Fashion Week

Fashion Week is a grouping of fashion shows over the course of several days, at which several of the industry's top designers present their upcoming collections to clothing store buyers and the media. The daily events typically take the form of runway fashion shows.

One Event, Arranged by Location

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. These events influence trends for the current and upcoming seasons.

Fashion Week events are often arranged by location — Paris Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week, Hong Kong Fashion Week and many more — each city running its own week on its own dates. The fashion week guide and fashion week resources linked from this page cover the events and their organisation, the fashion week blog follows them, and the runway fashion show summary explains the format every week is built from.

Press Week 1943: The First Fashion Week

The first official Fashion Week began as Press Week in 1943, at the height of World War II. The American fashion media could not travel to Paris to see the next season's collections, so New York used the opportunity to show off its own fashion instead.

Press Week turned into Fashion Week, and shows were staged in venues all over New York City. The idea then travelled: a concentrated week of shows, presented to buyers and press together, became the industry's standard way of launching a season — the pattern the calendar, designers, events, schedule and tickets summaries linked below each examine from their own angle.

What Fashion Week Changed

Press Week's invention looks obvious in retrospect, which is the mark of a real innovation. Before 1943, a season's new clothes were shown piecemeal — in salons, in stores, to individual buyers — and the press reported fashion largely from Paris, on Paris's timetable. Concentrating the shows into one announced week did three things at once: it made fashion an event with news value, it let a city's designers be judged collectively as a school, and it gave buyers a single trip that covered a market. Every fashion week since, in every city, runs on those three inventions. The format has survived radio, television and the livestream because its core is social rather than technological: the right people, in one place, looking at the same clothes at the same time, and leaving with a shared account of the season. Digital coverage distributes that account worldwide in minutes, but the account itself is still made the 1943 way — in a room, on a schedule, in a week.