Geography has always been a convenient form of branding in Manhattan, where Madison Avenue, Broadway and Wall Street are shorthand for career tracks as much as they are addresses.
As the home of New York Fashion Week, Bryant Park is, to much of the world, synonymous with fashion. That is a fitting distinction since its wide-open lawn is also commonly referred to on Seventh Avenue, where famous designers like Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera have their offices, as the backyard of the garment district. So when the New York catwalks were centralized under a big tent there in 1993, it made a poignant narrative to show the clothes just a couple of blocks from where they were being created.
Sure, there were plenty of people then, as there are now, who thought it was perfectly appalling that a bunch of fashion designers should be allowed to take over just about the only patch of open green space in Midtown for their invitation-only affair. It may not have been obvious why fashion mattered to the thousands of tourists and commuters who walked by each day, irritated by the traffic, excited by the celebrities, bemused by the outfits.
But now, after a prolonged dispute between the designers and the park management, the Fashion Week that begins in Bryant Park today will be the last, before the event moves to Lincoln Center in the fall.
It's entrance, on Avenue of the Americas at 41st Street, is printed with dozens of quotations from designers, editors and publicists, all expressing the belief that showing collectively in Bryant Park is what made New York City a global fashion capital. One from Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, hangs over the front door: “Bryant Park became the beacon of what New York fashion stands for — an industry that’s fearless, tireless and always moving forward.”
And yet few have missed the symbolism that this move away from Bryant Park is happening at a moment when the garment district, from 34th to 40th Streets between Broadway and Ninth Avenue, is in a profound state of decline.
Manufacturers who made their homes there selling buttons, trims, fabrics and threads, making samples, producing dresses and suits in factories along the side streets, have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the last decade. Most of the production of clothes moved to cheaper factories overseas long ago. The recession, and pressure from landlords who want to convert factory buildings into luxury apartments, hotels and office space, has caused more of them to flee the district.
And now go the tents, the most visible image of the work that still goes on in the neighborhood.
“I love the fact that Bryant Park was where they chose to do the shows because I love the garment center,” says,Caroline Steffe, a small local designer. “And to this day, we still wheel the racks to the show ourselves.”
Although it was once the largest source of manufacturing jobs in the city (representing more than 200,000 workers in the 1970s), there was little respect then for New York fashion in the rest of the world. Apart from a handful of major brands, very few New York designers had been exposed to an international audience, and hardly any had stores overseas.
That is, not until the designers decided to show their collections together in a central location, as a major media event, as their counterparts in Paris and Milan had done for decades. Their first season, in which virtually every major designer showed in the park, drew coverage from CNN, CBS, NBC, the BBC, VH-1 and MTV. Now organizers of Fashion Week typically receive 3,000 requests for media credentials each season.
The catalyst for banding together was a Michael Kors show, in 1991, in a raw Chelsea loft, when the booming music caused the walls to shake and a big chunk of the ceiling to fall onto the runway, clipping Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, on her well-regarded head. She made only brief mention of the incident in her review. But, angered that no one seemed to take it very seriously, she slammed the chaotic disorganization of the New York shows in comments to Women’s Wear Daily.
“She called us second-raters,” Mr. Herman said, President of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. “Everybody looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve really got to do something about this.’ She was one of the few editors from Europe who came to America.”
Persuading the designers to show in one place, however, was as much of a challenge as securing the use of the park, a task that fell to Fern Mallis, who was then the executive director of the council and the person widely credited with conceiving the event. She described a meeting at which several young but reluctant designers kept asking whether Calvin Klein had agreed to show there. Mr. Klein happened to be in the room and announced his support.
As the event grew larger, from 42 shows under 2 tents and inside the New York Public Library in 1993 to more than 65 in 3 tents this season (hundreds more designers show independently), corporate sponsorship took on more prominence. Sponsors like Mercedes-Benz, Olympus, General Motors, M.A.C., Evian, Fiji, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Delta, the Bermuda Department of Tourism and Kohler, the toilet maker, paid handsomely to feature their products and messages in the limelight of Fashion Week. In 2001, the fashion council sold its runway operations to IMG, the global marketing company. That, in turn, led to sniping that Fashion Week had come to resemble a trade show, or a car dealership. Many of New York’s marquee designers now show their collections elsewhere.
The complaints may be somewhat unfair. What is not often noted is how closely the explosion of marketing noise around Fashion Week mirrored the increasing globalization and corporate slickness of fashion itself over the last two decades. Without a lot of money and marketing behind them, it is harder for new designers to construct and produce a small collection on their own.
Can Lincoln Center, already associated with so many things besides fashion, ever give fashion designers the same sense of belonging as did Bryant Park? It bothers many of them no end that their craft is perceived a lesser (if not the least) form of art, that the costume galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are in the basement, or that an appreciation of style is often remarked upon as a liability to politicians, athletes and intellectuals.
Designers are making the best of it.
“When you think of Lincoln Center, you think of the arts, the music, the dance and the opera, so I think being there will elevate and celebrate fashion as an art,” said Donna Karan, who happened to be the very first designer to have a runway show in Bryant Park when the tents opened on Halloween in 1993. Many of her peers, in interviews and in the comments plastered on the front of the tents, repeated the belief that Lincoln Center will legitimize them, not just as designers, but as artists.
Not one of them mentioned that the new location is home to another seasonal event that takes place under a big tent, one that is perhaps an even more apt metaphor for Fashion Week.
That is, of course, the Big Apple Circus.
