NYFW

I chose New York fashion week. It is held in February and September of every year and lasts usually seven to nine days. New York fashion show is known as one of the ‘Big 4’. It began in 1943 by Eleanor Lambert, the press director of The New York Dress Institution, American fashion industry’s first promotional organization. It was originally called Press Week. It was the first organized fashion week and was meant to distract from French fashion during WWII. After, fashion magazines such as Vogue began featuring more American fashion.

New York fashion week costs a total estimate of 865 million economically, although there are different estimates. Costs vary depending on factors such as venues, celebrities, etc. Models pay can range from $150-$1000 and venues can range from $15,000-$60,000. Celebrities can get paid as much as the designer wants to give just to make an appearance so therefore there is no exact known cost estimate. They pay a celebrity to come as an association to the brand of the designer.

Celebrities are always placed in the front row; you will not see someone like Sarah Jessica Parker in the second row. Also in the front row are editors from fashion magazines. Average people can’t buy a ticket to NY fashion week; you can only get an invite from a designer to sit. However, if you have connections you can slip through to stand and watch the event. Some of the people pictured in “street style” are people who purposely dressed and stood out front of the event in hopes that they will be photographed.

Model casting is a process. Hundreds of models come to NYC in hopes of their chance to walk the runway for NY fashion week. Girls must be able to walk in heels and they have head shots done with no makeup so the designer can see them in their natural state. Models generally have multiple castings, sometimes multiple in a day, anything they can for the chance to walk the NY fashion week runway. Most models have an It factor they say, that spark that makes them stand out.

Carrie Hammer strayed from the norm with her “Role Models not Runway Models” show. She featured Danielle Sheypuk, the first model in a wheelchair, Karen Crespo, the first quadruple amputee to walk the runway, and Jamie Brewer, the first girl with Down syndrome to walk. I absolutely loved reading that because it makes us average girls feel good. You don’t have to have the perfect face or body to have that It factor.