From Editors to Influencers: The Past, Present & Uncertain Future of the Fashion Show
It’s Paris Fashion Week, and you’re attending a show for a Major Fashion Brand. As you walk up to the venue, you dodge a pack of influencers and street style photographers clamoring for pictures and weave through a traffic jam of black cars shuttling elite buyers, editors, and the Major Fashion Brand’s VIP clients. Next, you fight your way through an army of screaming teenage stans waiting to catch a glimpse of the show’s celebrity attendees. Upon entry, you’re scrutinized by the security detail and a troop of PR agents — if one of them knows you personally, you may be whisked ahead of the line. Once inside and securely seated in the second row — because the front row is increasingly reserved for iPhone-wielding influencers and celebrities — you wait at least 30 minutes on a hard bench for the show to start. If you’re lucky, you know your neighbor, and the two of you exchange views on the shows you’ve seen. You might even get a juicy morsel of gossip. If you’re unlucky (and most of the time you are), you’re seated next to someone preoccupied with their Instagram account.
Finally the show starts, and virtually everyone whips out their phone to broadcast it to their followers on social media. Few attendees bother to look at the actual clothes.
It wasn’t always thus. Once upon a time, fashion shows were an intimate affair. They were reserved for three camps: clients, editors, and buyers. The clothes were the main event, not the pomp and circumstance surrounding them. Now, it seems fashion shows are about everything but the garments.
The evolution (or devolution, depending on your vantage point) of the fashion show reflects the changing rules and interests of the industry. From roughly the 1870s, when Charles Frederick Worth established the modern fashion system, to the 1960s, haute couture — hand-constructed garments that houses make to order for VIP clients — ruled fashion. To walk into a couture salon, much less be invited to a couture show, a woman couldn’t simply be rich. She had to be carefully vetted, with an impeccable high society reputation. If an American couture debutante stayed at the wrong hotel during her Paris shopping jaunt, that was enough to disqualify her. Back then, direct relationships with the “right” kinds of clients were the heart of the fashion business.
Relationships with the press were also key. When Christian Dior presented his seminal 1947 collection, it wasn’t called “The New Look.” In fact, it didn’t have a name at all — the now-famous moniker was the doing of Carmel Snow, then editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. She, along with a handful of other editors, was part of the show’s carefully selected audience who earned a seat at Dior’s haute couture salon at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. Snow and her cohort had the power to make or break a brand’s collection (and directly influence its sales), depending on what they published in the press.
Haute couture was notoriously snobbish, but the rise of ready-to-wear — clothing made for distribution in stores, rather than made to order for individual customers — in the early ‘60s helped democratize fashion, opening it up to more than just ultra-rich clients and high-powered editors. Leading the charge were British designers like Mary Quant and Ossie Clark, who couldn’t care less about Parisian pretensions. Their shows were theatrical, like the rock concerts of the times — think The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom Quant and Clark were dressing.
Yves Saint Laurent also helped drive the shift away from haute couture and towards ready-to-wear. In the wake of the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris, a reaction against capitalism and colonialism, Saint Laurent declared: “Recent political events, the reaction of young people to fashion and the way of life today make haute couture a relic of the past.” His pivot to Rive Gauche, his young ready-to-wear line, was in the spirit of the time. It was also a commercial success. Saint Laurent’s iconic Le Smoking, a men's tuxedo suit recut for a woman’s body, sold exactly one unit after its couture debut in 1966 — but it began flying off the shelves when he introduced it at his Rive Gauche shops.
Saint Laurent remained the darling of the fashion world for decades, and he wielded his power to modernize the fashion show. In March 1976 he put on a ready-to-wear show inspired by the famous Ballet Russes at Paris’ InterContinental hotel. It cost $500,000, a head-spinning sum at the time, and was the first to enlist professional hair and makeup teams (until then, models largely did their own hair and makeup). Saint Laurent’s next ready-to-wear show in October 1976 was opened by the singer Grace Jones, featured 281 outfits, and lasted two-and-a-half hours.
The designers who came after Saint Laurent — Jean Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana, and Thierry Mugler, all of whom rose to fame in the ‘80s — similarly distanced themselves from the haute bourgeoisie. Theirs was a world of gay liberation, pop culture, and camp. They were dubbed “Les Enfants Terribles” for their irreverence, which spilled into their over-the-top shows, a far cry from the prim and proper presentations put on by Dior.
Central to Les Enfants Terribles were Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who married punk rock and fashion at their subversive stores — one of which was simply called SEX — at 430 King’s Road in London. In 1982, the pair decided to do the most punk thing of all: show their clothes in Paris alongside its fashion elite. Their Fall/Winter 1983 collection, “Nostalgia of Mud,” wasn’t inspired by the enclaves of the rich, but by Appalachian folk costumes, homeless people, and early hip-hop from the Bronx. It was a complete rejection of Parisian chic, staged right in the middle of Paris.
By then, ready-to-wear had thoroughly displaced haute couture. Clients, once the backbone of a brand’s business, rarely came into contact with designers (though exceptions were made for celebrities). Consequently, the makeup of show attendees began to change: Private clients were out, and store buyers were in. The rise of specialty stores like Charivari and Barneys in New York and Browns in London turned buyers into tastemakers. Fashion media attendance also expanded, reflecting the increasing readership — and commercial power — of fashion journals and magazines like Women’s Wear Daily and Vogue.
