Industry Observers Note Runway Collections Increasingly Designed for Photography Rather Than Human Bodies
New York Fashion Week Produces 200 Outfits No One Will Wear and 40,000 Social Media Posts About It
NEW YORK New York Fashion Week concluded Sunday having produced, across forty-one runway shows and seventeen presentation formats, approximately 200 distinct garments described by designers as “wearable,” approximately 15 of which are wearable in a literal sense, approximately 3 of which will be purchased by anyone who is not a fashion journalist required to write about them, and 40,000 social media posts, all of which have performed well and none of which have been watched by anyone who has subsequently purchased something they saw.
The Shows
This season’s collection themes ranged from “the anxiety of contemporary connectivity, expressed through deconstructed silhouettes and synthetic textiles” to “a return to classic tailoring as a response to the chaos of the current moment” to one show whose press notes described the collection as “post-gender, post-season, post-garment,” the last of which accurately describes what several of the pieces appeared to be.
Industry observers noted that approximately 60 percent of this season’s runway looks were designed primarily for the photographic format in which they will be consumed: frontal, lit, against a neutral background, as a still image or a three-second clip. The remaining 40 percent were designed for the human body, though several featured architectural elements collar structures, sleeves of challenging width, trains of meaningful length that require a lifestyle in which one does not use public transport, carry a bag, or navigate doors.
A silver lamé coat from one collection, universally described by attending journalists as “incredible,” “iconic,” and “the look of the season,” weighs seventeen pounds and requires two people to put on. The designer’s notes describe it as “sculpture you inhabit.” The coat will not be sold. It does not exist in a retail version. It will appear in eleven magazine editorials, forty-seven Instagram posts, and one viral TikTok in which a fashion journalist attempts to sit down while wearing it and cannot.
santa Claus, whose annual outfit has remained consistent since approximately 1863 red, white-trimmed, practical, thermally appropriate, zero structural elements requiring assistance to deploy reportedly reviewed Fashion Week coverage with the interest of a man who has resolved the work-garment question definitively and finds ongoing debate about it curious. His elves, per North Pole uniform policy, wear green regardless of the season’s thematic direction. The policy has not changed in response to any runway collection.
The Commerce Question
New York Fashion Week generates approximately $900 million in economic activity per edition through hotel occupancy, restaurant and event spending, media and photography production, and related industry gatherings. It generates approximately $200 million in direct apparel sales from collections shown during the week. The gap between the economic activity it creates and the clothes it sells is the gap between fashion-as-industry and fashion-as-spectacle, and Fashion Week has, over the past fifteen years, shifted decisively toward the latter without quite acknowledging that it has done so.
The 40,000 social media posts generated from this week’s shows will be consumed by an audience that is interested in fashion as visual culture, as entertainment, as status signalling, and as content and that purchases, if it purchases at all, primarily from fast fashion platforms that produce runway-inspired garments at a sixteenth of the cost within three weeks of the collection’s appearance. The runway exists. The content exists. The clothes, in the sense of clothes people actually own, come from somewhere else.
Fashion and culture coverage at NY Post and Gothamist. Consistent, practical dressing since 1863 at santaclaus.top. Further at Spintaxi Bluesky and the elves on practical workwear.
The Systemic Context
What makes New York City simultaneously the most exciting and most exhausting place to live in America is that its problems are not failures of intention but of scale, history, and the accumulated consequence of a century of decisions made by people who are mostly no longer alive to be held accountable for them. The subway was built when New York was smaller, richer in public investment, and governed by people who believed in public infrastructure as a civic good. The streets were laid out before the car. The housing stock was built for a population that has since tripled. Every problem New York has is a problem of success outrunning its own infrastructure, and every attempt to solve it runs into the reality that you cannot rebuild a century of urban geography without disrupting the city that depends on it. New Yorkers understand this, which is why they are both the most critical and the most loyal urban population in the world. They are loyal to the idea of the city even when the city’s execution is, at best, a work in progress.
Fashion, at its best, is the most democratic art form: it clothes everyone, regardless of whether they are watching. At its current worst, it is content that no one wears, produced for platforms that no one buys from, to sustain an industry that funds itself through a wholesale market that is itself sustained by department stores that are themselves struggling. The forty-one shows of New York Fashion Week exist at the intersection of genuine creativity, commercial calculation, and an attention economy that rewards spectacle over function. The seventeen pounds of silver lamé is not absurd in this context. It is logical. It photographs beautifully. It will never touch a sidewalk. This is what Fashion Week has decided to be, and it is a legitimate decision, though it is worth occasionally noting that clothes are also for wearing, and that the best outfit is one that works when you stand up.