For a week in July, Paris becomes an outpost of Tokyo as Japanese designers and buyers throng the catwalks, parties and cafes where business is done at the biannual men's clothing collections
The Paris menswear collections -- five days of catwalk mayhem, cocktail parties and big business deals staged in a setting as fantastique as it gets.
France exports some $560 million worth of menswear a year, most of it in the high-end sector -- and most of it to Japan, where men spend around $30 billion a year on their wardrobes and are widely acknowledged to be the most daring of nationalities when it comes to how they dress.