Furious with rage and full of rapture at the same time. All these contradictions are contained in the word „furore“ – and thus the current leitmotif of the 50th Munich Fabric Start. The colour and material trends for Autumn.Winter 23/24 reflect this in a controversy – from calm, discreet and natural to highly innovative, impulsive and provocative; from almost invisible to maximally striking.

Far Furore is also the name of the game for the fair organisers themselves: „Now is the time to think big. Now is the time to move forward with courage, to exploit potential and to grow beyond limits. That is exactly what we have done this season: with growth and a broader portfolio. We are stronger than ever,“ says Sebastian Klinder, Managing Director of Munich Fabric Start Exhibitions GmbH.

With almost 900 exhibitors and 1,500 collections on a total exhibition area of around 45,000 square metres, Munich Fabric Start now comprises eight areas: Fabrics and Additionals with international material innovations for all apparel segments, ReSource and innovative novelties for Sustainable Innovations, Design Studios with fabric designs and new developments for prints on an enlarged area, the Keyhouse innovation hub, the Bluezone denim powerhouse and the new The Source sourcing area for international vertical integration.

New Segment: The Source

Already fully booked for weeks, The Source is the new European One Stop Solution for holistic fashion sourcing. 65 selected international manufacturing companies present their offers from cut-make-trim (CMT) to high-end production. A cluster of the most important sourcing countries, such as Portugal, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Bosnia and Vietnam, creates a businessrelevant mix for risk diversification, independent of genre and price level. Munich Fabric Start has developed the new Hall 8 with around 2,500 square metres of additional space for this purpose. The Lokhalle, a listed building that has recently been restored and is directly adjacent to the former Munich Fabric Start site, is the perfect location for this and, with its gigantic dimensions and spectacular architecture, is one of the largest cantilevered historic steel halls in Europe.

Full Halls at the MOC

Halls 1 to 4 as well as the atriums and studios at the MOC are also fully booked. With a broad and deep range of products – from internationally important fabric and ingredient exhibitors to renowned agencies and top European weavers to selected textile designers – Munich Fabric Start underpins its claim to be one of the most important European textile fairs. ReSource, the sourcing platform for sustainable material developments, offers bio-certified, bio-based, recycled, recyclable or regeneratively sourced fabrics and ingredients and continues to gain in importance.

A completely new area has been created for the Design Studios in the light-flooded Atrium 3 of the MOC. With around 40 studios, the number of exhibitors has doubled.

Keyhouse: Innovation Hub for the Fashion of Tomorrow

Information and interaction is also the name of the game at Keyhouse. On more than 1,000 square metres the spotlight will be on trend-setting show cases alongside sustainable innovations – be it on sustainability, digitalisation, traceability, technology or finishing. The main lecture forum of Munich Fabric Start with exclusive keynotes is also located here, panel discussions, trend presentations, Q&A sessions and expert talks by international international industry insiders.

Bluezone: Back to High School

The fully booked Bluezone in Hall 6 and 7 will be the place to be for the blue community on 30 and 31 August. As a global key event for the denim industry, around 100 international denim mills, weavers, manufacturers and finishing companies will be showing their latest innovations and trends in the Zenith Hall and the coal bunker.

Under the motto „Campus“, Bluezone will beam the denim industry into the high school: From the Yellow Bus, to the basketball court in the Blue Park and the library, to the Charity Store where Bluezone Caps, Socks, Bags and Bottles as well as Floyd Travel Cases will be available for purchase. For a good time, but also for a good cause – 50% of the proceeds will go to the Fair for Ukraine charity project, an initiative of Munich Fabric Start.

Right at the entrance to Bluezone, an automated high-tech machine park awaits the visitors. Wiser Tech presents how cloud- and AI-based solutions can revolutionise denim finishing. The result: fully traceable and sustainably optimised finishing processes.

From creation to fabric production, denim laundry to ingredients – the new project „The Italian Luster“, shown for the first time at Bluezonein Munich, depicts a fully integrated value chain of Italian denim production.

As part of the first cooperation between Bluezone and Transformers, lectures on the core topic of sustainability will be held on two consecutive days. On 30 August, the focus will be on energy and decarbonisation. On the following day, the focus will be on the review and exchange of the Transformer Reports on Unethical Behaviour and Cotton.