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. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
Can you feel it?
Energy has pulsed through New York Fashion Week this Spring/Summer 2025 season; in national politics threading runways with “vote!” messages and references to Kamala Harris, and in collections firmly anchored in the American experience from the Hamptons polo fields to the streets of East Los Angeles.
We felt it in renewed confidence as designers dug into their own origins in Iowa cornfields, small-town South Carolina and Fresno, California — and a sense of real purpose to being here emerged. Willy Chavarria dubbed his collection ‘América’ to reference his Chicano origins, while collaborating with the most blue-blood-American of shoe brands, Allen Edmonds. The result on his runway was a split-toe derby with a slanted Cuban heel called the ‘Jalisco’.
For sheer joy, it would be hard to beat Wu-Tang Clan emerging at Tommy Hilfiger to perform while roving all over the decommissioned Staten Island ferry.
We saw renewed energy in international labels Alaïa, Toteme and Nanushka, opting to show in New York this season to better reach US audiences. Consider the potency of Off-White, a label founded by an Illinois native, Virgil Abloh, but based in Milan and known for showing in Paris, choosing to present in New York for the first time. “I think it’s good for the brand to come home,” said creative director Ib Kamara, establishing Off-White as a wholly American label by placing it on the basketball courts (with branded hoop backboards) of Brooklyn Bridge park.
Some labels — Ralph Lauren, Hilfiger, Todd Snyder — returned to the fold after eschewing the week in recent seasons for their own plans elsewhere. Snyder dubbed his collection shown at the Le Rock restaurant in Rockefeller Plaza, ‘Villa America’.
There’s a pivotal election coming up that could impact the lives of many people within the nation’s fashion industry. But the strength of the American consumer is a basis for this renewal. US consumer sales have been beating expectations — they rose 1 per cent in July alone, according to the US Department of Commerce.
Clothes and accessories designed to sell featured heavily on the runways at NYFW, as brands continued to strike the balance between creativity and commerciality. Denim, bags and shoes popped up often, drawing the eye at Ulla Johnson, Khaite, Coach, Tibi and Monse, the latter of which debuted bags for the first time the season, some shaped like footballs (the American sort). Sportswear was another crossover: Tory Burch sent swimsuits paired with drawstring trousers down her pool deck-themed runway (and also brought back her biggest commercial hit, the T-logo ballet flat); Chavarria’s new collaboration with Adidas dominated the second half of his show.
The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) deserve a tip of the hat for their steps towards better organising a week that had in recent seasons spun so far out of control that buyers and editors had to miss shows that couldn’t be reached in time. CFDA chief executive Steven Kolb and his team urged designers to consider placing venues with reasonable reach of other labels’ shows. The CFDA’s bus, sponsored by Shop with Google, enabled a group of editors and retailers to make it from Off-White’s Brooklyn show to Jason Wu at Hudson Yards on Sunday, a trip that would otherwise have taken an hour and at least two transfers on the subway.
Next season, heightened publicity and word of mouth will increase the bus ridership, I’ll wager, if it makes a return (and I hope it will). I heard envious comments from people who were just learning about the bus towards the end of the week. I also hope designers will begin to acknowledge that it behoves them to make it easier for editors and buyers to attend their collections.
I heard from one influential investor that there’s a move to organise a grouping of shows in Lower Manhattan next season. More on that if it happens.
The election on the runway
Vice President Harris emerged this week as a fashion muse. Sergio Hudson’s collection of tailored pantsuits and powerful gowns could have doubled as a lookbook for the Democrat presidential candidate, whose campaign resulted in a surge of optimism — and a joyous get-out-the-vote rally led by Vogue’s Anna Wintour and the CFDA on Friday morning.
Hudson, who has dressed Harris in the past, says: “She is the woman that I dress. A powerful woman, our leader. That woman is my muse.”
Harris as a muse bodes well for working professional women who have money to spend but have long struggled to find the sort of power wardrobe that men find easily. Chief executives, senators and potential presidents have rarely inspired fashion designers.
It was hard to miss the sequin coconut tree, from which three coconuts fell, at Prabal Gurung on Saturday. (If you did, download TikTok and watch the 10,000 memes of Harris recounting something her mother once said.)
“That dress will stand for this time,” Gurung said backstage after his Saturday afternoon show on Centre Street. “It’s such a historic moment.” He was wearing a T-shirt of his own design, which he promised to have available for sale on his website within days. It featured four squares with a letter spelling “vote” in each — and a coconut for the ‘O’.
With a pivotal election in just eight weeks, the messages were everywhere. Ralph Lauren returned his famous knitted American flag sweaters to his runway, with First Lady Jill Biden looking on from the front row.
Chavarria walked his own runway wearing an ACLU (aka the American Civil Liberties Union) tee on Thursday evening. He placed a copy of the US Constitution on every seat at his show on Wall Street, in a message more of fortitude and grit than of joy, as though it’s too soon to celebrate.
Why the Constitution, I asked. “Oh, so you can read it and learn,” Chavarria replied before being swept away by well-wishers backstage. “It’s about democracy!”
America and New York Fashion Week continue to offer something universal to people across the world who face struggles of their own. Svitlana Bevza, a Ukrainian designer who has been living in London with her young children while her design team and manufacturers work in and around Kyiv, returned to New York on Sunday with her label Bevza. She presented a finely designed, tightly edited collection of ready-to-wear, jewellery and bags.
Bevza’s husband, Volodymyr Omelyan, a major in the Ukrainian army, is recovering from being hit two weeks ago by bomb shrapnel while fighting in the country’s east. She says work helps keep her mind off her anxiety; her label is always designed around symbols of her nation, like the sheaths of wheat featured in brass bag closures and braiding at the neck of a dough-coloured apron dress.
This season, she placed crystals on necklaces and small clear baubles that looked like teardrops on dresses. They represented the morning dew for a collection she called the ‘Dew in the Sun’. It’s a reference to a line in the Ukrainian anthem, which says, “Our enemies will perish like the dew in the morning sun.”
So maybe Tommy Hilfiger’s caramel peanut popcorn boxes, like the Cracker Jacks that used to be sold at baseball games with a toy inside, weren’t just gimmicky. Inside each box was a paper sleeve with a pin: the Statue of Liberty.
If you don’t head to London and Milan humming “O Say, Can You See” under your breath, were you even at New York Fashion Week?
With additional reporting by Hilary Milnes.
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