At the same time, a new class of anti-establishment designers had emerged on the scene. In 1981, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons put on their debut shows in Paris. Their ragged, asymmetric creations were largely met with howls of indignation from the Parisian fashion media establishment, who buckled under the shock of the new (Kawakubo’s collection was titled, unambiguously, “Destroy”).
The impression these Japanese disruptors left took on a new force in the early ‘90s as Generation X began to come into its own, demanding fashion that was closer to Seattle and Nirvana than to Paris and Catherine Deneuve. And independent, youth culture-oriented magazines like i-D, Blitz, and The Face were there to support them. Young Gen X’ers wanted grunge, not glamour — and before long, conceptual designers like Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang answered their call.
Margiela’s upending of fashion’s conventions was visible in both his clothes and his presentations. He deconstructed not only jackets, but the fashion show itself. Margiela staged his presentations on the outskirts of Paris, in children’s playgrounds and in abandoned train stations. He disregarded carefully orchestrated seating hierarchy — people sat where they wanted, or had to stand.
By the mid-’90s, the makeup of Paris Fashion Week had gone from purely French to thoroughly international. British and Japanese designers were showing alongside Belgians (the Antwerp Six), Germans (Jil Sander) and Austrians (Helmut Lang). New York would also become a fashion capital to reckon with, when in 1997 Lang decamped there from Paris. Instead of joining the official New York Fashion Week calendar (which, since its establishment in 1943 largely featured American designers), he opted to show a few weeks earlier. Lang — who, along with Jil Sander, ushered in the era of minimalism — was one of the hottest and most-mimicked designers at the time. Shortly thereafter, Calvin Klein announced that he would also move his show ahead, prompting the rest of NYFW to follow. Instead of closing fashion month, New York now opened it, rearranging the women’s fashion calendar and giving the city a new cachet.
With the rise of the Internet in the early ‘00s, fashion shows would expand their reach far beyond Paris, Milan, London, and New York. Enter: the rise of bloggers (think of them as proto-influencers). In 2009, Dolce & Gabbana became the first brand to put bloggers in the front row, even giving them laptops to document the show in real time. Outside the shows, photographers like Scott Schuman and Tommy Ton, both of whom ran their own street style blogs, captured the scene and eventually became influential in their own right. Now, anyone with an internet connection, VIP or not, could catch a glimpse of a fashion show. Brands no longer had to go through mediators like magazine editors and store buyers to reach customers — they just had to show up online.
The proliferation of smartphones and the birth of Instagram in 2010 opened fashion week up to an even wider audience. Photos of the shows could be uploaded in real time, accelerating the speed at which bloggers — who quickly adopted Instagram as an outgrowth of their web addresses — could reach their audience. Instagram also began turning famous editors into brands, sometimes more powerful than their publications, leading to another tug of war over who wielded fashion influence and who could profit from it.
Not everyone was in favor of the changing face of fashion week. In 2013 the esteemed critic Suzy Menkes published an article in The New York Times, “The Circus of Fashion,” excoriating bloggers and the street style scene. She faced backlash for the story, but Menkes’ observation that “the fuss around the shows now seems as important as what goes on inside the carefully guarded tents” would become even more relevant over the years.
The “circus” she described over a decade ago continues to balloon. Attending fashion week is seen as a must for every kind of celebrity, from rappers to actors to athletes, who want to remain in the cultural spotlight. Brands dress their VIP show attendees, influencers and celebrities alike, and pay photographers to take their pictures. Fashion editors and buyers are no longer prioritized. Instead, influencers who amplify the brand message, sans critique or analysis, pack the front row. Ten years ago, designers would scoff if someone recorded a show instead of looking at the clothes they carefully created. Today, if you aren’t recording a show, you’re not doing the job brands want you to do.
In a strange way, we’ve come full circle. In the decades since haute couture’s heyday, the purpose of fashion shows hasn’t changed at all: They are still vehicles that allow brands to speak to consumers. Fashion shows have always been mediated experiences and now they’re even more so, broadcast through the lens of a phone camera to a contemporary audience of consumers that’s largely remote, and far more vast than Christian Dior could have ever predicted. While immediacy has been gained, something vital has been lost: thoughtful consideration of a designer’s proposition.
In 2015, I half-jokingly declared that soon, fashion shows would be held in sports stadiums like pop concerts. A year later, Kanye West presented Yeezy at Madison Square Garden, livestreaming the blowout event in movie theaters. Going forward, the lines between fashion show and entertainment will continue to blur. We live in a culture of entertainment and spectacle. Gone are the days when attending fashion week was to belong to a tightly knit club, its own ecosystem of allyship and feuds. Today’s fashion show audience is anyone who cares to look. Already, big fashion brands are increasingly retooling fashion shows with headline-grabbing add-ons like pop star performances and A-list afterparties, the better to hide often uninspiring clothes. It’s not farfetched to predict that one day, fashion shows will be broadcast on television like the Oscars or the Super Bowl, complete with celebrity show hosts and commercial breaks (Vogue World’s 2024 “fashion show” in Paris, more of a TV show than a runway, can be viewed as an early blueprint). I just hope that I will have retired from fashion journalism by then.
