Welcome to The American Thread, a recurring column on the fate and future of fashion in the US, written by Vogue Business editor-at-large Christina Binkley.
This Autumn/Winter 2025 New York Fashion Week was a reminder of one of the ways that we believed, a decade ago, that fashion was going to change and then did not.
I had a chance to ponder that while laid up on crutches after surgery for a bone spur on my right ankle. No worries, I thought. Rather than navigate fashion week via subway, taxi and the CFDA’s new shuttle, I’ll attend digitally using all the great technology out there.
Nine years ago at The Wall Street Journal, I attended NYFW digitally as an experiment. It wasn’t great, but brands were just really cottoning on to Instagram and learning to live stream. TikTok hadn’t yet been invented. Lighting was usually difficult, having been set up for the advantage of the photo pit and its still photographers. The video cameras — sometimes just an intern’s iPhone — often had awkward positioning. Much of the live streaming was being done via a then-new app called Periscope — remember it? Twitter acquired it in 2015 and killed it in 2021. Another one bites the dust.
But tech has improved and brands gained experience communicating digitally during the pandemic. A website that streamed every NYFW show, called Runway360, launched in 2020 and was sponsored by American Express. So a digital NYFW had to be great, right?
I soon discovered what many labels and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) already know. Hardly anyone cares about those live streams. The CFDA and American Express “paused” Runway360 in spring 2024, because, says CFDA CEO Steven Kolb, “nobody was really watching it”.
“It’s there if we need for any reason to bring it back,” he texted me later. Like, maybe another pandemic.
So how does one go about tuning in from afar? A few brands this week streamed their shows on their websites in moves that seem to be mainly about data collection. Todd Snyder’s website highlighted the live stream on Thursday morning. A pop-up appeared, saying: “Sign up to join the live stream.” I had to share my email in order to get the invite. Moments later, I received an email offering 15 per cent off with a gift code. The code was only valid on first-time online orders, which eliminated me.
For the grand debut of the week, Calvin Klein promoted its new designer Veronica Leoni’s first collection on its home page with a “Learn More” button. It asked for my email. Small print noted that by asking to learn more about this runway collection, I agree that I am joining the “Preferred Program” and will receive marketing communications.
Calvin Klein required me to share my gender. “Gender diverse” and “prefer not to say” were options. It is intriguing to see how that data might inform future Calvin Klein collections.
Some of the week’s savviest digital work came from Collina Strada, which started its show day by posting a cheeky Instagram reel. The brand’s mix of humour, great visuals from the runway and an organised active Instagram campaign are a textbook on how even small fashion brands can garner notice and build communities.
“Welcome to the chicest link,” Collina’s reel began, and then coyly and somewhat inexplicably announced that its models had to take “this completely arbitrary quiz. No prizes, no real consequences. Just niche internet clout. Stay tuned.”
Collina streamed its show on Instagram, and according to my feed, organised its favourite muses and influencers to rouse their own followers. Ella Emhoff, daughter of the former Second Gentleman, posted “Crying with joy” among an array of photos and videos. Collina stepped back and let its fans flood TikTok with clips from its influence-y guests — Law Roach, Dove Cameron, Clara Perlmutter. The celebration went on for days online and felt fun and organic (even if it wasn’t) and proves what a brand can do when it trusts an army of digitally savvy friends.
A more typical scenario this week was the one adopted at Carolina Herrera, which inundated its Instagram with gorgeous photography, and some video, of its show, all while streaming it on its website. Don’t get me wrong — the clothes were spectacular. Wes Gordon has been training for this role since he showed ball gowns under his own name in a suite at the Empire Hotel (with his mom looking proudly on). I expect those fabulous clothes. Had I been in the room, the energy of the front row — all those ladies who lunch salivating over next autumn’s shopping spree — might have excited me. Online, it was just what I expected, but no more.
It’s probably neither a failure for Carolina and many other well-heeled fashion labels — Ulla Johnson, Tory Burch — whose online presence this week was curated and lovely but didn’t make my heart race. I suspect they know their not-perennially-online audience must encounter their goods in person.
An Instagram account is in the job description for any fashion brand today, and TikTok may be more effective in generating excitement for a label with the right fans. But the smarter digital strategy may be less about shows and more about what is buried in the algorithms that push products when they are available in stores.
I lost track of NYFW a bit on Sunday, due to its conflict with Super Bowl LIX and the NFL’s fashion pile on there. From the luxury of my living room sofa, that’s not the only thing I missed during the week. I couldn’t touch the fabrics at Lafayette 148’s presentation in Chelsea. I missed seeing 82-year-old Calvin Klein come out of seclusion to attend Leoni’s debut at his namesake label.
I missed welcoming Christopher John Rogers and his vivid house-designed prints back to NYFW after a two-year pause, and the tour de force that will be Thom Browne’s show, as his theatrical productions always entertain.
I especially missed the smaller moments that happen as writers and editors mingle and rush their way through fashion weeks. I missed talking with Ukrainian designer Svitlana Bevza about how she continues to produce in Ukraine during years of war, while her husband fights as an officer in that war. She weaves her nation’s symbols, such as sheaths of wheat and tear drops, into her Bevza collections and jewellery, and they become a wearable remembrance of what her country means to Ukrainians.
Which is to say that all the talk of digital fashion weeks, and the necessity of them during a pandemic, only emphasises that fashion is a social and tactile business that can’t truly be successful unless experienced in real life. Little wonder that brands abandoned digital shows as soon as possible.
Instagram and TikTok, if it survives, are fun, but they are no substitute for flesh and fabric. Good luck to the store buyers who are working from digital lookbooks while their employers cut back on travel budgets.
A few other notes:
I heard the disappearance of WME from fashion week is being felt by emerging designers. For years, WME and its predecessors held shows, eventually called ‘NYFW: The Shows’, that managed to simultaneously compete with and support the CFDA’s calendar. Editors — me among them — and established labels often chafed at WME’s trade show-like atmosphere during NYFW, but it offered a more affordable platform to the tiny labels, some of which could emerge as the The Rows and Khaites and Willy Chavarrias of tomorrow. NYFW is weaker for the absence of such a platform.
The CFDA is exploring the potential of another sort of emerging designer venue for September, Kolb says, by advising a newly formed company called KFN. KFN is associated with LA Fashion Week, which, last November, was headlined by an Ed Hardy runway show and dinner. Stay tuned and cross your fingers that whatever emerges serves designers’ needs to impress, and doesn’t feel like an attempt to profit from fashion by exploiting the very upstarts who may be its future.
It’s worth noting that WME still owns NYFW.com, which has to be one of the more potentially powerful URLs in American fashion. Doesn’t someone out there want to buy it?
And the CFDA shuttle that ran from show to show for the second season, I’m told, is a sleeper hit among those lucky enough to receive invitations. Given the clear importance of getting people to see collections in person, and the difficult-to-navigate spread of venues from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn, NYFW might benefit from expanding that guest list.
Save a seat for me in September.
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