New York Fashion Week February 2019

Fashion calendar week is dead. Oasis't y'all heard? Information technology was dying, and so it was dying some more, and kept on dying, and at present information technology'southward dead.

Or is it? Maybe fashion week is coming back from the dead, or maybe fashion week was never actually dead at all. Despite the fact that style calendar week still very much exists, people accept been arguing about its expiry for years.

The concept of mode week — which, in the US, usually refers to the New York Fashion Week that takes place in February and once again in September — is relatively simple: designers presenting collections for the following season to a room full of their peers in the mode industry.

Its genesis tin can be traced back more than than 75 years, but over the by decade, NYFW has become something else. Depending on whom you ask, it's turned into a swollen and outdated trade evidence for an industry that has evolved beyond it, or a parade of influencer narcissism, or an overcommercialized slog where nobody has any original ideas anymore. It'south possible it peaked in the late 1990s, afterwards Sexual activity and the Metropolis brought the glamour of New York fashion parties into living rooms countrywide, or maybe it was in the excesses of the mid-2000s, when way became an increasingly common business organisation venture for celebrities, but earlier the recession devastated the economy.

All the same, each time fashion week rolls around now, the same debates have to be litigated: Should manner week still be? Who is it for? These questions aren't really virtually whether the parties are fun or the trends are absurd. It's about whether the structure of mode week is relevant to the way people buy wearing apparel today.

The history of New York Manner Calendar week

Though its origins lie in the "press weeks" that took identify in New York every fall and spring kickoff in 1943, in which editors would flock to ritzy hotels to watch track presentations of designers' latest collections, the fashion week we know today is a relatively immature miracle. From the 1940s to the '80s, New York, Paris, London, and Milan established themselves as the "Large Four," the largest and most important centers of fashion, each with its own slate of shows. The concept of a dedicated week-long result for a metropolis to promote its manner industry has now spread globally.

For a long time, fashion weeks fabricated sense. Rail shows offered editors and buyers a hazard to preview the collections and larger trends that would hitting clothing racks in vi months, allowing time for magazines to plan content and for department stores and boutiques to brand business decisions far in accelerate.

New York Fashion Week as it lives now didn't begin officially until 1993, when Fern Mallis, then the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, sought to centralize the scattered process of editors and buyers running around to various rail shows all over the city.

"Organized shows put American designers on the map and changed the fashion landscape forever," Mallis told Racked in 2015. "Before that, at that place were 50 shows in 50 locations. Everyone did their own affair without agreement what a nightmare it was if it was your business to get from one testify to the other."

By 1994, the success of American designers similar Calvin Klein and the celebrities their shows attracted (a very immature Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance) established NYFW as a must-cover event.

Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss outside the Bryant Park tents at New York Style Week in 1994.

For 16 years, "the shows," as they were called, took place within tents fix in Manhattan's Bryant Park. This not simply freed attendees from aimlessly running from venue to venue but too meant designers were no longer responsible for the burden of producing a style prove from scratch — the space, lighting, audio, and security were all handled past a production firm. That's non to say it was cheap: In 2007, a show at Bryant Park toll "at least $50,000" for designers, according to ane estimate.

Come 2010, the result had spilled across the reaches of the relatively modest park — at its height, NYFW included nearly 300 shows — and after years of disagreements betwixt the fashion industry and Bryant Park's management over its expansion, the event was moved to tents inside the plazas of Lincoln Eye. The new location, while slightly further from New York'southward Garment District where many designers keep their studios, had thirty percent more space and was equipped with much better engineering to fulfill the needs of the increasingly digital event. A year later, designers started regularly live-streaming their shows on YouTube so that fifty-fifty those without an invitation could melody in.

The photo pit at the Vivienne Tam fall 2011 show at Lincoln Center.

