Fashion Week NYC

Fashion week events take place all around the world, so why is New York Fashion Week so important? Start with the city itself: New York is potentially the fashion capital of the world — depending on who is voting — and its week is where the American industry shows itself.

Why New York, Specifically

The case rests on concentration. New York has a vibrant fashion industry and its own garment district, it has a Fashion Avenue, it hosts many great fashion events, many fashion designers are based in the city, and many media companies are based there too. Everyone, in addition, loves to travel to New York for special events.

The same arguments can be made for other fashion cities, and are — but New York's combination of makers, sellers and press in one walkable centre is hard to match. The fashion capital of the world, fashion district NYC, fashion avenue NYC and NYC fashion events summaries linked from this page take each part of the case in turn.

February and September

New York Fashion Week, held in February and September each year, is a semi-annual series of events, generally lasting seven to nine days, during which international fashion collections are shown to buyers, the press and the general public. The New York Fashion Week guide linked here covers the city's event in full.

The NYFW website is the event's own home, and Vogue's New York Fashion Week coverage follows the shows from the magazine side. The fashion blog's account of fashion shows in New York City, also linked here, adds the visitor's view of the city's shows beyond the official week.

Planning Around New York Fashion Week

New York's week rewards visitors who plan it as two overlapping trips. The first is the official one: shows and presentations in February or September, found through the NYFW site and the city's event listings, concentrated in a few districts and best navigated with generous time between venues. The second trip is the permanent one: the garment district's suppliers and showrooms, the fashion museums and exhibitions, and the retail flagships that make the city a fashion destination in any month. The two trips reinforce each other — a morning show explains what an afternoon in the district is for, and an exhibition supplies the history behind the season's revivals. Even New Yorkers underuse the second trip, attending the week and skipping the city that hosts it. The summaries linked from this page — the district, the avenue, the city's events — are organised to prevent exactly that mistake, treating New York Fashion Week as the headline of a fashion city rather than as a tent that arrives, performs and vanishes twice a year.