T

he young woman struck a pose while four judges eyed her with faintly interested expressions. With a flaunting attitude that could make a peacock envious, she turned around and walked a few steps before striking another hand-on-hips-chin-up pose.

In the room next door were shuffles of long legs and high maintenance hair as more than 100 models of various agencies awaited their turns on Tuesday to audition for the second Jakarta Fashion Week, scheduled to be held in November.

Jakarta Fashion Week, organized by the Femina media group, will be part of the 2009-10 Indonesian Fashion Festival. The festival this year will also include the annual fashion design contest, for which registration and submission periods opened this month.

"We hope the 2009-2010 fashion week and fashion festival will be bigger and certainly better than those last year," chief festival coordinator Svida Alisjahbana said during the auditions.

Last year more than 4,000 people attended the first Jakarta Fashion Week, which featured the works of around 50 designers.

This year's fashion week would feature a collaborative project by Indonesian and Indian designers, Svida said. "Two renowned fashion designers from India will use Indonesian fabrics for their designs and two Indonesian designers will do the same using Indian fabrics," she said.

The two Indian designers, Tarun Tahiliani and Malini Ramani, would arrive in Jakarta at the end of this week to pick their materials, roughly the same time as the announcement of the names of two Indonesian designers chosen to go to Delhi next month to select fabrics.

Rukmani Nanda, the wife of His Excellency Biren Nanda, the Indian ambassador to Indonesia, said the collaborative project was part of the Indian Festival, which will be held for two months in Jakarta.

India and Indonesia have a long history of shared fashion and fabrics knowledge, for example using tie-dye techniques and ikat (dyed woven fabric) styles.

"I feel right at home here," Nanda said at the same event, emphasizing the many similarities between Indonesia and India.

Jakarta Fashion Week will be held at Pacific Place on Jl. Sudirman, at the same venue as last year.

This year's fashion week would feature a better lighting system and more facilities for the press.

"The event is being covered by national and international journalists, so we must increase our standards," creative coordinator Diaz Parzada said.

The current global financial crisis threatened to disrupt the local fashion industry, he said.