with people working for l'Officiel France, Vogue.com UK, i-D Magazine, Annabelle and others, which of course all attended the event as well.

This year's finalists were: Erdem (UK), Alexis Mabille (F), Ohne Titel (USA), Thakoon Panichgul (USA), Peter Pilotto (UK) and Alexander Wang (USA). In the end, there was no big surprise when they announced Alexander Wang as this year's winner.

Erdem

Alexis Mabille

Peter Pilotto

Alexander Wang

Ohne Titel

Thakoon Panichgul

Rodarte

Alexander Wang as the lucky winner

Choosing Wang as this year's winner was a pretty obvious choice and there's nothing wrong with that since he's doing a really great job – yet I would have appreciated it if they had chosen another designer like Thakoon or Mabille, which I liked a lot as well. While for other young designers the prize money would be a significant financial aid, it's probably just the cherry on top of the cake for Wang, who's already on top of his game at such an early stage of his career and age. Who would have been your choice?