Amsterdam Fashion Week | Netherlands, Europe
Last updated: July 30, 2026
Amsterdam Fashion Week (AFW) is the Netherlands’ leading fashion event. It showcases Dutch designers through runway shows, presentations, and talks each September. Since 2017, stylist and entrepreneur Danie Bles has owned and run the event, after acquiring it from Telegraaf Media Groep.
History
Amsterdam has hosted a fashion week before, in a much earlier form. From 1947 until the late 1950s, the Dutch Women’s Clothing Industry organized a biannual fashion week under the same name. It stopped when the Dutch clothing industry collapsed. Read more →
The event returned in 2004, under the name Amsterdam International Fashion Week (AIFW). Its goal was to put Amsterdam on the map as an international fashion destination. Early editions ran twice yearly, in January and July, aligning with the global fashion calendar.
For its first decade, AIFW ran shows at Westergasfabriek, a former gasworks turned cultural venue. Alongside the ticketed runway shows, a public program called AIFW Downtown (also known as Laundry Days) brought exhibitions, store openings, and parties across the city.
Mercedes-Benz sponsored the event for several seasons, part of the automaker’s wider push into fashion week sponsorship worldwide during the 2010s. A guest-exchange edition in 2016, for example, sent Spanish designer Maria Cle Leal from Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid to show in Amsterdam.
Ownership changed twice in quick succession. Dutch media company Telegraaf Media Groep (TMG) acquired the event in 2016. Then, in 2017, Dutch stylist and entrepreneur Danie Bles bought it from TMG.
Under Bles, the event consolidated its public and trade programming into a single official schedule, and shifted its focus toward storytelling, sustainability, and innovation. Following talks with PETA, Amsterdam Fashion Week banned fur in 2019. In May 2025, the event expanded this policy to ban wildlife skins and feathers from all catwalks, winning the Best Catwalk Moment award at the PETA UK Fashion Awards.
Today, Amsterdam Fashion Week BV runs the event under Bles’ leadership, guided by an advisory board that includes Fantastic Man editor-in-chief Gert Jonkers, GoodEggs founder Ida Petersson, textile innovator Borre Akkersdijk of BYBORRE, and Highsnobiety’s Stefanos Constantinou.
Latest News
- AFW26 announces its first September 2026 names. Amsterdam Fashion Week confirmed the opening lineup for its September 1–5, 2026 edition, mixing established Dutch designers with emerging talent.
- Highsnobiety deepens its Amsterdam presence. Stefanos Constantinou, the platform’s VP of Brand Partnerships, now sits on AFW’s advisory board, reflecting the event’s push toward global streetwear and youth culture audiences.
- BYBORRE’s Borre Akkersdijk to launch new label at AFW 2025. The Dutch textile innovator, known for work with Nike and Louis Vuitton, planned to debut his new brand Patience during the event, continuing his focus on circular textile design.
Economic and Industry Impact
The Netherlands has a far smaller fashion industry than France or Italy, and a much smaller population to match. Dutch clothing manufacturing generates roughly €606.6 million in 2026, a fraction of the multi-billion-euro industries behind Paris and Milan. Read more →
Rather than compete on haute couture, Amsterdam Fashion Week has built its identity around streetwear and sustainability instead. Brands like Daily Paper, Patta, and 11 PM Studio have grown into genuine international names through this positioning, not through couture ateliers. Read more →
This strategy mirrors Copenhagen Fashion Week’s rise more than it does Paris or Milan’s. By 2025, AFW had formally adopted Copenhagen’s sustainability framework for its official shows, reinforcing ethical production as a defining feature rather than an afterthought.
The wider Dutch fashion market reflects this same shift. E-commerce, largely based in Amsterdam, was valued at $10.6 billion in 2022 and was expected to account for over half of all Dutch apparel sales by 2025. Sustainable (“green”) fashion alone reached $1.37 billion in 2024. Read more →
In short, Amsterdam Fashion Week doesn’t try to out-couture Paris or Milan. Instead, it leans into what the Dutch fashion industry already does well: streetwear with cultural roots, and sustainability as a genuine standard, not a marketing layer.
A Story Worth Telling
Amsterdam Fashion Week’s ownership history says as much about the Dutch fashion industry as any runway show has. What started under a national newspaper group, Telegraaf Media Groep, passed in 2017 to a single stylist and entrepreneur, Danie Bles, working independently of any media conglomerate or car brand’s marketing budget.
That independence shows in what AFW has become. Rather than just a week of shows, amsterdamfashionweek.nl now runs as a daily online publication covering Dutch fashion and beauty year-round, alongside art, interior, and graphic design. Few fashion weeks have made that leap from event to ongoing media platform — and fewer still did it after changing hands twice in a single decade.
Amsterdam Fashion Week
amsterdamfashionweek.nl
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