Does New York Fashion Week Need A (New) Home?
“A convenient, centralized venue would be fabulous and appreciated by many. But where? And at what cost?” — Fern Mallis
On Sunday afternoon, I walked from a Fashion Week show at 22nd Street and 11th Avenue down to the C train on 14th street. I waited for three tracks of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts until the train finally came. Of course the C was running on the F line, so I rode that down to Essex Street in the Lower East Side where I transferred to the M. I took that to Marcy Ave. Because the last show had started 45 minutes late (par for the course, unfortunately), I found myself with that awkward bubble of time when there’s not enough time to go home but it’s still too early to arrive at the next venue. I scoured the area for the nearest bodega in search of air conditioning and water. I found one of the two and emerged back outside, where I stood underneath the Williamsburg Bridge lapping up water and wondering if I could hold off that critical threshold between sweaty and sweating through. I looked down: All good. I could feel the droplets on my lower back, though, so I angled my phone to examine à la Karlie Kloss looking camp right in the eye. It wasn’t a good situation. “I’m coming home,” I texted my fiancé, unreasonably angry at myself for being a person who sweats in the heat.
I set off in search of an air-conditioned place from where I could call a car, when I came upon the Moxy Hotel. Though I wasn’t bum-rushed by the air conditioning I expect when entering a hotel lobby, it was a reprieve. I sat a few tables away from a woman who looked exactly like Hunter Schafer (and who might have been Hunter Schafer) before deciding that with my 30+ minutes left, I could try and rehabilitate my spirits by attempting to cool off. I headed to the bathroom, where I removed my shirt and began fanning it up and down repeatedly. I want to call this a low point, but honestly, I was out of the heat, so spirits had actually plateaued. I stood in this bathroom for over 20 minutes and watched the water molecules break free of their bonds to each other, allowing the shirt to dry. I emerged shortly thereafter and walked a few blocks to the next show. “You have to laugh,” I told myself, as I often do.
There’s a lot to love about New York Fashion Week (NYFW), the first to launch of the “Big Four” fashion capitals (London, Milan and Paris follow suit) during the bi-annual Fashion Month, which debuts the Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer ready-to-wear collections from members of each respective country’s fashion councils.
Fashion! Parties! Celebrities! For me, it’s the gossip. New York Fashion Week incurs an otherwise unusual amount of small talk. You’re seeing a lot of the same people each day (multiple times a day, often) and if it’s not bitching about the weather, it’s bitching about the week. And while many reserve their frustrations with the state of fashion itself to the group chat or their Close Friends (save for Cathy Horyn, who penned an excellent story for The Cut earlier this week positing that the fashion industry has “all but abandoned design talent”), less guarded are people’s frustrations about the wild-goose chase that’s become navigating the week. In her latest dispatch, Puck News’s Lauren Sherman said out loud the thing I’ve heard whispered all week: “Bring back the Bryant Park tents!!!”
I spoke to Fern Mallis, the former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) who is widely credited with transforming NYFW into one of the Big Four fashion events on the international circuit, to gain her insights. According to Mallis, the tents in Bryant Park are now the stuff of legend, akin to Studio 54 in having a “you just had to have been there to understand” type of mystique.
“For the last ten years, all I’ve heard from everyone is ‘please bring back the tents,’” Mallis explains. “They weren’t always perfect, but they worked and we cared about making it easy, accessible, safe and affordable. Clearly the tried and true — and tired — industry professionals who go to almost all the shows are experiencing a great deal of frustration just trying to get around town. I’ve spent more hours on the Williamsburg Bridge this week than I can count. But you can’t go back. The genie is out of the bottle.”
Is she right?