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The fashion calendar is moving faster than ever, packed with ready-to-wear men’s and women’s, couture, resort and pre-season shows. For some small and independent brands, the pace of production has forced pre-fall to slip through the cracks — despite it being a major buy for retailers.
At the time of publishing, Vogue Runway reviewed 39 fewer pre-fall collections for 2024 than 2023, with some notable absences that had shown pre-fall by this time last year including Rabanne, Proenza Schouler, Bach Mai and Prabal Gurung. Some brands, like Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta, are showing later in the season, after the Autumn/Winter ready-to-wear shows have cleared up. Others still produce pre-fall collections but don’t show to press. And a few are opting out altogether.
What’s going on?
Pre-fall collections, generally released from December through April, are becoming more concept than time frame, industry observers say. It’s a difficult one to skip entirely, given pre-fall’s importance for wholesale placement. (Seventy per cent of Mytheresa’s buying budget goes to pre-fall, according to chief buying officer Tiffany Hsu.) Pre-fall has the longest shelf life of all collections: it hits stores in May and tends to stay on the floor (at full price) until the autumn/winter markdowns towards the end of the year. They’re also great commercial offers, says Liane Wiggins, head of womenswear at Matchesfashion, making them good buys for multi-brand retailers.
But designers are feeling the heat. Creating pre-season collections in between main collections makes for more work, more time and more resources — not just on creating the pieces, but shooting them. Big brands have big funds to produce back-to-back collections, bolstered by collabs to pad press coverage. “It is a good way to bridge the gap between seasons and the runway drop,” says Hsu, who has noted more consistent pre-fall offerings from larger brands. Smaller, independent brands are left to weigh up whether it’s worth the lift.
“It’s a total quandary of what to do,” says New York designer Adam Lippes, who has gone back and forth with his team about whether or not to show for pre-fall and resort. Lippes skipped pre-fall 2022 and 2023, but showed once again in 2024. “For the few seasons we didn’t show, they felt a bit like lost seasons.”
For these, Lippes still released pre-fall collections to sell, accompanied by lookbooks for buyers. Designer Rachel Scott’s Diotima takes a similar approach — she’s just returned from Paris, where she presented a full pre-fall collection to buyers. But she didn’t show to press this year. Instead, part of Diotima’s pre-fall collection will show as main during New York Fashion Week, plus a small capsule or show collection Scott will market after.
Not showing for pre-fall is strategic. “I need to hold the imagery for when we present the collection in February,” Scott says. “We make two collections a year, and don t have the budget to do four full collections or shoot it multiple times, so we need to be very strategic about what we produce in terms of imagery, and how we use it.”
The timing for pre-fall in NY in particular is unideal, Scott says, right before the end of the year and the holidays. Instead, Diotima hosts wholesale appointments in Paris in January, when domestic retail partners travel there alongside accounts from Europe and Asia that may not travel to the US. “That being said, it has become increasingly important to have presentations,” she adds. During the main ready-to-wear season, Diotima presents a small capsule and holds appointments in her New York studio for buyers.
Some brands haven’t dropped pre-fall entirely, they’ve simply changed up the release schedule (meaning they weren’t included in Vogue Runway’s pre-fall 2024 count, as the collections won’t be released until it’s in season).
New York-based Area is one brand that takes this approach. “We have not forgotten pre-fall,” says Kareem Burke, director of Area’s global marketing communications. “We operate on a hybrid see-now, buy-now cadence so the collection will be released in May/June as it is delivered to stores, as we’ve done for several years now. For example, our resort ’24 released in December of 2023 as it was delivered to stores.”
Name recognition
Pre-fall remains essential, says Mytheresa’s Hsu. “If a brand doesn’t offer pre-fall they tend to deliver their main collection earlier anyway, so it’s not always relevant whether it’s called pre-fall or fall. It’s more about when it’s going to be delivered,” she says.
But, Lippes found in his two-year break that showing pre-fall as a distinct category makes a difference. “Stores want to see the press. They want to see it reviewed,” he says.
Matches coordinates much of its editorial content around brands’ pre-fall collections, especially given its longer selling window. “In terms of how it appears on the site, we always do strong editorial content on shoots on the pre-fall collections, and we focus the calendar on when the key deliveries are coming in,” Wiggins says. “There is a longer window to editorialise and make sales on the pre-fall collections in general than runway.”
Brands feel the importance of pre-fall. “The pre collections have gotten much more important to us,” says designer Veronica Swanson Beard, who like Lippes, didn’t show pre-fall in 2023, but still delivered the collection. “The silhouettes and transition weights these collections offer are hugely important in servicing our customer in warmer weather markets,” she says.
For Ukrainian womenswear brand Bevza, the pre-fall label isn’t worth the strain. Instead, the brand folds pre-fall into its main collections. The goal is to avoid market oversaturation and prioritise team energy and resources, given everything is still produced in Ukraine, says founder and designer Svitlana Bevza. “We have a focused-but-comprehensive collection where truly transitional pieces are integrated into our main collection. We aim to promote items in our main collections without oversaturating the market.”
Diotima’s Scott also isn’t worried about the ‘pre-fall’ moniker. “I don t care about the label at all honestly. It s more about when the pieces arrive in the store, and ultimately when markdowns begin,” she says.
Timing matters
By releasing pre-fall collections sooner, designers can guarantee longer placements. “We tend to spend a good portion of our budget on the earlier delivery, purely because of the longer selling time,” says Mytheresa’s Hsu. Wiggins agrees: it’s key to Matches’s occasion and high-summer buys, she says.
“If anything more brands are putting more emphasis on pre-fall as the delivery is earlier,” Wiggins says. “We have more brands offering this drop than previously because the selling window is longer and it helps production timelines to get selling earlier in the season. For pre-fall, the delivery is May to July so we see many brands developing strong occasion collections, and early spring day-dressing collections for that moment. This modern high-summer, slight Rivera feeling often comes through in the collections in this timing, which always perform well with our customer.”
Lippes wrestles with not just the best time to show, but to ship. “Showing when we ship — or a month before, to build excitement — makes a whole lot of sense,” he says. Lippes also flags that if he were to show later, he wouldn’t be able to show the looks that get dropped before going into production (which are some of his favourites). “When we shoot, it is the last date for us to show before we produce [the collection].” For Beard, too, December is the right time to show. “December is when our accounts are here for market and it’s how our design calendar is set,” she says.
Area is reaping the benefits of the excitement that comes with the see-now, buy-now model. “With this cadence we can see direct results in our ability to drive brand awareness, traffic and sales tied to a collection that is readily shoppable,” Burke says. “This model is better for us as it allows us to leverage our rapidly growing direct-to-consumer channel.”
“There are a tonne of ways to do things,” Lippes says. “I wish we could all just make a decision and get on board with it. But, he flags, until an LVMH-esque superbrand makes a shift, the status quo is unlikely to change. “[Without that], it’s hard for an independent brand to really be off calendar.”
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