Who's Next

In 2023, the Cashonly team was invited by Taiwan's Ministry of Culture and the Taiwan Textile Federation to travel 11,489 kilometers to Paris and participate in the Who’s Next fashion trade show.

Among the participating brands in the delegation, Cashonly was the only original apparel brand. Yet the significance of this journey extended far beyond simply attending a trade show.

For a brand that began in a small local studio in Taiwan, bringing our work overseas for the first time—presenting our clothing, hand-drawn artwork, and craftsmanship within the international fashion industry—also represented a meaningful form of personal and creative fulfillment.

Who’s Next is a major fashion and lifestyle trade show held annually in Paris, France.

Since its establishment in 1994, the event has continued to bring together brands and professionals from the apparel, accessories, jewelry, beauty, and lifestyle industries. It provides a physical space where designers, brands, buyers, media representatives, and creators from different regions can exchange their perspectives on what clothing means.

For our team, Paris was never a destination to be conquered, nor was exhibiting there a test that demanded immediate results.

Instead, it was more like a mirror: only by stepping outside familiar surroundings and onto a broader stage could we gain the perspective to see ourselves more clearly and examine the methods and convictions we had developed over time.

We did not begin with a large-scale operation, nor did we follow established rules of fashion. We began in a small art studio, drawing slowly, creating patiently, and spending years gradually transforming the images in our minds into pieces that could be worn.

Beyond fabric, silhouette, and color, every garment carries something more: the creative director's accumulated reflections on history, culture, literature, art, and everyday life.

For us, painting is not decoration added to a garment. It is the very origin of our creative process. The choice of subject, the warmth of each brushstroke, and the visual language conveyed through an image all become ways for the creative director to tell a story. We do not rely on aggressive marketing strategies or the manipulation of online traffic. We believe the work can speak for itself.

Walking through the exhibition, we encountered brands from diverse cultural backgrounds, each offering its own answer to the question, “What is clothing?” Some began with materials, others focused on tailoring, while others defined their identities through accessories, craftsmanship, or lifestyle.

Following this journey to Paris, the Cashonly team began developing the NOT FROM PARIS collection.

The collection was not conceived as a rejection of a major fashion capital. On the contrary, it emerged directly from our experience of arriving in Paris for the first time and presenting our work at an international trade show.

As Paris continues to stand as one of the fashion industry's most powerful cultural symbols, many clothing brands choose to register themselves in France, using a French identity to lend their brands an added sense of prestige, imagination, and authority.

With NOT FROM PARIS, the Cashonly team responds to this convention by posing a deliberately ironic question: Does a brand need the “right address” to be considered valuable?

As fashion becomes increasingly globalized, creativity should not revolve around a single center. Paris may be an important stage, but it does not have to be the only recognized point of origin. What gives a brand its identity and legitimacy has never been its registered address.

When the exhibition ends, the booths are dismantled, the works are packed away, and the journey comes to a close. But what our team brought home was more than the experience of participating in a trade show. More importantly, we came to understand that a creative language of our own can ultimately travel far beyond where it began.