LONDON, United Kingdom — Sharp suits vied with streetwear and top brands at men’s fashion week in London, which opened Friday with an eye on boosting ties with the lucrative luxury Chinese market.

Burberry, Alexander McQueen, Tom Ford, and Jimmy Choo are some of the big names showing over the next four days alongside Savile Row tailors such as Richard James, Gieves & Hawkes, and Hardy Amies.

The event opened with a show by Topman, the brother label of high-street brand Topshop, featuring retro tracksuits, wide-legged chinos and sporty tailoring and watched from the front row by Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton.

Men’s fashion week, officially known as ‘London Collections: Men’, grew out of the larger womenswear event and is now in its seventh edition, with 77 designers on the main programme.

This season sees a new focus on promoting British menswear to China, with the appointment of the event’s first international ambassador, 45-year-old Chinese model, actor, singer and philanthropist Hu Bing.

“We’ve been looking at the Asian market for quite some time because there’s been huge interest in London Collections from Asia,” said Dylan Jones, chairman of men’s fashion week and editor of Britain’s GQ magazine.

Attendance by Chinese press and buyers has grown 185 per cent since the event began in 2012, he told AFP, adding that Hu would “take the message of British menswear all around the world, but particularly to China”.

China was the fifth largest market for luxury ready-to-wear menswear in 2014 and is expected to become the second largest after the United States by 2017, according to analysts Euromonitor International.