New York Fashion Week has a nostalgia problem.
Every season, the same whispers are overheard: New York Fashion Week is dead and it used to be better. While it’s reaped the rewards of its initial purpose—putting American fashion designers on the global map—there is some truth to the sentiments. In the past, NYFW seemed to be less focused on the spectacle of it all (celebrities, gimmicks, marketing tactics), and more focused on the clothes. More than 80 years since NYFW was born, where are we headed now?
In 1943, Eleanor Lambert, at the time press director of the New York Dress Institute and later the founder of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), started New York Fashion Week, then known as Press Week and later Press Week of New York. Like any good publicist, she saw an opportunity. During World War II, Paris, where fashion designers usually looked to replicate designs, was under German occupation, so Lambert set out to showcase and prove that American fashion and its designers had something worth looking at too.
Eventually, other cities also broke from the tradition of fashion shows taking place at designers’ boutiques or ateliers. Milan Fashion Week launched in 1958, Paris Fashion Week in 1973, and London Fashion Week in 1984. By 1993, NYFW got its official name, a permanent location (Bryant Park until 2010), and became the pulpit for many acclaimed designers such as Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, and Halston. It continued to reflect both the vast influence and the niche grittiness of New York, a space where big name designers flexed their capital and honed their sportswear specificities, and emerging designers found their footing and community.
In 2024, the consensus amongst the sartorial set is that New York Fashion Week is in a quagmire, with the normal push-and-pull of the industry’s commercialism and creativity growing bellicose. There are many factors that have contributed to this vibe shift, and remnants of pandemic setbacks even further exposed NYFW’s pre-existing loose threads. The contrast between NYFW’s problems and its strengths remains stark, making it hard to see why it’s still important.
“It feels like overall, New York fashion as an industry has become less and less important. I see fewer established brands coming here, I see fewer European editors coming here, which is always a sign,” says Eugene Rabkin, journalist and educator behind Style Zeitgeist and the Style Zeitgeist Academy. “It’s hard to see New York as a fashion capital, even though it’s certainly the fashion consumption capital.”
Much of the woes of NYFW reflect the same systemic issues America faces: an unhealthy and unsustainable emphasis on capital, lack of support for and nurturing within creative industries, outdated infrastructure, climate disregard, and an obsession with celebrity. But, despite those issues, New York designers continue to show up each season and make due.
While this season has welcomed big-name brands like Alaïa and Off-White, emerging and independent designers, now inarguably the heart of NYFW, are having to decide between hemorrhaging money to put on a fashion show, or keeping their brands afloat. This year alone, Interior; Dion Lee, an Australian brand that shows in New York; and Mara Hoffman all shuttered their brands due to financial instabilities. In February, Puppets and Puppets had their last NYFW runway show, opting instead to focus on accessories and move to London. In comparison to organizations like the British Fashion Council (BFC) and Fashion East, which put more effort into nurturing emerging designers, there is a very apparent lack of support for independent designers in America.
Danya Issawi, a fashion writer who wrote a deep-dive on the finances of independent designers earlier this year, pinpoints that a lack of financial support is a big reason for the New York Fashion Week vibe shift. It can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $400,000 to put on even a barebones runway show. Today, brand sponsorship is scarce and competitive and something like the one-time $50,000 Empire State Development and IMG grant given to 10 independent designers in 2022, barely makes a dent. “A lot of the really cool designers don’t get help from anybody,” says Issawi. “It’s difficult to just get funding to do the shows, plus there’s a lot of pressure for them to put on the shows, especially if they are just coming off a CFDA win or nomination and they want to use that momentum.”
“There’s work to be done in order to give what’s due to the [NYFW] designers that are putting their all into showing their collections and making it easier for them to do so,” says Issawi about the future of New York Fashion Week. She mentioned Copenhagen Fashion Week, founded only 18 years ago, as a place that has a structure NYFW could adapt. CPHFW has sustainability requirements that each brand has to meet in order to show during fashion week and larger brands, like Zalando, sponsor smaller brands' shows to ensure they are able to showcase their designs each season.
Then, there’s the fractionality of NYFW. Until 2021, IMG and CFDA ran two separate calendars unlike in London, Paris, and Milan where one organization runs the show, with support from the government. It can also often feel like big brands don’t want to participate, which definitely influences the tone. This season, Ralph Lauren showed off-calendar and bussing editors to the Hamptons. After Tom Ford was announced as the president of CFDA in 2019, he almost immediately had his runway show in Los Angeles. “That was a big sign of saying New York Fashion Week doesn’t matter,” says Rabkin. Thom Browne, the current CFDA president, once moved his usual PFW show to NYFW in February, but there’s no word on whether New York will become his permanent RTW show home. Other brands like The Row, Vaquera, and Peter Do moved to Paris. Stylist and creative director Dione Davis, who has worked on several NYFW shows, sees Paris as the place where brands go once they graduate from New York or move to due to their clientele. “If most of your showroom and all the accounts you want are in Paris, it makes more sense to show there,” says Davis.
The question then becomes, if the markets and opportunities for growth are abroad, why should NYFW even exist? Or rather, what does NYFW bring to the table that other fashion weeks don’t? The answer lies in pushing the boundaries. In the past, New York Fashion Week put supermodels and great designers on the map, and while there were sprinkles of contrast to the homogeneity, there were still limits to who was allowed entry. In the years since, NYFW has grown and continues to push the conversation forward in terms of who’s included with other countries often following.
“To be honest, if fashion still operated like it did in the past, I went to an Alabama state school, I definitely wouldn’t have made it. I would not have been on the top of the list to rise in the ranks in fashion, that was reserved for the Ivy girls, that was reserved for the girls who got all the internships,” says Davis.
Think about it: NYFW, second to LFW, is currently the most diverse fashion week. Its independent designers are constantly pushing the conversation forward in terms of who’s on the runway, who clothes are made for, and why getting dressed continues to be an important aspect of one’s identity. It’s a place whose subcultures, from ballroom to hip hop, are continually referenced, even on runways abroad. And, with America’s current identity crisis, NYFW is a place that constantly challenges the country’s stagnant modus operandi with the power of imagination. For example, Ralph Lauren’s ideal America feels irrelevant and out of touch next to newer designers like Willy Chavarria and Luar. Designers, independent ones especially, continue to answer the question of what it means to be "American" in vibrant, amorphous, and transgressive ways.
While fashion insiders may be convinced that New York Fashion Week is dead, fashion reflects the times that we’re living in, which means that the twice-yearly rendezvous continues to serve as a witness.
In order to pave the way for forward momentum of any kind, we have to move away from waxing poetic about what NYFW was or should be, and embrace it for what it is. NYFW gets flack for its dearth of established designers, but pillars like Tory Burch, Carolina Herrera, and Coach have reliably reinvented their wares for American audiences with the event as their platform. Independent designers like Luar, Willy Chavarria, and Women’s History Museum might not yet be household names, or might not even want to be. Still, support them! There’s a reason the designers we know and love got to where they are. “Europe often feels very closed off,” concludes Davis. “I get community from NYFW.”
