Fashion Designer Seasons

You often hear the terms spring fashion, fall fashion, winter fashion and summer fashion — and if you follow the fashion scene, the combined terms spring/summer and fall/winter as well. This hub explains how designer collections are named and organized by season, and links the guide's two great seasonal lists: the Fashion Designer Fall Collections and the Fashion Designer Spring Collections, each in two alphabetical pages.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

How Collections Are Named by Season

Typically, when a designer launches a new collection it contains garments to be worn during a particular time of year — warm weather versus cold weather. A designer will typically indicate the year of the collection and the season: the collection designed to be worn in spring of 2008 would be referenced as the “2008 Spring Collection.” The year and season reference may also include the designer's name — for example, the “Ralph Lauren Spring 2008 Collection.”

That naming is the filing system of this whole section. Every fall and spring page in the guide belongs to a designer whose seasonal work is recorded collection by collection, and the season name tells the reader, before a single photograph, what weather the clothes were made for and when they belong in the designer's timeline.

Why Fabric and Color Follow the Season

Generally, the fabric construction and color of a collection are selected appropriately for the particular season: light, breathable cloth and fresh color for spring and summer; heavier construction and deeper color for fall and winter. Sometimes designers get a bit off track and throw caution to the wind when designing — you may catch on the runway colors or fabrics that most people would think are not appropriate for the particular season of the collection. Those exceptions are part of the record too, and often the most talked-about part of a show.

The seasonal transition has its own corner of the guide: the Seasonal Fashion Transitions page, linked below, covers the in-between dressing problem the two-season system creates, and the Fall Fashion and Spring Fashion term pages define each season's character in the glossary.

Using the Fall and Spring Lists

The fall list and the spring list are mirror images: the same designers, filed alphabetically across two pages each, answering opposite briefs. In this section you will find fashion photos, fashion news, fashion blog articles and more for a select group of fashion designers, organized by the season of the work. A note on method: the seasonal pages gather material with search technology, which may not always return the absolute best results — while investigating fall fashions, for example, a spring item may occasionally appear. The guide does its best, and the structure — designer by designer, season by season — keeps the record navigable regardless.

From here, most readers pick a season and a designer and go deep: the fall collections for the cold-weather record, the spring collections for the warm-weather one, and each designer's own collections, runway, fashion week, news and profiles pages for everything the seasons sit inside.