Meanwhile, some other industry was exploding far exterior the walls of the tents: personal fashion blogging. In the years before Instagram, a smattering of well-dressed (and often wealthy) fashion mavens all over the world shared photos of their outfits online alongside slice-of-life weblog posts. Between 2004 and 2008, people like Bryanboy and Tavi Gevinson were starting to build brands with quirky clothing pairings and colloquial writing voices.

These early "influencers," who gained fame even earlier the term became a bona fide career choice, planted the seeds of a fashion industry reckoning. They were outsiders, threatening the traditional organization in which magazine editors held nigh absolute power in directing public opinion of fashion trends. "They had a keen awareness of how engineering could assist them attract the attention of hundreds of thousands of agreeing fashion fans who had been close out of the conversation," critic Robin Givhan wrote in 2014.

And while the mode industry ultimately embraced them — Marc Jacobs named a bag after Bryanboy in 2008, and Lucky magazine put three digital influencers on its comprehend in 2015 — these swaths of previously unheard-of showgoers were oftentimes blamed for ushering in the then-called death of fashion calendar week.

Bloggers Rumi Neely and Bryanboy, along with Elizabeth Hilfiger, attend the Tommy Hilfiger fall 2013 fashion prove in 2013.

To a certain extent, their critics had a point. These hoards of well-dressed digital natives were adept at peacocking for street fashion photographers who waited exterior runway shows, thereby creating a spectacle exterior the tents that was arguably bigger than what was going on within them. And even by the time they sabbatum downwardly, these frequently-maligned newbies didn't necessarily attach to the old-school rules; namely, not taking photos during shows. Anyone who followed them online was privy to essentially the same admission they had.

In 2015, the shows were booted from Lincoln Eye, past fashion of a lawsuit that determined the space where NYFW was held could non be used for commercial purposes. Merely fifty-fifty prior to the settlement, many designers were already beginning to decamp to diverse other issue spaces around the city. The biggest brands, similar Alexander Wang, preferred to rent out enormous warehouses to put on fashion shows that morphed into all-night ragers, while up-and-coming designers experimented with intimate showroom presentations that felt more like art openings than fashion shows. The latter strategy was also a good mode to avoid the gargantuan cost of putting on fifty-fifty the about bones rail prove, which back in 2014 was estimated to cost around $200,000.

Tyga and Kylie Jenner at the Alexander Wang spring 2017 afterparty.

Though New York Fashion Week somewhen relocated to two separate event spaces, many of its marquee designers had decided not just to host their shows on their own but to forgo the traditional fashion week calendar entirely. This creeping decentralization, both physically and temporally, has contributed to the event'south waning relevance.

Why fashion week isn't equally important as information technology used to be

It's not that the organizers and participants of fashion calendar week haven't been trying difficult to keep it alive: Price points bated, loftier fashion is equally democratized as it's ever been. Anyone with internet access can now sentinel nearly whatsoever major runway show in the world in real time, and when designers screw up, they're forced heed to the opinions of boilerplate people via social media. Racial diversity among models notwithstanding isn't nifty but has largely improved in the by iii years alone. Information technology'southward no longer such a shock to see, say, a size ten woman walk downward a rails, nor is it unusual for a designer to make a progressive political statement with his or her collection. None of this has been enough, though.

Fashion week is dying because it has zero relevance to the fashion modern shoppers buy stuff.

The traditional mode agenda, in which a collection of garments for fall is presented the preceding February and spring clothing is shown in September, actually comes from King Louis Fourteen. In the 17th century, he established French republic equally the center of the luxury textile industry by imposing a seasonal schedule wherein new textiles would be released twice a year, as a ways of encouraging people to buy more of them. From the beginning, it was just skillful marketing — people bought the latest textiles because they were new, not because they were actually needed.

