Fashion Week Videos

One of the best ways to capture the experience of fashion week is to use video recordings. Video allows people who cannot attend the event to enjoy the full splendour of the designers' creations, the models and the set design. A fashion week is a fashion industry event lasting approximately one week, where fashion designers, brands and fashion houses display their latest collections in runway fashion shows, presenting their clothing designs to buyers and the media — and these events have the potential to influence trends for the current and upcoming seasons.

This guide collects the fashion week video sources worth knowing: the big video search engines and platforms, the fashion press, specialist fashion television and stock archives, and Apparel Search's own fashion week filming — a complete record of the Spring 2008 collections shown at Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week in September 2007. The source list sits high on the page, because most visitors arrive knowing they want to watch a show; the notes below explain how to get the most from fashion week video once you find it.

Watching a Season You Could Not Attend

Most fashion week video falls into three kinds. Full-show recordings present a collection exactly as the room saw it, in order, and are the best record for buyers, students and researchers. Edited highlights compress a show — or a whole week — into the looks an editor judged strongest, which makes them fast but filtered. Backstage and front-row video shows the machinery around the show: hair and makeup, the dressing rush, the audience and the street style outside. A complete picture of a fashion week usually needs all three, and the sources in the list above divide roughly along those lines — platforms and search engines for full shows and highlights, fashion television and the fashion press for coverage and commentary, and stock archives for professionally shot footage that can be licensed.

Fashion Week Video as a Research Tool

Fashion week videos are a fabulous method for showcasing next season's fashion, but they are just as valuable as historical reference. Viewing videos from previous years allows fashion designers and consumers to research previous concepts and trends, and past developments often re-emerge in new collections — a shoulder line, a hem length or a way of layering returns, and the video record shows exactly how it was worn and styled the first time. Year-by-year video searches, such as the Bing collections for 2016 through 2019 in the source list, make that kind of season-by-season comparison practical.

The September 2007 New York Fashion Week collection in this section is a good example of the research value of an archive: thirty-eight videos of Spring 2008 collections, filmed by Joe DiRosa of the New York Artist Series, covering houses from Anna Sui and Vera Wang to Heatherette and Sabyasachi. Watched today, it is a time capsule of a season — and a reminder that a fashion week's video record may outlast every other account of it.

About the Sources

The fashion press brings context to its video: Vogue's fashion week coverage and ELLE's fashion videos pair footage with reporting and criticism. Fashion TV, broadcasting fashion, beauty and style around the clock since 1997, and Fashion Television, the Canadian fashion programme, represent the television tradition of the form. Getty Images offers a one-stop moving-image library spanning news, celebrity, music and film alongside its fashion clips, growing by many hours of footage a day. At the specialist end, Vidcat is a New York video production and distribution company whose archives hold fashion runway shows from the 1980s to the present, backstage footage, designer interviews and vintage fashion newsreels from the 1950s and 1960s, licensed to television and corporate clients. Between these sources, nearly every fashion week of the video era can be watched somewhere.

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