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Business

Record-low number of shows leaves Fashion Week at a crossroads

By
Lisa Fickenscher
Published Feb. 13, 2018
Updated Feb. 7, 2019, 10:45 a.m. ET

New York Fashion Week is being pulled apart at the seams.

The February event, which ends on Wednesday, will host a record low number of shows — down 19 percent from 2016, to 118 — as a growing number of designers pass it by.

This year, big-name designers, including Proenza, Rodarte, Altuzarra and Thom Browne, opted to show at a fashion week in another city.

The news is just as grim with NYFW’s September event. The number of shows last fall tumbled 76 percent, to 140, from 2014.

The declining number of shows could tamp down the economic impact of the biannual event — which was pegged recently at $900 million.

NYFW also finds itself at a crossroads because it is weighing a move to go from two shows a year to four — adding weeklong events in June and December.

A groundswell of designers, spearheaded by Alexander Wang, wants to leave the traditional calendar altogether and move their shows to the summer and winter months when, according to Susan Scafidi, director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School, buyers spend 80 percent of their budgets.

Ever since Wang declared in January that he is moving his megawatt fashion shows, at least a dozen other designers have said they will follow him, according to Steven Kolb, chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

“Now there seems to be a consensus or a grouping of people who are willing to try it,” Kolb told The Post, adding that “it’s possible that in a year there could be four NYFW events. This is a period of experimentation.”

While Kolb declined to identify the designers who are following Wang’s lead, he added that people are “too stuck on the idea of NYFW being in September and February.”

The CFDA would support the moves, he said.

The concern, say others, is that the buyers and fashion editors who attend the shows and are crucial to the ecosystem would likely not come to all the shows.

“Buyers and editors with ever more limited budgets have to make decisions about what to cover,” said Scafidi. “If the calendar is further divided, the industry has to take into account that not all buyers are based in New York and that the enormous editorial budgets of the past don’t exist anymore.”

IMG, which produces upward of 70 of the NYFW shows and owns the rights to NYFW, says the event “is alive and well.”

“The idea that a few designers showing at nontraditional times in the year would somehow jeopardize the business being done during February and September is ludicrous,” said Catherine Bennett, SVP and managing director for IMG Fashion. “Every season, when something inevitably changes, everyone rushes to judgment. NYFW is not going anywhere.”

But as NYFW wraps up on Wednesday, not everyone believes February’s shows were a great success.

“There were a lot of breaks and downtime, which is never the case,” said one industry insider, who did not want to be identified. “Some designers even went to the movies in between shows.”