This Is What New York Fashion Week Looked Like Before Influencers and Instagram
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Somsack Sikhounmuong keeps a shoebox full of treasures in his closet. Every now and then, he dusts it off, opens the lid, and transports back to his pre-J.Crew, Madewell, and Alex Mill (where he is currently creative director and cofounder) days, when he was a wide-eyed fashion student at Parsons wielding a cheap disposable camera from the drugstore.
In the late ’90s, Sikhounmuong discovered that anyone and everyone could visit New York Fashion Week, which was then held mostly at the Bryant Park tents. Well, not just anyone could score a ticket, but it was relatively easy for an inspired kid like himself to finagle his way backstage or perch outside, waiting to catch a glimpse of a designer like Isaac Mizrahi or a model like a then baby-face Gisele Bündchen.
Sikhounmuong remembers that moment in fashion fondly. Back then, models dressed for comfort and practicality rather than a photo op. They wore easy scarves and cardigans, unwashed jeans, and dirty sneakers. Sometimes they would throw on a designer jacket or bag, but mostly they were running from show to show in their most approachable daily uniforms.
Two decades later, New York Fashion Week is bigger and more crowded—it’s definitely no longer an insider’s-only event—but Sikhounmuong’s work is still defined by the unstudied effortlessness of the models he snapped back then. On the eve of the Spring 2020 shows, he’s sharing some of his favorite images with Vogue Runway.
“It was probably just around 1997 and I’d started as a design student at Parsons. Coming to New York from Toronto was like hitting the jackpot. My dorm roommate at the time took me to meet his friend Ellen, and when we went to her apartment, she had a photo of Kate Moss framed on her table. She told me she took the photo herself, and I was like, “Wait, you can do that?” She told me, “Yes, there are fashion shows that are happening up in Bryant Park soon, and you just have to go up there and hang out, see what’s happening.” This was back when New York Fashion Week started in October, it was the fourth leg of the shows after London, Milan, and Paris. So it was October, and I ran to Duane Reade to get a disposable camera, took the N train up to Bryant Park, and just waited outside of the tents.
It was really strange because there were no bloggers, there was no street style; this was pre-Vogue.com. So I found myself waiting at the exit of the tents with a bunch of industry photographers, and there weren’t even that many—I think I was maybe one of four people. I would hang out there if I didn’t sneak into the show or backstage, and I would just call the models by name and ask them for a photo. This was prior to the idea of a celebrity model, outside of the Supers; so I think they were probably a bit taken aback to hear me call them by name, but they would oblige most of the time, and if they weren’t in a rush, they would pose, and you’d say, “Thank you,” and they’d be on their way. To me it was like, Oh my gosh, I have a picture of Gisele or Shalom or Kate—those were my celebrities. It was the same as a fan waiting outside of a movie premiere and getting a star’s autograph.
I would definitely try to sneak into the shows when I could, and security then was pretty loose. The shows I always had on my list and the ones that I always tried to sneak into were Anna Sui, Marc Jacobs (who showed away from the tents), and Isaac Mizrahi. These were the must-stake-out shows. It was such an insider industry in the 1990s, so you would have to pull out WWD and find the calendar in there, and if I couldn’t, I would call the press offices of the brands and pretend to be someone’s assistant confirming the time, date, and place for a show. It was a different era then, and it was special, because if you really wanted to see what was going to happen in fashion in six months, you had to be at the shows, you’d have to try and find your own way in. Also, the only photos of models I’d ever seen were runway pictures, so snapping them candidly was a nice way to see models in their real clothes, their real uniforms. That stayed in my mind, and I think informed a lot of what I do now at Alex Mill and what I did when I was at J.Crew—the idea that looking great doesn’t have to equate to ultra-glamour and it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.