Most of the American-made fashions at the time were just knockoffs of French couture, and the shows weren’t for the press, but for customers. The fancier, made-to-measure houses did host viewings of their latest collections for journalists. But those shows weren’t quite as fun.
The couturier Mainbocher, for instance, “only served ice water [at his presentations],” fashion historian Caroline Milbank told The Post. “The focus was solely on the clothes, not on socializing.” Fashion shows became so commonplace that Vogue’s longtime editor Edna Woolman Chase complained in her 1953 memoir that a lady couldn’t “lunch or sip a cocktail . . . without having lissome young things in the most recent models swaying down a runway 6 inches above her nose.”
It wasn’t until World War II that the American fashion industry would come into its own — when rich, well-heeled Americans could no longer rely on Nazi-occupied Paris for their couture.
“It was the perfect storm to create a New York Fashion Week,” said Goodin. “Not only could Americans not access French designers, who had limited access to materials and little freedom anyway, but you had this culture of patriotism that gave rise to the idea that American designers were something to be promoted.”
Sensing an opportunity to promote homegrown talent, fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert launched the first “Press Week” in 1943. Held at The Plaza hotel, it featured collections from American designers such as Norman Norell, Claire McCardell and Valentina for journalists from all over the country.
It was a success. Glossies such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, slavishly devoted to French fashion, started putting American designers in their pages — and actually crediting them. By its
second year, designers and manufacturers working outside of Lambert’s rarefied cadre of artisans began holding their own presentations during the week, which created some confusion. “Several editors, including some friends of mine at WWD and Eugenia Sheppard from the Tribune, were complaining about conflicts,” said Ruth Finley, who in 1945 launched the Fashion Calendar, a publication that still collects and lists all the events taking place during Fashion Week. “I decided that we needed a clearinghouse.”
Press Week continued to swell, and its success spawned imitators in Paris, Rome (where the Italians held their Fashion Week before it moved to Milan) and London.
NEW YORK FASHION WEEK 2018 Continued...
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