Fashion Week is Dead, Long Live Fashion Week

As Fall/Winter 2016 draws to a close, so too does another chapter in the century-old story of New York fashion. The eviction from Lincoln Center, IMG's acquisition of MADE, and the the bequeathal of the fashion calendar to the CFDA (not to mention Mercedes Benz exiting as title sponsor) are, for the most part, superficial changes; however, they couldn't have come at a more existentially fraught moment.

 

For the last 70 years, the exercise of gathering editors and retailers in a room to preview new collections has been perfectly logical – and fun. But in recent years there has been a tectonic shift in the way fashion is both created and consumed. Everything from fast fashion to capsule collections to live streaming to live tweeting is chipping away at the relevance of the fashion show. 

 

"We live in what appears to be a post-trend fashion world — with no clear guidelines for our sartorial choices and an endless array of options," T Magazine wrote on Sunday. "New shows and collections seem to be springing up constantly throughout the year, consumed hungrily and instantaneously around the world on a variety of platforms before the editors have even filed out the doors." 

 

So, what now? What next? Don't you worry, come this fall, we'll still be hosting our little slice of the maelstrom at The Standard, High Line, but we're still wondering: does all this still make sense? Below, we've listed five reasons it doesn't and five it absolutely does – the truth probably chilling somewhere in the middle.