Fashion weeks are spreading from city to city

Posted by Helen Lee at 3:15 am October 29th, 2007 | 1 comment

‘I’m going to watch a fashion show’ might sound glamorous for people who aren’t working in the fashion industry who don’t have the privilege of attending some of the world’s biggest runway shows (think Dior, Gucci, Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg). But for the fashion pack, it gets quite unglamorous when the week (or month) is over as this video by Fashion Television sets out to illustrate

I just love the dash of the fashion pack (including Anna Wintour, quite distinguishable with her trademark bob) out of the fashion show location as soon as the designer takes his last bow.

Did you know that in this spring 2008 runway season, New York Fashion Week saw 221 fashion shows run from 9am to 9pm for the week, with 90 shows back to back in Paris? Besides the four fashion capital, Paris, Milan, New York and London, cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Cape Town, Cairo, Madrid, Sau Paolo, Toronto, Dubai, Columbia, Tokyo, Lisbon, Singapore, Montreal, Beijing, and Sydney now have twice yearly fashion weeks of their own.

I’ve only attending various fashion weeks in Australia, working and sitting in the crowd, and I found that I spent more time waiting around than actually watching a runway show, it would work out to be a 1 hour to 10 – 15 minute ratio. If only the whole process could be streamlined so that we should just sit in our seats like a theatre production and have the all the collections show on the same runway 30 minutes after one and another.

As Roxanne Lowit says in the clip, “When there are a few shows, it makes it magic, but when it’s one after another after anther, it’s hard to keep that level going”.