Your collection is in Malpensa

The call comes on a Tuesday, usually around eight in the morning Italian time, which is early afternoon in Shanghai. The collection left on Friday. It landed on Sunday. It is Tuesday and it has not moved, and the show is on Thursday.

At that point the options are expensive and few. Six weeks earlier they were free.

Look at almost any first Milan production plan written by a brand team and you will find the same gap. The collection ships on one date and appears at the venue on another, with nothing in between. Between the two is customs, and customs has a duration.

What follows is orientation, not advice. Every shipment is specific and a licensed broker should confirm your case before anything is packed.

Decide before you pack, not after

The first question is what happens to the goods after the show, and it has to be answered item by item.

If they go home, this is a temporary import. Goods enter the EU without duty and import VAT falling due, on condition that they leave again, unchanged, within a set period.

If anything stays, whether sold, gifted, kept in a showroom for the buying season or handed to a stylist, that part is a permanent import. Duty and import VAT are due and you need an EU-established importer of record.

Brands routinely declare the first and then do the second. One piece goes to a stylist. Three stay in a Milan showroom through October. A sample is sold to an editor who asked nicely. Each of those quietly converts part of a temporary import into something that has to be regularised. Planned for, it is a cost. Discovered afterwards, it is a problem with a deadline attached.

The carnet, and its edges

An ATA carnet lets goods travel temporarily across borders without duty deposits at each one. China and Italy both participate, and for a collection travelling to a show and returning home it is usually the cleanest instrument.

Its limits are where the trouble starts. A carnet is for goods that come back. It is not intended for anything sold, consumed, given away or permanently left behind. Consumables, gift items, printed material distributed at the event, catering, anything for sale, all sit outside it.

So a crate containing eighteen runway looks and two hundred gift boxes is two customs problems wearing one shipping label. Split them. Different consignments, different documents.

Two lines on the packing list

More delay is caused by these two fields than by anything else in the process.

Description. "Clothing" is not a description. Classification drives everything downstream, and vague descriptions get shipments held for physical inspection. Item, material composition, intended use, stated identically on every document.

Value. Every item needs a declared value even when nothing is being sold. Declaring a nominal figure to keep things simple is a false economy, because the value has to be defensible, and a mismatch between invoice, packing list and carnet is precisely what triggers an inspection.

The rule that saves the most time is unglamorous: the paperwork has to agree with itself. Invoice, packing list, carnet, transport documents, identical, item by item.

The file nobody closes

Temporary import creates an obligation to take the goods out again, within the permitted period, with that exit properly recorded and the document discharged.

This is where the real money is lost, and it is lost late. Four months after the show, long after the team has moved on and nobody remembers who was supposed to stamp what. The show went well. The file was never closed. The penalty arrives anyway.

Assign the closure to a named person before the goods ship, and keep the discharged documents somewhere that survives a change of agency.

Six weeks before

Decide item by item what returns and what stays. Appoint a broker in Italy and confirm the instrument. Confirm the importer of record for anything staying. Build documents that match. Split returning and non-returning goods into separate consignments. Put three working days of buffer between planned clearance and the day the collection is needed at the venue. Name the person who closes the file.

That last one takes thirty seconds and is the one that gets skipped.

General orientation as of September 2026. Customs treatment depends on the goods, their origin and their intended use. Confirm with a licensed customs broker before shipping.

Jonah Liu, N.7 Studio