Does Fashion Week Even Matter Anymore?
Who is it for? Is it for you? It's definitely not for me.
About ten years ago, New York City tried to commodify Fashion week by lifting its velvet rope to include the unwashed public in a little event called Fashion’s Night Out. The concept was that every fashion brand, storefront, and department store held a celebration open to the invite-less public ostensibly to kick off NYFW, but mostly to generate revenue. It did not. What it did was give all of us who had to work feverishly for the next week a massive hangover and turn the city into more of an unmanageable playground than it already was.
Fashion’s Night Out, and its performative, proto-social media flurry is now a distant, awkward memory—like the sanitized tents. (Can you imagine a whole new crop of editors who will never have to sprint from the D train to the Lincoln Center…or even Bryant Park? Lucky bebes.) But it had a point. Sure, an extremely capitalistic, consumer-focused point, but it knew what it was there to do.
I don’t know if Fashion Week can say the same thing.
Last newsletter, I talked about how entertainment is going to have to contend with the algorithmic monster it created, endlessly needing to feed the beast of scaled content. Before that, it was the music industry, with its Napsters and Apple Music purchases that eventually gave way to the Frankenstein-ed system we have now. And like all industries that try to monetize on-demand creativity, the fashion world will have to grapple with its outdated model. The brands that work outside establishment approval will figure out something faster and better than shows and seasons—if they haven’t already.
A bit of context setting. Once upon a time, Fashion Week showcased a group of locationally divided designers in fashion capitols, notably: New York, London, and then super-duper heavy hitters in Paris and Milan (the latter often hosting foreign designers without a local fashion week, like Antwerp or Tokyo). This gathering was mostly for powerful boutique and department store buyers who’ll go on to actually sell the garments, or for editors and stylists who pull clothes for their pages and/or clients. Fashion shows are expensive as hell; last I heard, smaller ones are executed for roughly $30k, while larger ones can be substantially more—models, venue, hair and makeup, production, now Covid protocols—so shows tend to be funded by a brand’s investor. Then public relations teams are tasked to manage the event and get notables to see and be seen, intending to create cache for the designer that translates into sales. Due to order amounts and production times, it roughly takes about six months from runway to consumer. As such, fashion week was split into seasons: Fall/Winter in February, and Spring/Summer in September. (Then came Resort and Couture, which was entirely created to drum up more business and is a whole other newsletter to explain.)
Once the internet caught on, bloggers began to descend on the runways, inciting hand-wringing commentary about who deserves to be at Fashion Week. Though these are events are driven entirely on hype, the arrival of bloggers definitely generated controversy, with all their street style and fashion week diaries. With more press came more attention. And with attention, a generally business-2-business event meant to stock stores became a celeb-flooded holiday where attendees jockeyed to get the most exciting photo posted the fastest.
Which put designers in a weird position: suddenly, they needed to not only show their just-finished collection—one that, mind you, was supposed to predict the trends six months in the future—but they also needed to entertain the internet. Sure, critics still mattered (🥴 is the face I made as I typed that), but a viral video written up by mainstream pubs did oodles more than a thoughtful review from Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan. The focus was on creating a moment instead of creating iconography. The clothes are fine and all, but is anyone actually watching?
As Fashion Week became more online, so grew the passionate professionals and hobbyists who made it a hashtagged #event and an industry larger than the clothes themselves. Suddenly, “fast fashion” companies with less scruples and more production capacity (that weren’t bogged down in executing a runway show), could quickly produce what was shown weeks, even days later. Gone is Miranda Priestley’s trickle down cerulean blue sweater speech. Her point, that the fashion industry represents jobs and that she finds it hilarious that Andy “made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of ‘stuff,’” no longer rings true. The people in the room have lost influence, traded in for whatever resonates with the Instagram-obsessed consumer first.
So let’s take it a step farther: why does one even need the pretense of a fashion week when there are millions of folks on TikTok who can tell you how to dress, right now, for much less? There are plenty of legitimate brands who eschew fashion week in favor of producing and shipping the preternaturally targeted Instagram items I can receive ASAP.
