Who Would Wear This?

What Is Fashion Week—and Why Do It?

[Intro]

Paris Fashion Week has begun. My Instagram feed is now flooded with Fashion Week posts—which, as a side effect, has even increased the number of accounts I follow. Fashion Week sometimes turns into a meme, becoming the subject of ridicule because of its strange concepts and outfits. And lately, it’s also been drawing even more attention in Korea because so many K-pop idols attend.

In this post, I want to take a closer look at what Fashion Week actually is—one of the biggest events in the fashion industry—and, more importantly, why on earth we do it.

The much-talked-about Schiaparelli Spring 2023 Haute Couture collection.

[What Fashion Week Is]

Starting from a dictionary-level definition: Fashion Week refers to a period—usually around a week—during which fashion shows are held intensively in a particular city. Typically, brands present Fall/Winter (F/W) collections in February–March and Spring/Summer (S/S) collections in September–October.

When people say “Fashion Week,” they usually attach a city name—London Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week—because, yes, it’s fundamentally organized by city. But at this point you might be thinking: A week? Then why have my Instagram feed and entertainment news been occupied by ‘Fashion Week’ for months?

The reason is that the “Big Four” Fashion Weeks—New York, London, Milan, and Paris—run one after another, each for about a week. If you string them together, it’s inevitable that Fashion Week content takes over your feed for more than a month.

So why do we hold Fashion Week? Is it just an event for brand promotion, a glamorous spectacle to entertain fashion people around the world? That’s half right and half wrong. Of course, there is a marketing purpose: inviting celebrities and maximizing exposure. But at its core, Fashion Week is a place where brands invite the buyers who distribute and retail fashion and present new collections to them. Before social media, it was also a stage where traditional media—editors-in-chief, editors, and press from major magazines—attended, evaluated shows, and helped define what became “the trend.”

In other words, the essence of Fashion Week is this: a brand designs and produces products, puts them on the runway, and then the buying teams from department stores and select shops—retailers who actually carry fashion brands—come to make purchase decisions about what fits their assortment and what they believe will sell. This is also why most brands reveal collections about six months before the actual launch date: it takes time for media and buyers to promote the collection, and for the public to absorb and recognize it.

In that sense, a fashion show can also be a brutally cold evaluation arena. If a brand fails to satisfy buyers, struggles to secure orders, and receives harsh assessments from the media and the public, it’s not rare for CEOs and directors to be replaced.

[The Origins and Characteristics of the Big Four Fashion Weeks]

Fashion Week happens in Seoul, too—and in many cities worldwide. But the most prestigious and influential are the “Big Four,” held in this order: New York, London, Milan, and Paris.

You could say New York Fashion Week is the origin of Fashion Week in its modern form. Paris already had fashion presentations, of course, but they weren’t systematized the way they are today; designers invited buyers and held smaller, more informal events. Then World War II broke out, and New York designers could no longer travel to France—so New York created something called “Press Week,” which later became the foundation of New York Fashion Week.

Representative designers associated with New York Fashion Week include Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Alexander Wang—names that feel extremely familiar. (Not “department store first floor” brands, more like the kind you’d expect on the second or third floor.) With its distinctly American character, New York Fashion Week is known for hosting the most practical and commercial shows.

While looking this up, I came across an interesting behind-the-scenes story. Apparently, New York used to be the last stop among the Big Four, which often led to suspicions of copying. To dispel that perception, the protagonist of The Devil Wears Prada—Anna Wintour—supposedly decided to move New York Fashion Week to the first slot, and pulled American designers who previously showed in other cities back into New York in a major way.

On the left: Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, who inspired Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada.

London Fashion Week is the Big Four where you’ll see the most emerging designers. There’s said to be an unspoken rule that once a brand grows large enough, it “graduates” to other cities like Paris or Milan. But if you flip that logic around, it’s precisely why London can shine as a stage for new talent—so much so that it’s often described as an incubator for emerging designers. When I think about it, many of the young designer brands that are doing well—Simone Rocha, Erdem, JW Anderson—are brands associated with London Fashion Week.

