Fashion Week Returns, Yet Again

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. No, jk, today is the first day of New York Fashion Week, which also marks the beginning of Fashion Month — after New York, London, Milan, and Paris Fashion Week follow.

If you’d like to get technical, today is also the beginning of some kind of Fashion Quarter, considering that there are more Fashion Weeks in more cities than ever before. Toronto (hi), Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles, Dubai, Tokyo, Brazil, Copenhagen, and even Cleveland have their own Fashion Weeks, although their relevance and necessity are, shall we say, debatable.

This is the month that counts for buyers, designers, octopus-armed conglomerates, the beautiful men and women in attendance and the street style photographers who preserve them in slideshows, because women’s ready-to-wear is, I would say, the most important spoke in the ever-turning wheel of fashion. It’s more relevant than couture, more established than the men’s fashion, more suited to the spectator sport aspect of the fashion industry that thrives during Fashion Month.

I once tried to write an essay about the fashion show and, by extension, the history of fashion weeks and it is, bizarrely, one of the least researched aspects of the entire industry. There are a lot of strange things that happen in fashion that can be explained by momentum — the adoption of a certain model, a certain trend, a certain designer moving like a very, very elegant Slinky traveling down stairs — but the runway has momentum on a whole other level. The people I interviewed were shocked that I had even asked if it was worth it (except, of course, for the people I interviewed because they had chosen to reject runway shows in favor of something more beneficial to their companies). It is just, as they say, what you do.

I liked this post on Racked last week because they discussed some of the real numbers associated with producing New York Fashion Week (one choice quote: “At the Lincoln Center shows, the lighting racks alone cost $40,000”). I always think we need more fashion writing that contextualizes the actual economic realities of the fashion industry. Here is, for lack of a better term, the money shot:

In 2011, the New York Times reported that the Marc Jacobs show cost at least $1 million, which breaks down to about $1,750 per each second of the show. Last season, Fashionista estimated that $200,000 was a reasonable amount for brands to expect to pay to pull off a show during NYFW. For context, the International Business Times reported last September that, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, NYFW pulls in about $850 million each year for the city. That’s almost double what the Super Bowl made for the city when MetLife Stadium hosted the game this past February.

There’s also Vanessa Friedman’s New York Fashion Week Guide, where she breaks down the why of, at least, this upcoming Fashion Month in a particularly satisfying way:

The spring/summer season is upon us, with more than 100 shows taking place between now and next Thursday, followed by the same again in London, Milan and Paris until the first week of October. Fashion month has become a cultural phenomenon as globally pervasive as the ginkgo tree. You can’t avoid it, so you may as well embrace it, and find out what you should be ready to discuss during cocktail parties and water cooler conversations everywhere. Indubitably, questions of geopolitics and the stagnant European economy are more important, but think of it this way: What happens at fashion week will inform in large part the shape — literally — your identity will take six months from now.

I mean, yes. Exactly. This isn’t a discussion about whether or not fashion should exist, and it never will be for me; it’s a discussion of why fashion exists the way it does, how the fashion industry snakes its way into our economies, art forms, lives, how fashion is performed on runways versus how it becomes a thing we wear and hang in our closets and grow weary of and throw out and replace and then, inevitably, mourn the loss of, and how that cycle mirrors the larger cycle of the fashion industry.

Amanda Fortini wrote about the lack of fashion show analysis in 2006, pointing out that “[f]ashion scholars have penned histories of the high heel, the corset, and the little black dress, but no one has yet written a definitive history of the fashion show.” And it’s kind of true! Caroline Evans is an incredible fashion writer and has written two books that touch on part of the history of the fashion show, both of which are mandatory reading, and yesterday Jazmine reminded us about the origins of Fashion Week as Eleanor Lambert’s press week. There’s Marilis Schweitzer’s When Broadway Was The Runway, which explores the theatrical origins of the runway, but yeah — where is the definitive account of the contemporary fashion show as an evolving artifact of the fashion industry at large? More importantly, who is going to look at the fashion show and ask why — why we persist in participating, who benefits from Fashion Week (side-eying those octopus-armed conglomerates again), who suffers from Fashion Week, why the fashion show matters as much as it does, and why the fashion show continues to exist at all.

I wanted to write about fashion shows in the first place because I really do think it has all the elements of what is so wonderful and simultaneously so awful about fashion. There’s such outlandish creativity that stands beside such obvious greed. Runway shows are where fashion really is allowed to be an art form as well as a purely commercial transaction, and it deserves our attention (like, yes, I will be clicking through every slideshow posted on Vogue.com, I’m not made of stone) and also a healthy amount of critical thought.

That was a really long-winded way of saying “Happy Fashion Month,” but here we are.