Bright lights, big city

…beautiful clothes. Bethan Holt on the singular glamour of New York Fashion Week

New York Fashion Week in all its glory. By Bethan Holt

‘FASHION WEEK BELONGS to New York, like the Oscars belong to Hollywood,’ writes Booth Moore in American Runway: 75 Years of Fashion and the Front Row ,a book being released to coincide with this month’s shows. It’s true. Every fashion week has its quirks – the cool creativity of London, the slick power of Milan, the rarefied chic of Paris – but in New York, a very American mix of flashing light bulbs, high-wattage glamour and bustling personalities becomes an intoxicating cocktail that takes over the city.

New York Fashion Week began as ‘Fashion Press Week’ in 1943 as a project masterminded by Eleanor Lambert, a publicist who tasked herself with amping up the reputation of American fashion (which trailed behind its European rivals). In the midst of the Second World War, hosting a fashion week was an act of defiance. Just 50 editors attended, filing their copy from typewriters in a specially appointed room on Broadway.

‘Fashion writers admit to being dazzled to the point of blindness by the many sequins; the slim silhouette gets scrupulous attention and more than one editor warns readers that they’ll have to pare off excess poundage before they can wear the clothes come October,’ reported Women’s Wear Daily at the time of the dispatches from those first shows.

Everything and nothing has changed. It’s not just the sequins blinding us now, but the twinkle of smartphone cameras and ever-more-spectacular mises en scène. Givenchy’s collaboration with Marina Abramović in the shadow of One World Trade Center (left) in September 2015 and an army of models of all shapes and ethnicities wearing nude body stockings for Kanye West’s autumn 2015 Yeezy show are just two recent examples. It all kicks off again this Thursday. Bring it on.

American Runway: 75 Years of Fashion and the Front Row, is published on Wednesday by Abrams