사랑하는 JW Anderson

Now, on to Milan. Italy has so many heritage-rich brands that Milan, along with Paris, is one of the highlights. Brands everyone knows—Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Marni, Max Mara, Moschino, Valentino, Versace, Bottega Veneta, Prada, and many more—show in Milan.

Versace 쇼/ 트렌드와 타협하지 않고 Identity를 고수해 나가는 이탈리아 브랜드들

But the ultimate highlight is undoubtedly Paris. Paris Fashion Week is considered the biggest and most influential of the Big Four, with unmatched scale and tradition. The shows of top luxury houses beloved worldwide—beyond even the “big three” that dominate department stores and duty-free sales (Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Chanel), along with Dior and other globally iconic high-end brands—take place in Paris.

[What Are Those “Impossible” Clothes at Fashion Week? Haute Couture]

Personally, I think the true highlight of Fashion Week is Haute Couture, which is held only in Paris. It’s not an exaggeration to say that haute couture—exclusive to Paris Fashion Week—is what makes Paris the Fashion Week.

Haute couture is responsible for that category of looks: the ones people mock, the ones that trigger the reaction of, “Why would anyone make that, and who would wear it?” Pieces shown in haute couture collections are less “wearable clothing” and more like works of art—or the designer’s realization of a fantasy.

The standout of Spring 2024 Haute Couture was, hands down, Maison Margiela.

In English, people sometimes casually call it “high fashion,” but the term haute couture itself is treated as the highest honor a fashion house can carry: its standards were formalized starting in 1945 and are legally protected within France. To earn the designation “haute couture,” a house must meet requirements set by the Paris couture governing body, and those requirements are famously strict. Just to list a few as examples: the designs must be made-to-measure for private clients; the atelier must be located in Paris; the house must employ at least 15 full-time staff and at least 20 technical artisans; it must present collections at least twice a year (January and July); it must show at least 50 new looks per collection—including both daytime and evening wear… and so on.

For houses that pass this stringent bar, creating a single haute couture showpiece can take months of work. One of the most time-intensive dresses on record is said to be Chanel’s feather dress from the 2018 S/S collection, which reportedly required 1,150 hours of labor. And the 2021 S/S “Miss Dior” dress reportedly took 800 hours to make.

So yes—those outfits people love to mock, the ones they ask “who would ever wear this?” about—those are not easy to make. They aren’t garments designed primarily for practical use. It’s more accurate to view them as wearable art pieces, or even a kind of performance art in a form that a human body can inhabit. Which is why I hope people will pause the ridicule: “Who would walk around wearing that?” Please stop it.

Chanel 18 S/S Haute Couture, Feathered Dress

Dior 21 S/S Haute Couture, Miss Dior Dress

Because the pieces are custom-made, it’s technically meaningless to talk about a fixed “market price,” but costs can range from tens of thousands to millions. That said, haute couture is not something you can simply buy because you have money. You must be invited as a guest to the couture show. It’s essentially a world reserved for fewer than 4,000 carefully selected clients, so becoming a client is extremely difficult. The exact criteria aren’t public, but naturally celebrities—and, often, “society women”—are among those invited.

This is an older reference point (as of 2010), but Bruno Pavlovsky, the president of Chanel’s fashion division, reportedly said that haute couture revenue had increased by 20–30% in recent years, and that many clients came from the Middle East, China, and Russia.

[Outro]

I may not have been invited to the shows, but the world has gotten better—now I can watch them on YouTube. Haute couture shows are starting right now, so I’m going to wrap this up and go watch the runway videos.

And to you reading this: I hope you’ll watch at least one couture show this season with the mindset that you’re viewing art—art that happens to touch human skin. That’s how I’ll end this post.