United States Fashion Weeks

The United States has several outstanding fashion weeks, and this guide gathers them: every American event in the directory is linked at the head of this page, from the New York seasons at the top of the world calendar down to the youngest city showcases. A fashion week is a fashion industry event, lasting approximately one week, which allows fashion designers or fashion houses to display their latest collections via runway shows for buyers and the international fashion community looking at the latest trends.

The most prominent fashion weeks are held in the fashion capitals such as Milan, Paris, London and New York City — but the American map is far wider than one city. Fashion week is held in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami and several other key fashion-relevant cities, and each of those events has its own page in this guide, carrying the event's own description as its record. The full city list above is the fastest way into the American section: twenty-five event pages covering eighteen states and the District of Columbia.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not photographs from these shows.

New York and Los Angeles

New York holds four pages in this guide, because the city has carried several fashion week banners across the years: the current New York Fashion Week page, which points to the official NYFW shows organised by IMG; the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week record, from the sponsor era; the Olympus Fashion Week record, kept for historical reference as the banner that preceded it at Bryant Park; and Couture Fashion Week, the independent couture showcase produced by USA International Fashion Shows, which also has its own company page in this guide. Los Angeles holds two: the LA Fashion Week page, centred on the California Market Center and the LA Fashion District, and the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week LA record, whose historical note states plainly that IMG no longer runs that event.

The Regional Fashion Weeks

Beyond the two coasts, the American fashion week map is a network of regional platforms, each built for its home industry. Phoenix presents itself as the leading fashion industry event in Arizona, established in 2005; Cleveland's fashion week, produced with the Cleveland Fashion Institute, bills its Cleveland Fashion Show as the showcase for emerging American designers; Baltimore's was created to bring the region's fashion and arts communities together; Kansas City's revival draws on the city's historic Garment District. Dallas launched its international fashion week at Dallas Market Center, the world's largest wholesale resource, while Saint Louis built a semi-annual week whose March 2008 schedule survives in this guide day by day.

The youngest entries show the form still spreading: Vegas Fashion Week was under development as of 2016, and NOVA — Northern Virginia Fashion Week — launched in 2009 just outside Washington DC, whose own DC Fashion Week had already become one of the fastest growing fashion week exhibits in the world. Each city page keeps its event's own words as the record, so the guide reads as the events described themselves.

Read as a whole, the American section is also a history of the fashion week form itself in the United States: the centralised collections built by 7th on Sixth in New York in 1993, the sponsor banners that followed there and in Los Angeles, the market-centre and institute weeks of the interior, and the community platforms of the 2000s that put a runway within reach of almost every sizable American city. The fashions change every season; the geography this guide records changed much more slowly, and it is the geography that makes the American map worth keeping whole.