Fashion Videos by Fashion Week Event

Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting and display of moving visual media. A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, wherein fashion designers, brands or houses display their latest collections in runway fashion shows to buyers and the media — and these events influence trends for the current and upcoming seasons. If you are not interested in searching for one particular designer or a specific season, the natural way to search fashion week video is by the fashion week event itself: New York Fashion Week, Fashion Week Paris, Fashion Week London, and the other weeks of the international calendar.

This page explains how event-based video is organised and where it comes from. The companion indexes — by designer name and by year or season — are linked at the top of the page for searchers who know a name or a date instead of an event.

Who Controls Fashion Week Video

Most fashion weeks have event organisers who plan the event and decide which photographers and videographers will have access. Those videographers and photographers then have the ability to share or sell video of the events to news organisations, stock video companies and other outlets. The fashion week organisers and the fashion designers also often hold video of the week themselves — the official show films and house recordings that anchor an event's archive.

That chain of custody explains the shape of the fashion week video record. Official event and designer channels carry the polished full-show films. Accredited videographers supply the news and stock footage. Guests and press add the front-row and backstage angles. Some websites compile various fashion show videos and organise them by date, designer or event name — which is why the same show can often be found in several places, at several lengths and levels of polish.

Searching by Event

Event titles are the filing system of fashion week. Search for video of a specific week — New York Fashion Week, Fashion Week Paris, Fashion Week London — and the results gather every designer who showed there into one place, in schedule order, with the week's atmosphere intact: the venue, the audience and the running order that made one collection the answer to another. Event searching is the right approach for buyers and editors reviewing a whole market week, for students learning how a city's fashion week differs from another's, and for anyone who remembers the show but not the designer.

Event and date work together. A fashion week recurs every season, so an event search usually needs a season or year to land on the right edition — which is what the year and season index is for. And once an event search surfaces a designer you want to follow further, the designer name index takes over. The three indexes in this section are designed to be used in sequence, from whichever fact you happen to know.

The Weeks of the Calendar

The international calendar runs city by city — New York, London, Milan and Paris at its centre, with fashion weeks in many other cities around them — and each week has its own character, its own organisers and its own video traditions. The fashion week section of this site covers the weeks themselves; this index exists to make their moving image record findable, event by event.

What an Event Archive Preserves

An event-based archive preserves more than the collections. Because the week's videos are gathered whole, they keep the running order that shaped how each collection was received, the venue and staging conventions of that city in that year, and the audience the designers were playing to. A single designer's own archive rarely keeps any of that context; the event record keeps it by accident, which is often how the most useful history survives.