New York Fashion Week is happening again, and every September the same thing happens: suddenly, my Instagram is full of impossibly well-dressed people standing outside warehouses, celebrities sitting in front rows, models walking down runways, and fashion editors posting schedules that look completely impossible to follow. Everyone seems to be running somewhere. Everyone seems to know where they’re going. And everyone seems to think it is very, very important. I’ve always wondered: what is all the fuss actually about?
The story goes back to nineteenth-century Paris, when fashion was still very much about the couture house and its relationship with individual clients. Charles Frederick Worth, who opened his Paris fashion house in 1858, is often considered one of the founders of modern haute couture. One of the things that made Worth different was the way he presented his clothes. Instead of simply showing clients fabrics or sketches, he had garments worn by live models so that they could actually see how the finished clothes looked on a person. It sounds completely normal now, but at the time it helped establish the idea of presenting fashion as something to be seen, instead of something that existed only as an object in a dressmaker’s workshop.
For a long time, though, there was nothing resembling the Fashion Week schedule we have today. Paris was the center of the fashion world, and designers presented their collections through private appointments and salon shows. The audience was small and carefully selected, made up mostly of wealthy clients and people within the industry. Fashion was exclusive by nature, and seeing a collection in person meant that you were already part of the world surrounding it.
The system started to change in the early twentieth century, particularly in the United States. American designers were still heavily influenced by Paris, and American fashion editors would travel to France to see the latest collections and report back home. New York had a growing fashion industry of its own, but it did not yet have the same cultural authority as Paris. Then World War II changed the situation almost overnight. With European travel restricted and Paris no longer easily accessible to American journalists, the American fashion industry suddenly had a reason to create its own system.
This is where Eleanor Lambert comes in. Lambert was a publicist who understood something that seems obvious to us now but was still relatively new at the time: fashion needed publicity. She worked to promote American designers as names and personalities rather than simply people producing clothes for manufacturers. In 1943, she organized what was then called Press Week in New York. The concept was surprisingly simple. Instead of making fashion editors travel all over the city to see different collections, designers would present their work during the same concentrated period so that editors could see more shows and cover more designers.
The fact that it was originally called Press Week is actually pretty important. Fashion Week was not created for everyone. It was created for the press. Editors were the people who could take a collection that had been seen by a relatively small group of people and turn it into something much bigger through newspapers and magazines. The runway was essentially a meeting point between designers and the people who controlled fashion’s public image.
This is also why Fashion Week has always been about more than clothes. From the beginning, it was about attention. Who gets invited, who gets photographed, which designers get reviewed, who sits in the front row and whose collection gets mentioned in the next issue of a magazine are all part of the same system. We tend to think of the front row as one of the glamorous details of Fashion Week, but it is also a very visible representation of who has influence in fashion.
The other fashion capitals developed their own systems later and in very different ways. Milan’s rise came largely after the Second World War, as Italian designers and manufacturers began establishing a stronger identity separate from Paris. The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana was founded in 1958 and eventually became an important force in organizing and promoting Italian fashion. Milan gradually became associated with the country’s particular strengths: tailoring, manufacturing and ready-to-wear, with houses such as Giorgio Armani, Versace and Prada eventually becoming some of the most recognizable names in the world.
Paris, meanwhile, already had centuries of fashion history behind it. Its couture system was much more established than those of the other cities, but the modern structure of Paris Fashion Week took shape later. One of the most important moments came in 1973 with the Battle of Versailles, a legendary event that brought five French designers and five American designers together for a fundraising show outside Paris. The event became famous not only because of the clothes but because of the cultural statement it made. American fashion, which had spent so long being treated as secondary to Paris, was suddenly impossible to ignore.
London was the last of the four major fashion capitals to establish its official Fashion Week. London Fashion Week began in 1984, following the creation of the British Fashion Council the year before. Its early shows reflected the character that London would become known for: younger designers, experimentation and a willingness to be slightly less polished than Paris or Milan. Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and Betty Jackson were among the designers associated with those early years, helping establish London as the place where fashion could be a little more rebellious.
By the 1990s, Fashion Week had become an institution, and the runway itself was changing. Shows were no longer simply a practical way to display clothes. They were becoming productions. Designers started thinking about music, casting, lighting, locations and the overall atmosphere of a collection. The show became another form of storytelling, and the designer became almost as important as the clothes themselves.
New York’s Fashion Week was eventually centralized in one location, making the experience much closer to the version we recognize today. In 1993, the CFDA helped organize the shows under the name 7th on Sixth, with Bryant Park becoming their home. Suddenly, there was a physical place where the fashion industry could gather twice a year. Editors, buyers, models, photographers and celebrities could all exist within the same few blocks, turning Fashion Week into something that felt almost like its own temporary city.
Then the internet arrived, and Fashion Week became something completely different. For most of its history, you had to be physically present to experience a show. If you weren’t invited, you waited for the photographs and reviews to appear in a magazine. The internet broke that distance. Suddenly, a collection could be photographed, published and discussed almost immediately. By the time social media became central to fashion, the audience had expanded far beyond editors and buyers.
Instagram probably changed Fashion Week more than any other platform. The street outside a show became part of the show itself. People who had never been invited into the venue could still photograph what was happening outside it. Models could post backstage images. Celebrities could create headlines simply by arriving. An outfit worn by someone sitting in the front row could sometimes receive as much attention as the collection on the runway. Fashion Week stopped being something that happened behind closed doors and became a global event that millions of people could follow from their phones.
And yet, underneath all the changes, the original idea is still there. Designers still organize their collections around seasons. The press still plays an enormous role in deciding which collections become part of the conversation. Buyers still attend to decide what they want to stock. Editors still move from show to show trying to understand what the next season is going to look like. The technology has changed, but the basic structure has survived.
That is probably what I find most interesting about Fashion Week. We tend to think of it as this glamorous, slightly chaotic invention of the fashion industry, but its origins are much more strategic than that. Eleanor Lambert wasn’t trying to create a week of celebrities and street style. She was trying to get people to pay attention to American designers at a moment when Paris had almost complete control over the conversation. She understood that if you could get the right people into the same rooms at the same time, you could create an entirely new fashion system.
More than eighty years later, that system is still running. The venues have changed, the clothes have changed, and the audience has grown from a few carefully selected editors to practically anyone with a phone. But Fashion Week still depends on the same thing it depended on in 1943: getting people to look. And maybe that is what Fashion Week has really been about all along. Not just showing us what people will wear next season, but deciding what—and who—we should be paying attention to.
Image credit: Getty Images; ‘A model poses on a packed runway on Seventh Avenue wearing Samuel Winston’, 1953