New York Fashion Week: Remember when the future of fashion week was digital?

Which is to say that all the talk of digital fashion weeks, and the necessity of them during a pandemic, only emphasises that fashion is a social and tactile business that can’t truly be successful unless experienced in real life. Little wonder that brands abandoned digital shows as soon as possible.

Instagram and TikTok, if it survives, are fun, but they are no substitute for flesh and fabric. Good luck to the store buyers who are working from digital lookbooks while their employers cut back on travel budgets.

A few other notes:

I heard the disappearance of WME from fashion week is being felt by emerging designers. For years, WME and its predecessors held shows, eventually called ‘NYFW: The Shows’, that managed to simultaneously compete with and support the CFDA’s calendar. Editors — me among them — and established labels often chafed at WME’s trade show-like atmosphere during NYFW, but it offered a more affordable platform to the tiny labels, some of which could emerge as the The Rows and Khaites and Willy Chavarrias of tomorrow. NYFW is weaker for the absence of such a platform.

The CFDA is exploring the potential of another sort of emerging designer venue for September, Kolb says, by advising a newly formed company called KFN. KFN is associated with LA Fashion Week, which, last November, was headlined by an Ed Hardy runway show and dinner. Stay tuned and cross your fingers that whatever emerges serves designers’ needs to impress, and doesn’t feel like an attempt to profit from fashion by exploiting the very upstarts who may be its future.

It’s worth noting that WME still owns NYFW.com, which has to be one of the more potentially powerful URLs in American fashion. Doesn’t someone out there want to buy it?

And the CFDA shuttle that ran from show to show for the second season, I’m told, is a sleeper hit among those lucky enough to receive invitations. Given the clear importance of getting people to see collections in person, and the difficult-to-navigate spread of venues from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn, NYFW might benefit from expanding that guest list.

Save a seat for me in September.

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