Why Fashion Weeks Should Be Slower and Smaller

A fashion week is an industrial trade fair that has been dressed as a cultural festival, and the two functions now pull in opposite directions. The schedule was built to sell clothes to buyers; it has become a machine for producing images, and the images are more profitable than the clothes.

The arithmetic of four weeks

Four cities, several hundred shows, a month in which a buyer or an editor is expected to be in a different country every few days. A working day during a fashion week runs from eight in the morning to midnight: shows, appointments, showroom visits, dinners that are also meetings. The clothing is seen in twelve-minute intervals, from a seat, at a distance, in a room designed for photography.

No one defends this as a good way to evaluate a garment. It is defended as a necessity, and the necessity is circular: everyone attends because everyone attends, and the calendar expands because the coverage expands.

Who the show is for

The show is now designed for the camera and the front row. The lighting is set for video, the casting for the image, the soundtrack for the clip, and the seating for the people whose presence generates coverage. A production can cost six figures for twelve minutes, and the return is measured in media value rather than orders, which is a perfectly rational investment for a house selling perfume and a poor one for a house selling coats.

Buyers, meanwhile, order from showrooms, days later, with the clothes on a rail and a lookbook in hand. The show is not where the buying happens. It is where the desire is manufactured, and manufacturing desire at that scale is expensive.

What a slower week would look like

There are working alternatives, and they are unglamorous. Appointment-based presentations in a showroom, an hour with the collection, a lunch, a conversation with the designer. Regional scheduling, so that a buyer can see the same number of collections in fewer cities. Digital lookbooks released on a fixed date, with the physical appointments reserved for the pieces that need to be touched.

The objection is always the same: without a show, a house loses its moment. That is true, and it is an argument about attention rather than about clothes. The question is whether attention bought at that price is worth having.

Who bears the cost

The young designer bears most of it. A show is a fixed cost that does not scale with revenue, and a first or second collection that spends its entire budget on twelve minutes has nothing left for production, which is where the business actually is. The calendar therefore functions as a barrier to entry, dressed as a tradition.

The buyer bears the rest. Four weeks of transit produces exhausted judgment, and exhausted judgment produces safe orders. A buyer who has seen forty collections in ten days does not buy the strange, beautiful thing; they buy the thing that resembles what sold last season, because there is no time to think and thinking is the only competitive advantage they have.

The production calendar makes this worse and is rarely mentioned. A collection shown in February reaches the shops in August, so the customer meets a coat six months after the weather that inspired it. The industry has tried twice to close that gap, with see-now-buy-now and with pre-collections, and both attempts foundered on the same fact: a factory cannot make a coat in a week, and a house that promises otherwise is selling a simpler, smaller garment.

The defence of the show

The show is also a genuine cultural form, and it would be philistine to pretend otherwise. A great collection presented in a great room can do something no lookbook can: it can propose a way of moving through the world, and the proposal lands differently when bodies do it in space and time. That is worth protecting.

But the form does not require the calendar. Two shows a year per house, in a room with a hundred people, would preserve almost everything valuable and remove almost everything exhausting. What it would remove first is the media economy that has grown around the spectacle, which is why the proposal is unpopular in the places where it is most needed, and why the people who defend the current arrangement are rarely the people who buy the clothes.

A calendar is an argument about time, and the industry has chosen speed and called it relevance. Relevance is what a schedule produces when it has nothing else to say.

Clothes are made to be worn for years. A system that gives them twelve minutes to be understood is not a system for clothes, and the people best served by it are the ones who sell attention rather than garments.