New York Fashion Week: Chaos on the Runway

Despite its glitz, buzz, and Instagram potential, New York Fashion Week (Feb. 6 to Feb. 13) has deceptively simple business goals. Designers spend as much as $1 million to stage runway shows for department-store buyers who they hope will sell their clothes; financiers who they hope will invest in their lines; editors who they hope will publicize their looks; and those most influential of influencers—celebrity stylists, elite bloggers, and YouTube stars—who they hope will generate clicks and purchases. Several companies, led by title sponsor Mercedes-Benz, subsidize the costs, eager to court this stylish cohort themselves.

That group of fashion insiders only numbers a few hundred people, and many fewer guests attended Fashion Week as recently as the early Aughts, when it was held in New York’s Bryant Park. But head over to Lincoln Center, the event’s current home, and you’ll instead encounter dozens of street-style photographers loitering outside and hordes of fans waiting to get photographed. (It’s the blogging world’s equivalent of tailgating.) Inside the venue are even more hangers-on, folks credentialed to be there but not actually invited to shows, patronizing a gauntlet of sponsors pushing cheap cosmetics, bottled energy drinks, or that hot new granola bar. “It’s difficult for those who are working, as part of their jobs, to maneuver through some of the excess,” says Steven Kolb, chief executive officer of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the trade association representing the majority of designers staging shows.