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Like everything this past year, the annual New York Fashion Week will be occurring on an online platform, from Sunday, Feb. 14 to Thursday, Feb. 18, due to the upending and never-ending coronavirus pandemic.
New York Fashion Week occurs twice a year — once in February, again in September — in the heart of New York City. But NYFW will look different this year. Women’s Wear Daily describes the upcoming fashion week as “mostly digital, with some exceptions.”
The format of runway shows will vary among designers: some will be live-to-tape, and others will be by-appointment-only private shows. The NYFW website provides online audiences with panels, workshops and tutorials, galleries and designer lookbooks, fashion films, and behind-the-scenes content to make up for the virtual nature of the event.
Although the event will be mostly online, recordings and some in-person shows will still take place at Spring Studios, the traditional New York City venue for NYFW.
It is clear that IMG, owner of The Shows and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, is trying to make things as normal as possible while allowing designers the most important event of the year for the industry.
But trying may not be enough for fashion week to have its impact and memorability as it once had in the Before Times.
Some designers will seize the current global crisis by showcasing mask designs and making fashion relevant for what life looks like in 2021, but this may be received only as a bad memory for most of the fashion world’s clientele.
An online fashion week loses much of its striking and perhaps even shock factors as it converts to an online platform.
IMG will do what they can to make fashion week happen, but often it’s what happens outside the actual shows that creates the thrill around NYFW.
Influencers, celebrities, models, and designers traditionally roll up to Spring Studios in their black Escalade sporting their newest collection and latest style trends, while the paparazzi snaps photos of their street style looks. For anyone who consumes this content, it’s the style outside of the venue of NYFW which tends more toward what is practical and accessible for the average fashionista, and this is what influences popular fashion rather than the displays inside the venue.
Without the ability for hundreds of style icons, from Alexa Chung to Victoria Beckham, to come together at the Mecca of fashion and sport the newest trends, fashion connoisseurs know very little about what people are wearing in the candid.
Many fellow designers, models, and celebrities praise the remarkable effect of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in that front row of a runway show, seeing Anna Wintour from afar, and feeling fully immersed into the vision of a designer.
Some designers, from Dior to Saks to Calvin Klein, have attempted to encapsulate museums, gardens, or exotic travel destinations within their shows, building the atmosphere of the venue with their collection for the season.
The loud, booming runway music cues, and the models with their tucked cheeks, intimidating stare, strut out to reveal the designer’s collections.
It is this initial entrance and power of being in the atmosphere of a runway show, seeing the designer’s collection for the first time as everyone else, and even seeing the familiar faces of Gigi and Bella Hadid, Cindy Crawford’s daughter Kaia Gerber, or Kendall Jenner that makes fashion week a spiritual experience for those infatuated with fashion.
Onlookers can now watch from the convenience of their home the newest collections and looks of the spring season, but without being physically present, the runway shows may entrance few people. This takes away from what makes fashion a moving art, both literally and metaphorically.
When someone has experienced the power of sitting at a runway show, an online platform will just never compare.
In a time where society is constantly consuming virtual glory and gore on our devices by watching a movie or television series, digital platforms still cannot provide that heart-racing, heavy-breathing, jaw-dropping punch that an in-person, immersive experience can have. The same can be said for fashion week.
Take e-commerce, for instance. When shopping online, it’s very easy to look at your cart and convince yourself that the clothes you picked out “aren’t that cute,” simply because you can’t physically see and feel those objects.
Shopping in person, on the other hand, you see something, you feel it, touch it, put it on, and you think you look good. Heck, you do. And then, it’s even harder to give up that perfect item that you’ve just realized you can’t live without.
The immersive experience of NYFW that thrills the five senses will be lost this spring with a mostly digital show, just as so many other events this past year have been. But in the meantime, we can enjoy the accessibility of NYFW to all of us, as we wear our pajamas this year and plan our outfits for next year.
