Fashion Week Photos

Are you ready to view fashion week photos? Whether you are looking for a specific event or simply enjoy looking at events from around the globe, the links below offer guidance. Even if you cannot attend the various fashion week events, you can catch up on the latest styles by viewing photographs — London Fashion Week, NYC Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week and all the others.

Photography is how most of the world experiences fashion week. A few hundred people sit in the room; everyone else — buyers checking a collection, editors building a story, shoppers meeting a trend — meets the clothes as images. This page collects the photography routes: the event photography sites, the picture agencies and the search tools linked below.

The Photograph Is the Record

The Montreal designer records in this directory make the point concretely. The March 2006 shows lasted minutes each, years ago; what survives, and what this guide carries, is the photography — Jimmy Hamelin's runway photographs for Montreal Fashion Week, kept on each designer's page. The same is true at every scale of the industry: a collection's afterlife is its images, which is why the photographers at the end of the runway, shooting every look, are as much a part of the production as the stylists backstage.

That is also why this page's links divide the way they do. Agency libraries — Getty Images, WireImage, Reuters — hold the professional record, searchable by event and designer. Event photography sites collect the weeks themselves. Search engines and Vogue's show coverage give the quick route to a single collection. One link has been removed from this page as verified dead: Fashion Showroom's domain now redirects to a domain for-sale page. The Fashion Week Photos site itself, the modelling directory and the remaining agency links are carried as recorded.

Using Fashion Week Photos Well

Start from the event, not the image. Find the week first — the country guides and the guide's second page in this series will take you to it — then look for its photography, because a labelled set of photographs from a named show is worth more than a feed of unattributed runway pictures. The collage photograph kept on this page is the directory's own example: fashion week photography gathered as a record, credited to its event.

Photography and the Smaller Weeks

For the famous weeks, photography is abundant to the point of noise; for smaller weeks, it is scarce and therefore precious. A regional event may be covered by a single house photographer — as Montreal's 2006 shows were covered by Jimmy Hamelin — and that one body of work becomes the event's whole visual memory. This page's links are weighted accordingly: the agencies for the major weeks, where the problem is finding one designer's set inside a mountain of coverage, and the event photography sites for the rest, where the problem is finding any set at all.

There is a buyer's lesson in that scarcity, too. Collections from smaller weeks are bought from photographs more often than collections from Paris are, because fewer buyers can attend in person. A designer showing in Zagreb, Vancouver or Montreal should treat the photography as the primary product of the show — the garment walks once, but the photograph is what travels to the stores, the magazines and, as this directory demonstrates, the permanent record.

Finally, credit matters. A runway photograph carries its photographer's name the way a garment carries its designer's, and the records in this directory keep those credits where they were published — Hamelin's name on the Montreal shows is the standing example — because the credit is part of the record, and part of the photograph's value to everyone who uses it afterwards.

Photos