And back when fashion shows were more than like merchandise shows, where new collections were presented to a minor number of editors and buyers who would then report on the coming trends for readers or order garments for stores, this arrangement still served its purpose. But now that images can spread worldwide in an instant and the deed of buying a dress can be reduced to about three taps on a telephone, the six months between when an outfit walks downward a rails and when a person tin can actually purchase information technology feels ridiculously archaic. Fashion trends, likewise, now flare upward at lightning speed and flame out just as fast thanks to image oversaturation, then that after the half-year waiting period, an artful can experience played out.

Much was made of the fact that in 2016, major designers like Burberry, Tom Ford, and Tommy Hilfiger adopted a "encounter now, buy now" strategy, in which their runway collections were available to purchase immediately. But for most mass-market wearable brands, that's just business equally usual. The biggest fast-manner brands similar Asos, for instance, can plough effectually entire collections in the bridge of a few weeks.

Another problem with the traditional fashion agenda is how it forces designers to put out four or more full collections a yr, sapping designers of creativity and creating a huge financial burden for brands. (In addition to spring and fall collections, there are in-between seasons like resort and pre-autumn, which sometimes besides involve track shows or live presentations.)

Enter drop culture. Companies have constitute success by creating scarcity, edifice buzz and dropping limited collections or individual items whenever they want instead of releasing collections on a regular schedule. The most famous of them is Supreme, the streetwear brand that, fifty-fifty later on 25 years, still attracts lines that span total city blocks every Thursday morning. Information technology doesn't need a presence at mode calendar week to practise that.

A NYFW attendee carries a Supreme belt handbag in September 2017.

Plus, there are far fresher and less expensive ways to market a fashion brand that don't involve runways. There are highbrow examples (like the brand Opening Anniversary's relationship with the New York City Ballet) and quirky ones (like designer Rachel Antonoff turning a style presentation into a school scientific discipline fair). And and then there are presentations that just exist online, like Misha Nonoo'due south "Insta-Show," where the only spectacle was the one taking place on Instagram — the only medium through which most people accept access to a fashion testify in the first place.

At the same time, the draw of roofing fashion week for magazines and websites has waned. Every bit fashion calendar week and the nitty-gritty cycles of loftier way in general have less relevance to consumers' shopping habits, it isn't surprising that readers aren't as interested in hearing nearly them.

People aren't certain whether manner week is even worth saving

All of this raises the question: Who is fashion week even for? Designers are ditching it, no one seems to be clicking on coverage, and ofttimes, the events feel like little more than exercises in Instagram influencer posturing.

Sure, for smaller and up-and-coming brands, way week is still a banner event that can provide marketing opportunities. But for the nigh part, manner calendar week doesn't seem to be succeeding in its principal function: getting people excited about buying things.

Part of this could be because we don't care about clothes anymore. A Bloomberg feature terminal year called "The Decease of Clothing" highlighted all the reasons Americans are spending less of their incomes on their wardrobes, from the coincidental-ification of piece of work attire to the flattening of pinnacle-down influence (information technology doesn't just come from mode houses anymore).

Brands that been held upward as innovators in the industry, like Nasty Gal, are now struggling. Neither of them put on high-contour runway shows, just they serve as examples of a possible decline in our involvement in mode and, more broadly, our interest in owning things versus our want for experiences. "Who needs fashion these days when you can express yourself through social media?" the Bloomberg piece begins. "Why buy that pricey new apparel when you could fund a weekend getaway instead?" Why indeed?

Street style photographers train their cameras at a NYFW attendee in February 2016.

New York Manner Week is currently place like information technology always does, in early February. This time around, however, it'southward added more than console discussions and film screenings, expanding on the success of similar previous events from last autumn. Mayhap making style week more relevant means making it more like a briefing — accessible to more than people and with a takeaway across just "purchase some stuff." Attendees can now too purchase tickets to shows, which traditionally have been complimentary and invite-only, through bundle deals chosen "NYFW: The Experience."

In most means, though, this February's New York Fashion Week looks the same every bit it has in recent years: which is to say, with fewer and fewer people paying attention.