Can Anthony Vaccarello make Versus a thing? How much is Kendall Jenner going to be everywhere? And is it time for a sneaker backlash? Maya Singer answers all of your New York fashion week questions, and then some
Front-Row Talking Points: All of your Spring 15 NYFW questions answered
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Photo: Kathy Lo
Why, oh why is fashion week so early this season?
Are we crazy or is fashion week starting super-freaking early this year? New York fashion week always kicks off—officially—the Thursday after Labor Day, but this year we have the ill fortune of Labor Day falling on September 1. And so, while the rest of the professional world emerges at relative leisure from the dog days of summer, we fashion folk are going straight from vacation to the work equivalent of DEFCON 1. That is, if we got to take a vacation at all.
Yeah, yeah, cue the tiny violins. The morale-sapping fashion calendar is a #luxuryproblem, to be sure. But why does it have to be this way? According to the CFDA
s Steven Kolb, the scheduling of the four major fashion weeks is done to accommodate production and delivery deadlines at stores, and, he says, "Moving the shows any later would have a negative impact on both." Which seems fair enough, until you consider that pushing the whole block of shows back by one week also seems pretty reasonable.
A week is not nothing, at least for a designer. Consider Serafina Sama. Her brand, Isa Arfen, is based in London, but this season she decided to move her show to New York. Sama gets most of her materials from Italy, and although the fact that the factories there are closed all of August has presented difficulties in the past, the extra week or so she had to prepare her collections to be seen in London cut her just enough slack to make things work. "It
s been a real struggle, working with my factories," she says. "There was a mistake in one fabric I
d ordered, and so instead of being able to deliver it in mid-July, they would only have it for me in early September. Which was too late, of course, for New York. So I had to cut the fabric."
In other words: The earliness of New York fashion week has a material effect on collections. New York-based designers have been articulating sotto voce complaints about the Europe-is-closed-all-of-August situation for years, just as they
ve been moaning about the seeming illogic of, say, delivering furs and chunky sweaters to stores in July. The model of how this industry works is not written in stone. Indeed, it
s worth recalling that New York fashion week used to take place _after_Paris—until as recently as 1998, when Helmut Lang decamped to Manhattan and made the bold move to pre-empt the European shows. Disruptive? Yup. The fashion calendar seems overdue for some of that disruptive thinking now.
