About twice a year, four major cities around the world fill up with even more tourists than usual. The traffic gets even worse about hub areas, coffee shops and popular brunch places start filling up with glamorous-looking people, and people suddenly start talking in industry terms that sound like a foreign language to outsiders. It’s Fashion Week.
This year, COVID has thrown us all in a tailspin. The fashion industry has been hit hard, and to make matters worse, the fashion industry had already been facing several hits, ranging from the protests to protect democracy in Hong Kong and bankruptcy hitting many American department stores. It brings us to the question we now face: what will the future of Fashion Week look like?
The Struggles of New York Fashion Week
Perhaps the single, most important thing to remember about Fashion Week is that not all Fashion Weeks are equal. The struggles that face Paris and Milan are different than the struggles that face New York, or even London.
Even before COVID, New York Fashion Week (NYFW) was already facing a mountain of struggles. More and more designers were choosing to showcase their collections elsewhere or showcase during the off-season to cater to the “ready to wear” audience. With Tom Ford taking over at the helm of the CFDA, the biggest question that faced him was whether he can revitalize NYFW.
Yet, with COVID forcing everyone to go digital, we have already seen some great examples of how a digital showcase can still look as artistic as and be as engaging as an in-person experience. The quick fix for NYFW this season is to go digital or hold shows with an extremely limited audience and figure out their future next year.
However, I argue that the CFDA should look critically at this upcoming season for NYFW as a way to start reinventing themselves, find the old magic of NYFW that it has lost over the years, and come back stronger than ever when we have a vaccine for COVID.
With the Black Lives Matter movement and in the wake of the many bankruptcies declared, the natural solution for New York Fashion Week should be to follow in the footsteps that American society has taken and focus more on inclusivity and diversity rather than attempt to compete with London, Milan or Paris. One example for how New York Fashion Week can do this is to follow the “Copenhagen Fashion Week” model.
The “Copenhagen Fashion Week” Model
The first Copenhagen Fashion Week was held in 2006, and in 2018, Copenhagen underwent a makeover and emerged as the leader in sustainability. Three years after its refreshed focus on sustainability, Copenhagen has now become the place where the discussions of fashion and sustainability merge.
In many ways, as the entire fashion industry struggles to figure out how it can harmonize the costs of sustainability with the inherent business need for profit, Copenhagen has become the light on the hill for industry leaders to come together and come up with tangible solutions for how sustainability can coexist with fashion.
What Copenhagen has tapped into is a new philosophy for what Fashion Week should be. Rather than market Copenhagen Fashion Week as a collection of Copenhagen designers, Copenhagen markets itself as fashion week for sustainability featuring Danish designers.
Copenhagen defines itself through supporting its designers to find new, innovative ways to become sustainable. Given that Scandinavia traditionally dominates the global rankings for sustainability, it is no surprise that Copenhagen is using this to their advantage.
Following Copenhagen’s footsteps, New York Fashion Week should position itself as a week championing the designs of the underrepresented groups and focus on diversity and inclusion.
Why Inclusion and Diversity is Unique in the United States
The Black Lives Matter movement has become worldwide, but it originates from the history of the United States and the many conversations we still need to have around race and how many Black people and other minority groups have been marginalized in society.
The discussion of diversity and inclusion is unique in the U.S. because whereas most other countries are not a country of immigrants, the United States is a country of immigrants. The history of the United States is a history of immigrants and a melting pot of cultures. In the United States, we can be Black-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American, or British-American.
Fashion, specifically American fashion, should represents what American society looks like, but instead, it currently reflects what the privileged society of America looks like. The Black Lives Matter movement has offered American fashion the moment in which the CFDA and New York Fashion Week should step up and revise the ways they think of fashion.
In many ways, the future for New York Fashion Week should function the way that many American department stores used to: discovering new, undiscovered talent. This time, the focus should be on diversity and inclusion. What made Barney’s or Neiman’s unique was their ability to help undiscovered talent rise to prominence through partnership and collaboration.
With many American department stories declaring bakrupcy, what better way to reinvent New York Fashion Week than to take this legacy and transform it into something better? This season, in my efforts to showcase independent designers who may be lesser known to the mainstream culture, I am pleased to share this behind the scenes view of Flying Solo’s SS2021 presentation.
