Nearly a hundred intended cooperation deals were struck within three days—a number that means more to Keqiao's textile sector than mere order accumulation. It signals that the procurement weight of East Asia's fashion supply chain is shifting toward upstream fabric sources. From August 19 to 21, the 4th China Textile City Seoul Fabric & Accessory Exhibition took place on the platform of the Seoul PIS International Fabric Show, with 49 Keqiao companies showcasing over 10,000 fabric products and attracting more than 20,000 visitors.
Event Background
The immediate backdrop is the warming high-level economic and trade exchanges between China and South Korea, with both sides agreeing to explore new growth points in green transition and consumer supply chains. Yet from an industry perspective, the real essence is Keqiao's precise positioning in the Korean market—the procurement demands of Korean womenswear, casual wear, fast fashion, and outdoor brands for natural cotton, recycled eco-friendly materials, functional fabrics, washed-down finishes, and cotton-nylon blends align closely with Keqiao's product offerings. The fact that buying teams from Lotte Fashion, JAJU, GSGM, and PLAYBACK visited to inspect samples indicates that Korean buyers are no longer satisfied with sourcing Chinese fabrics through intermediaries.
Notably, before the exhibition, the Keqiao delegation visited leading Korean fashion brands such as Hyundai and Donggwang International to research popular colors, pattern trends, and sustainable procurement standards. This pre-show research suggests a shift from passive order-taking to active matching, embedding fabric development directly into Korean brands' product planning cycles. For buyers, this approach significantly reduces the time cost from trend confirmation to fabric sampling, especially fitting the industry's current small-batch, quick-response rhythm.
Industry Impact
Green sustainable fabrics became the most prominent highlight of the exhibition—not by chance. The deepening of ESG concepts in the Korean market has directly driven local apparel brands' demand for certified fabrics like GRS and RCS. Several Keqiao companies brought regenerated series with such certifications, drawing significant buyer attention. The underlying logic is that environmental certification has evolved from a marketing plus to a threshold for entering Korea's mid-to-high-end market. For Keqiao factories, this means production line upgrades and certification investments are no longer optional but necessary costs to stably integrate into the East Asian supply chain.
The commercial value of offline exhibitions is being amplified in the presence of physical fabrics. Textile fabrics are strongly tangible—online images cannot convey hand-feel, drape, texture, or finishing techniques, while on-site touching and face-to-face communication quickly build trust. Shaoxing Fanda Textile's T/R yarn-dyed fabrics and Shaoxing Yeshuai Textile's washed cotton-nylon new products both received sample and quotation requests for their alignment with Korean aesthetics. This reminds foreign trade companies that despite highly developed digital tools, physical display and interpersonal trust remain irreplaceable in cross-border fabric transactions.
From a longer-term perspective, Keqiao fabrics have established market recognition in Korea's fashion industry, with more Korean brands proactively connecting with source enterprises to open full-chain cooperation from development to sampling to procurement. The intended deals from this exhibition are actually a signal of the realignment of Sino-Korean textile supply chains under ESG and quick-response pressures—brands are compressing intermediate links, source factories are extending toward design, and Keqiao happens to be at the intersection of this restructuring.