The association’s new global tour will start in July. In a press release, the Comité Colbert announced that several of its members “will accompany the President of the Republic on his official visit to Nigeria on 3rd and 4th July.”The association firmly believes in Nigeria’s potential, and underlined “the country’s energy and its rich cultural and ethnic diversity,” which make it “a destination of the future for the French luxury industry.”
The USA is also on the association’s radar this year, being “both a major market and one that still has a huge potential.”The Comité Colbert is especially interested in California’s Silicon Valley, a region home to “a multicultural elite fostering a specific eco-system, notably in Stanford, a hub for promising students, corporations and venture capitalists, all of them driven by a desire to change the world through the value of knowledge.” To tap this vast potential, the Comité Colbert will organise next September a pilot workshop for French artisans and students from San Francisco’s Stanford University.Then, the association will invite up-and-coming entrepreneurs and young professionals from Silicon Valley to Paris, showcasing the quality of the French luxury industry at an event dedicated to France’s luxury industry’s secret expertise, on December 3 and 4.Japan is the association’s third focus destination. In 2017, the Comité Colbert organised an exhibition in Tokyo, ‘Rêver 2074’ (dreaming of 2074), in which 50 Japanese artists from Tokyo’s Geidai university of the arts were commissioned an artwork embodying their vision of luxury in 2074.The collaboration continues this year, with the Geidai art faculty teaming up with French luxury labels present in Tokyo. Together, they launched the ‘L’Homme et la Nature’ (Man and Nature) project, which will give the 12 winning artists the chance to exhibit their works in Tokyo in November. Finally, in 2015, UNESCO launched with the Comité Colbert an international poster campaign to attract the general public’s attention to the promotion and protection of creativity and culture, and for the safeguarding of intellectual property.The association announced that the campaign will now be featured in Argentina.