If Fashion Week is no longer for the B2B buyer, those hoping to invest in hot new things for their stores six months down the line, and it is still tied to the antiquated model of seasons, seats, and front row attendees without being innovative, who is it serving? What trends does it set?
Here’s an apt but imperfect metaphor. TIFF is also occurring right now: Imagine applying to TIFF, despite the fact that you have to basically bankrupt yourself to get in. Even if you are accepted, it’s incredibly competitive and the only reason anyone would watch your film is if you had a song and dance number. In the unlikelihood that you did get picked up, you either got a small theatrical run or went up against some algorithmically perfected Netflix Christmas movie. So, is TIFF worth it to you? Or would you try to find success outside of the awards circuit and leave the festivals to the well-funded Emma Stone movies?
To be clear, this is not a condemnation of runways shows (where the models move and you stay still) or fashion presentations (where the models stay still and you move). Designers like Elena Velez and Wiederhoeft remind us that there is something exhilarating about an artistic statement, and I deeply believe fashion itself is a form of communication. But how meaningful is artistic presentation when the only viewers are the obscenely rich?
Cathy Horyn, known for her clear-eyed criticism of fashion, witnessed the Elena Velez show last week, where models trudged through a mud pit and then ended up slinging muck for a finale, symbolizing the dirty business of fashion. Horyn writes, “I happen to think that Velez is right, that the expression of women on the runways is so sanitized — largely by the demands of the luxury-goods industry — that it’s practically one-dimensional. We don’t really get a fierce or nasty woman, much less a complex one…A new and commanding expression of sexuality almost always disturbs people, as it apparently did some the other night.” This is true! And great! And right! But Horyn goes on to lament that what Velez needs now is an investor who believes in her, because ultimately, without sales, there are no clothes, and without clothes, there is no NYFW. On one hand, this mud-crusted performance was breathlessly covered by fashion folk everywhere, with the stunt generating plenty of press for the young designer. Yet, trending or not and statements be damned; if she doesn’t generate orders, her show was just a mud fight. The nature of fashion week itself will always put commodity, not art or expression, first.
And thus, a tension exists between the generations who crafted fashion to be purposeful but lucrative and those who use shows as a vehicle to make a virally crafted point. “I look at (Velez’s) generation, and whether they are fighting against overconsumption to help save the planet, or for the rights of animals, or for how human beings should be represented in all their plurality, I see people who want to shift the moral focus of society. To them, it’s not about a compelling new design,” Horyn writes. “It’s about something bigger, and we are still far from seeing how that will be expressed in fashion. But it will happen.” And yet, it cannot happen when Fashion Week’s ultimate goal is commerce, married to seasonality that no longer exists, catering only to a very small population with limited influence. Just like a movie that leads with familiar IP instead of good ideas, the flourishes of artistry might be there, but the algorithm or mass production will smooth out all those delicious edges in pursuit of profit.
Balancing the demand of commerce and the desire for brand legitimacy is almost impossible. Streaming catwalks have middling success—a traditional runway on TikTok doesn’t generate tune-in. However a massive spectacle on a heavy hitting platform, like the Rihanna-Amazon-Fenty show, reaches millions (say, like an all-star film picked up at TIFF). To me, Fenty succeeds because it entertains us at home. It doesn’t induce empty FOMO or showcase designers who don’t get me like my hyper-tailored Instagram ads do. It’s dark; Rihanna only gets eyeballs because she has the means to put on a capital-S Show, with celebs and performances. But making fashion like the MTV VMAs certainly won’t help innovate or support indie designers.
Perhaps the solution is to revolutionize production, keep it constant and divorced of seasonal drops. Or perhaps a designer’s statement should be, you know, the clothes, instead of a fancy mud party.
Imagine putting those Fashion Week resources into providing more affordable options for your clientele and waiting for them to create a spectacle on their own platforms. But that puts fashion in the hands of the people, which is contradictory to everything Fashion Week was built upon—the very foundation that stymies its evolution into modern relevancy. But, as music and entertainment have brutally learned, being an established industry is no longer protection from the chaotic future.