It’s hard to believe that it was almost 18 months ago that I went to my last New York Fashion Week. It was a pretty busy week for shows, show reviews that I wrote for the site, Instagram stories that captured video content and exclusive interviews, and, of course, the daily musings of street style and walking to be captured by photographers. But, attending Fashion Week had been a dream of mine for years.
I remember the first fashion week I went to and literally feeling overwhelmed trying to learn the New York transit system while at the same time figuring out how to get from point A to point B in time for the show. Mind you, I was a newbie, and I thought Fashion Week shows actually started on time. I would later learn that the 30 to 45 minutes of waiting would be coupled with at most an eight-minute show.
Nonetheless, New York Fashion Week is a magical time for many fashion insiders. Although it has had its own set of problems since the start of the pandemic, many fashion commentators and media outlets have discussed if Fashion Week is in fact necessary.
After all, the event that originally started for buyers and stylists and editors to attend has become daily, ritualistic gathering places for celebrities and influencers. And when you think about it, the reality of showing clothes down a runway, only for them not to be available to the general public for another six to eight months. Seems a bit contrary.
Yes, there is a reason why Fashion Week does what it does and how it does it. But considering the consumer and how they shop, and how they look at clothes has changed. It might stand to reason that Fashion Week itself needed a facelift. We found comfort in knowing that we didn’t have to sit in small, overly capacitated rooms for many editors like me. To watch clothes walk down a runway. There is a level of stress that comes with attending Fashion Week.
The Pressures of New York Fashion Week
Whether you’re backstage and you are interviewing a makeup artist who shares tips on how they achieved the look while still fixing models’ eye shadow or extra stray hair in place. You might be seated to actually see the runway, trying to write down your thoughts in real-time while still trying to catch glimpses of who is also there, but also the other clothes that you may have missed as you put your eyes down for just a moment.
I know that New York Fashion Week is very glamorous to some, and magic surrounds it in many ways. But I believe that the pandemic has really highlighted what truly matters in various industries and for people. So to me, I’m not interested in putting on a full face of makeup and wearing overly priced designer clothes so that I can give the appearance of prestige as I walked down the road and hope that some fabulous photographer will catch a photo of me and plaster me as a cover photo on some generic round-up on street style fashion.
I also am a person who believes that cultivating real authentic relationships with the buyers or with the stylists or with the actual designers yields a better return on investment, both of my time and theirs. So I want to cultivate a real relationship with these people.
Instead of just depending on a few minutes of internet fame, but then gets glossed over with the next day’s set of news. Fashion Week still has a diversity problem. I have talked about this in my master’s thesis and have explored it through various media outlets as I have written around race and gender in the fashion and beauty industry. Of course, I don’t expect that a pandemic would naturally change the very DNA of an industry. But I have to say that if we are in the same spot today, as we were back, then the whole system might need to be torn down.
This season, I am not physically attending shows, mostly because of the rise in a Delta variant that continues to threaten the lives of unvaccinated and even vaccinated people. I also want to make a case that one does not need to physically be in a room to create meaningful or impactful work for the industry. Of course, there will still be content on the side as we showcase various designers and designers of color. We continue to talk about the very things that matter not just to us but also the world. At the end of the day, beautiful clothing can make you feel better.
There is no denying the psychology behind what we were. But I also believe that we no longer need to overextend ourselves to make an impact. At least, that is what I hope, and I’m continuing to be optimistic that over the course of my career, I will show people that true authenticity sometimes means walking away from the thing that would make you the cool kid. Still, rather it’s the kid that is grounded emotionally, spiritually, and mentally.
