Colcci knows how to draw a crowd. The brand’s catwalk show launched June’s São Paulo Fashion Week and starred the world’s richest supermodel, the Brazilian Gisele Bündchen, soap star Rodrigo Hilbert, and Jesus Luz, the young Rio model more famous for his headline-grabbing relationship with Madonna than his fashion career. It was the hottest ticket in town.

The Brazilian textile industry turned over $33bn in 2006. That is projected to reach $41.6bn by 2010. There are 30,000 fashion companies, which turn over $50bn and employ 1.7m people.

“After the crisis, the world is looking for ‘fresh fashion’. It is looking for new things,” says Antonin Bartos Filho, director of Abest, a fashion industry association.

Celebrities such as Ms Bündchen sell those clothes. “Whenever a celebrity appears wearing a particular brand, it starts selling more,” says Joyce Pascowitz, owner of the Glamorama celebrity fashion website. “If you have the money to pay her, Gisele will sell for you.”

Ms Bündchen is Colcci’s “propaganda girl”. She is also the world’s highest paid supermodel, earning an estimated $25m this year, according to Forbes.

After 14 years as a columnist on the Folha S. Paulo newspaper, Ms Pascowitz set up Glamorama in 2000 and now has 3.7m page views a month. Based in São Paulo’s leafy Jardins Europa district, she also runs the glossy Pascowitz magazine.

“The business is growing,” she says. “Brazil still has a mania to copy the rest of the world. But there are creative people here. You can dress very well in Brazil.” She singles out upmarket Rio beachwear brand Osklen for its originality, but notes that fake “designer” T-shirts with logos still sell well. “It’s difficult to have personality and make money,” she says. “Either you copy from abroad and sell well, or you have personality.”

Founded in 1986 in Brusque, Santa Catarina, in the South of Brazil and taken over by the AMC group in 2000, Colcci is using Ms Bündchen’s image to expand into Europe. “Her image publicises the brand. She is the number one in the world,” says the brand’s designer Jéssica Lengyel.

Sergio Vedaña distributes Colcci in Europe from Barcelona. “We are in almost all of Europe,” he says. “We are opening the eastern European market.” The sexy Brazilian touch, says Mr Vedaña, goes down well in countries such as Russia. “Once girls try on our stuff, they really go crazy for it. It fits the body really well.”

Sales, he says, are up 20 per cent this year. “Some of the best-known brands are suffering a crisis, but this is not a problem for Colcci.”

If anything has cemented the reputation of the Brazilian fashion business, it is biannual São Paulo Fashion Week. In 15 years, it has brought in 1.7m visitors and R$7.5m ($4.3m) invested each time.

Along with Rio Fashion Week, it puts Brazil on the fashion map. “São Paulo and Rio Fashion Weeks set up a movement, this circle of fashion really helps,” says Ms Pascowitz.

Paulo Borges runs São Paulo Fashion Week and the glossy art-fashion title Mag! – an innovative title that demonstrates that Brazil’s visual aesthetic is as vibrantly creative as anything in London.

“São Paulo Fashion Week helps valorise Brazilian style and products. In the Brazilian imagination, foreign products were always idealised. The work of São Paulo Fashion Week helped change this,” he says.

The new market is Brazil’s lower middle class – the famous Class C, which has developed a brasher and more colourful sense of style than the refined European tastes of the Brazilian upper class. “For the first time, a more numerous middle class exists, with more spending power, and more attentive to fashion,” says Mr Borges.

São Paulo’s Cavalera brand has hit this market head-on. “It is young. It is creative. It has humour. They always do something different,” says Ms Pascowitz. The brand was launched in 1996 by Igor Cavalera, drummer in Brazilian rock group Sepultura with Alberto Hiar, a former São Paulo state deputy.

“Our customers are young people with information about fashion,” says Mr Hiar. “People who like music, to dance, to go out at night, who have a lot of movement. People with personality.”

Mr Hiar bought the company outright soon afterwards and now has 300 employees. He claims 50 per cent growth year-on-year since then. Cavalera sold 600,000 garments last year and has just opened a 700 square metre shop on São Paulo’s ritziest shopping street, Rua Oscar Freire.

“We pay a lot of attention to creation, we are always looking for young stylists, but focused on the market,” says Mr Hiar.

But Brazilian fashion’s biggest success story has a much simpler proposition: the flip-flop. São Paulo company Alpargatas, formed in the city’s East Zone in 1907, launched the Havaiana flip-flops in 1962. Today, it is as synonymous with flip-flops as Levi’s is with jeans.

In Brazil, its low price means that for poorest Brazilians, it is often the only piece of footwear they own. The company also has the Timberland brand for Brazil. In the second third of 2009, sales were R$172.7m, an increase of 4 per cent.

That’s a lot of flip flops.