From Port Moresby to Moscow: PNG Fashion Week Represents the Pacific at the BRICS+ Fashion Summit

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PNG Fashion Week will return to the international stage this September as its Founder and Managing Director, Philma Kelegai, travels to Moscow for the 2026 BRICS+ Fashion Summit and Moscow Fashion Week. Her participation marks a third year of bringing Papua New Guinea’s perspective—and the ambitions of the wider Pacific fashion community—into a global conversation about the industry’s future.

The BRICS+ Fashion Summit will take place from 28 to 30 September 2026 at Moscow’s Zaryadye Concert Hall. Established in 2023, the summit is entering its fourth year as a meeting place for designers, fashion week organisers, educators, manufacturers and business leaders from across the world. For PNG Fashion Week, it offers a rare opportunity to contribute to discussions about the forces shaping fashion while building relationships that can create new possibilities for Pacific creatives.

Papua New Guinea brings an important voice to that room. Its fashion industry is rooted in extraordinary cultural knowledge, artistic expression and the enterprise of designers who create despite limited access to the infrastructure and markets available in larger fashion centres. Across the Pacific, makers are asking how to protect cultural identity, strengthen production, grow sustainable businesses and reach customers beyond their home countries. These are not peripheral questions. They belong at the centre of any serious discussion about the future of global fashion.

The calibre and range of the summit’s speakers make the opportunity especially significant. The 2026 programme lists Shirene Rifai, Founder and CEO of Jordan Fashion Week and Shirene Consulting; Nichole, Founder and CEO of Noir Fashion Week Global; Antonio Alizzi, Professor at Rome Business School; Mustafa Cem Altan, Immediate Past President of the International Apparel Federation; Rick Anderson, Founder of Mauritius Fashion Festival Week; Bench Bello, Founder of Manila International Fashion Week; and Tery Carola, CEO of Seychelles Fashion Week. Together, they bring perspectives spanning fashion events, education, industry leadership, entrepreneurship and international market development.

To sit among people with these networks is to gain a clearer view of how opportunity is created. Fashion week leaders understand how to build platforms that attract industry attention. Educators know what skills designers need to sustain careers. Manufacturers can speak to the standards and capacity required to serve new markets. Retail and showroom specialists understand how a promising collection moves from a runway presentation to a commercial relationship. Each exchange offers PNG Fashion Week knowledge it can bring home and adapt for the people it serves.

Those connections reach into established fashion centres, including Italy. René Barrera, CEO of El Salvador Fashion Week and a speaker listed for 2026, has produced a showroom in Milan. At the 2025 summit, the programme included Simona Severini of M.Seventy, the company behind WHITE Show Milan. For an emerging industry such as Papua New Guinea’s, access to people with experience in these environments can help answer practical questions: What do international buyers look for? How does a designer prepare for a showroom? What production, presentation and business systems must be in place before a label is ready to expand?

The summit also opens conversations beyond the familiar fashion capitals. Meeting leaders from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America allows Pacific representatives to learn from regions developing their own approaches to visibility, trade and cultural expression. Their experiences offer valuable lessons for Papua New Guinea, where the path to growth must reflect local conditions, community priorities and the realities of operating across islands and international borders.

Kelegai has already helped place Pacific concerns within these global discussions. In 2024, she joined fashion week leaders from countries including Ecuador, Namibia, Kazakhstan, Iraq and Malta in a conversation about the role of fashion weeks in international development. In 2025, she spoke on a panel about the ethics of cultural borrowing alongside fashion and cultural leaders from Paraguay, the United Arab Emirates, Panama, Congo and Russia. For Papua New Guinea, where creative work often draws on living traditions, the questions of cultural respect, ownership and fair benefit are fundamental to responsible growth.

PNG Fashion Week’s participation in Moscow has had an impact far beyond the conference hall. The experience of attending international gatherings, exchanging ideas and seeing how other regions organise their fashion industries helped inspire the creation of the Pacific Fashion Summit in Port Moresby.

Held for the first time during PNG Fashion Week on 18 and 19 September 2026, the Pacific Fashion Summit brought the conversation home. With support from the New Zealand High Commission in Papua New Guinea, the free public programme created space for designers, entrepreneurs, cultural creatives, educators, media practitioners and young people to examine the issues affecting their work. Its panels explored the business of fashion, supply chains, storytelling and media, leadership, sustainable practice and pathways for the next generation.

The decision to establish that platform in Papua New Guinea was a statement of purpose. In the year of the country’s 51st independence anniversary, PNG Fashion Week invited people from across the Pacific to gather in Port Moresby, share expertise and consider what a stronger regional fashion industry could look like. The summit recognised that a runway can introduce talent to an audience, while lasting opportunity also requires business knowledge, relationships, market access and places where difficult questions can be discussed openly.

That is the value of international exchange when its benefits are carried home. PNG Fashion Week attended the BRICS+ Fashion Summit, contributed a Pacific perspective and returned with a wider vision for what it could create in its own region. The Pacific Fashion Summit turned that vision into a gathering shaped by Pacific priorities.

As Kelegai prepares to travel from Port Moresby to Moscow once again, she carries the achievements and aspirations of an industry that is finding its collective voice. Her presence at the BRICS+ Fashion Summit and Moscow Fashion Week is an opportunity to tell the world what Papua New Guinea is building, to learn from people with access to influential markets and institutions, and to develop relationships that may open doors for Pacific designers and creative businesses in the years ahead.

For the young designer working on a first collection, the maker seeking a sustainable business, or the creative professional looking for a path into the industry, that representation matters. It places their ambitions in rooms where decisions, partnerships and ideas take shape. It also sends a message home: Papua New Guinea can participate in global fashion on its own terms, with confidence in its creativity and a clear commitment to bringing opportunity back to its people.

From Port Moresby to Moscow, PNG Fashion Week is carrying the Pacific into the conversation—and bringing the conversation back to the Pacific.