The Future of New York Fashion Week

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on The BoF Podcast, designer Jason Wu and BoF’s senior correspondent Chantal Fernandez examine the evolving purpose of runway shows and what New York Fashion Week might look like after the pandemic.

Fashion Week looks very different this season, with most designers choosing to present their collections through digital lookbooks and short films instead of traditional runway shows. But even after the pandemic subsides, New York Fashion Week isn’t likely to revert to its prior form. As BoF senior correspondent Chantal Fernandez reported in a BoF Professional article last week, the “unbundling” of New York Fashion Week has been happening for years.

”What worked 10, 15 years ago, doesn’t work today,” designer Jason Wu told BoF’s Imran Amed on this week’s podcast. “The backbone of American fashion has always been about diversifying and being less traditional in its approach in what luxury and what fashion looks like.”

”Fashion week has become something of a different creature, but that happened long before the pandemic,” he added. “I feel like it’s my job to keep part of it alive, even though it’s forever changing.”

External clip courtesy of Fashion By Look - Eleanor Lambert: Defining Decades of Fashion

To subscribe to The BoF Podcast, please follow this link.

The Unbundling of New York Fashion Week

What Is New York Fashion Week Without Its Billion-Dollar Brands?

How Independent Fashion Brands Are Navigating the Crisis

Join BoF Professional for the analysis and advice you need. Get 30 days for just $1 or explore group subscriptions for your business.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, February 19th. In 1943, Eleanor Lambert organized something she called Press Week, an opportunity to
0:23.9	showcase the work of emerging New York fashion designers. Years later, she created the CFDA,
0:29.5	and Press Week evolved into the biannual frenzy we now all know as New York Fashion Week.
0:36.6	The designer at one point in America was just somebody in the back room,
0:42.9	but they were growing to be a group equal to any in the world.
0:51.5	I felt that American designers like Claire McCartle and Anne Klein and Bill Boss and people like that deserve to be known as well as the French designers.
1:06.0	They were the equal of the French designers.
1:09.0	And so I asked some of them to come to my office,
1:13.7	and we just formed the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
1:20.1	And those number of people become a core of designers
1:25.0	that people want to be influenced by.
1:29.3	Eventually, New York Fashion Week, organized by the CFDA, became an essential stop on the
1:34.6	annual fashion calendar, kicking off the collections before moving on to London, Milan, and New York.
1:40.2	But now, as with all other live events and gatherings, COVID has put pay to the idea of having people squeeze into tightly packed spaces, and the future of fashion weeks around the world is now in question.
1:52.3	The New York Fashion Week that has just concluded was a virtually all-virtual affair this season, dampening the mood of an industry that thrives on human connection and creativity.
2:02.3	But as our senior correspondent Chantal Fernandez reported in her recent B-O-F professional story,
2:07.8	the unbundling of New York Fashion Week, things have been changing for years, with a steady
2:12.4	trickle of designers defecting to Paris or focusing on Instagram to show their collections instead.
2:17.8	Now, after the pandemic is over, not just a few industry insiders have been wondering if New York Fashion Week has a future at all,
2:25.3	as many of the biggest brands have chosen to show on their own schedule, from Tommy Hilfiger and Torrey Birch to Michael Coors and Mark Jacobs.
2:32.3	But one designer who bucked the trend and staged a physical
2:35.7	New York Fashion Week show amid the pandemic is Jason Wu, who first rose to global stardom when he
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Business of Fashion, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Business of Fashion and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.