With Fashion Season@Orchard (FSO) bringing style to the forefront of Singapore’s main shopping district with a slew of fashion-related events and parties, organiser Orchard Road Business Association (Orba) is hoping Singapore shoppers will rethink their loyalty to the national costume of casual flip-flops paired with basic T-shirts and shorts.

Says Orba chairman Sng Ngoi May: “We hope that FSO will help us excite the wider audience in appreciating fashion.”

But how likely are shoppers here to debunk the notion of Singapore as a flip-flop nation, much less give fashionistas at major shopping areas like New York’s Fifth Avenue and Tokyo’s Harajuku a run for their money?

Fashion show producer Daniel Boey, 44, is excited about the fashion buzz Orchard Road is getting this month due to FSO events, but points out that many Singaporeans are still “too lazy” to dress up.

“By all means, wear flip-flops but there is a stylish way of wearing them – with cropped trousers paired with a vest over a T-shirt, for example. It’s all about putting together a look,” he says.

Singaporean fashion designer Hayden Ng, 44, also believes that unlike style-meisters in other major fashion capitals like Paris and Milan, Singaporeans are “still trying to find their own fashion identity and copying what they see in magazines rather than adapting it to their own personal style”.

Ng, who used to have a boutique at Specialist Shopping Centre, adds: “Orchard Road is not as stylish as it used to be in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, going to town was reason enough to dress up.”

Still, all is not lost. For one thing, as veteran stylist and fashion show producer R. S. Danny, 48, points out, breezy casual togs are popular here due to the hot and humid weather and casual chic is not that hard to pull off with the right tweaks. After all, Rome was not built in a day.

For another, stylish dressers are certainly not an extinct breed at Orchard. We scoured Singapore’s top shopping district to bring you 15 fabulous fashionistas who believe in dressing to kill, no matter how hot it gets.

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>> Fashion savvy Singaporeans define style in their own ways

>> Singapore is not a nation of flip-flop wearers

This article was first published in Urban, The Straits Times.