Modtissimo: a hands-on industry event

With its dramatically hilly location on the Atlantic coast, Portugal's second largest city Porto remains elusively quiet in comparison to other major European cities. While the city is artful, with characterful winding streets, tiled churches and

World Heritage-protected status, it is far from the classification of being a fashion town. It certainly doesn't have the allure of Paris, the sophistication of Milan, nor the street style of London.

But looks can be deceiving. On the outskirts of Porto lie a smattering of Europe's most prominent factories who are quietly producing collections for some of the world's leading fashion designers: Isabel Marant, Stella McCartney, Raf Simons, Max Mara and J.W. Anderson all make their clothes here. Porto is the new hub of casualwear production, where quality, cost and sustainability are still in equilibrium, and where heritage and craftsmanship still matter.

Porto Fashion Week, also known as Modtissimo, runs at the same time as Paris fashion week. As expected, it generates little noise being a small exhibition in the north of Portugal. Modtissimo isn't about presenting ready-to-wear collections to press or buyers, it's a hands-on industry event for brands who are interested in Portuguese fabrics and local manufacturing. Despite its relative obscurity, it's where many of the beautiful things you see on the catwalks in London and Paris are made.

Porto Fashion Week is the new hub of casualwear production

If you are a young brand and decide to visit Porto on a whim without any market knowledge, the British Chamber of Commerce can organise meetings with local manufacturers, producers, agents and fabric companies. On a 48 hour visit you can see a diverse range of production facilities, ranging from shirtmakers, to jersey factories, to denim mills to outerwear producers. If Burberry can make a great trench coat in Porto, so can other brands.

While the 'Made in Italy' dictum expresses uncompromised European quality, it also means expensive production. This rings especially true for casualwear companies, where product categories such as T-shirts, sweats and jeans have a price ceiling. Italian production is expensive and generally the factories do not offer vertical production, meaning fabrics must be purchased separately from mills. That cost of manufacturing an archetypal wardrobe staple, say a simple pocket T-shirt, would in Italy be up to 50 percent more expensive to produce. At retail, that could mean the difference between a 50 euro T-shirt and 150 euros for the same design.

Newer manufacturing locations such as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria are catching up to Portugal, offering good prices and acceptable quality. But what these countries lack is service. In Poland, for example, you are hard-pressed to find a dye house that can offer any real quality, or that can speak English. For any brand producing garment dye product, it would mean having to send the clothes to a facility in another country to be dyed, then returned to Poland to be finished and packed. The cost and time implications are far from ideal, not to mention the lack of sustainability. In Portugal, this would be organised by the factory and all that would be need to be approved is a simple lab dip sample.

Factories in Porto are some of the most advanced mills in Europe. For larger brands, the output of these facilities easily reaches 25,000 units per week, whereas the capacity of others is much smaller. This means there is room for established and up and coming brands. The financial crisis has hit many European fashion companies, and the Portuguese seem to be hungry for new business, understanding that smaller brands can turn into giant corporations. Whereas many Italian companies would close the doors to fashion start-ups, in Portugal you will be able to find someone to affordably produce smaller collections.

Being able to produce in Europe, using local fabrics and where factory workers have decent working conditions all add up to why this city is famous for its manufacturing. Sure, one could still find cheaper production facilities in India or Asia, but you'd be hard-pressed to find sustainability in those regions. And the appeal of the 10 euro T-shirt is not getting such good press of late.

Image: Modtissimo, Porto Portugal