September 10th . 2015, NY Fashion week begins with BCBG
and Nicholas K. Here is little blurb about where Mercedes Benz Fashion
week is being held. (From NY Times post) And now the Full streaming screens are posted for all New Yorks to see the runways. Get Ready!
So after almost five years of being housed at Lincoln Center, the main show venues have moved to two locations: Skylight at Moynihan Station, in the old post office building on West 33rd Street, and Skylight Clarkson Sq in SoHo.
There are fewer shows at both sites, a more select list of designers, and the name of the event is no longer Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week but simply New York Fashion Week: the Shows.
Sponsors like Intel, Lexus and Maybelline have been largely disaggregated from the collections and sequestered in new, separate headquarters on West 14th Street, which will host live discussions and art installations.
There will be streaming screens on 14th Street for passers-by to watch, and hours when consumers can pop into the building and hang with the fashion crowd. There will be a New York Fashion Week app that is free from both the App Store and Google Play that will live-stream the WME/IMG shows (among other things) to anyone in Kansas or California who wants a virtual front-row seat.
The company is in negotiations with ABC Family for a two-hour documentary that will follow seven fashion week figures, including a designer, a buyer and Lameka Fox, an IMG model, throughout the shows. And that is just the beginning.
A few weeks after the ready-to-wear shows end in October, WME/IMG will debut its first-ever network in an exclusive deal with Apple TV — the first such Apple exclusive. Entitled Made 2 Measure (M2M), the all-fashion channel will stream on demand, featuring an original M2M documentary series on designers, industry issues and trends, as well as classic fashion films and documentaries and new looks at the shows that took place at the WME/IMG venues.
The change has been coming for a while. But it hasn’t been the easiest journey, and it doesn’t mean everyone likes the idea.
Fashion Week Minus Six
“Where are we with designers?” asked Mark Shapiro, the 45-year-old kinetic chief content officer for IMG and the man charged with spearheading fashion week’s transformation (among other initiatives).
He was sitting at the head of a long oval conference table on the seventh floor of the IMG New York office at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, wearing a gray Armani suit and a Tom Ford tie, and drumming his fingers against his forehead.
Next to him was Catherine Bennett, 42, the senior vice president and managing director for IMG fashion events and properties, his partner on the project. A fresh-scrubbed lawyer, she spent five years as head of business affairs for the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Her calm demeanor and knowledge of the fashion world functions as the yin to Mr. Shapiro’s disrupter yang.
They were discussing their campaign to persuade brands to show in the company’s venues. A classic New York Fashion Week name came up.
“They asked us to pay for an off-site show,” reported Sara Maniatty, the director of designers and brands for IMG Fashion. “I said no, but if they stayed part of the family, maybe we could do a deal. Then they asked for the venue for free for two seasons.”
“They’re bluffing,” Mr. Shapiro said, rolling his eyes and pulling his ear. “Everyone seems to bluff in this business.”
He joined IMG a year ago and was previously known for being an ESPN wunderkind (he still tends to speak in sports metaphors) and the chief executive of Dick Clark Productions. Fashion is a new world for him. He said he was fascinated by it, but he was still learning its idiosyncrasies, and he got this one wrong: The designer wasn’t bluffing, and ended up showing elsewhere.
This is nothing new: The story of efforts to centralize fashion week has been, historically, a story of failure — and not just in New York, but in London, Milan and Paris, too.
Fashion week began as a loose conglomeration of collection showings put on by designers when and where they wanted. It wasn’t until 1990 in New York, when Michael Kors held a show in a Midtown loft and part of the ceiling fell down on the critic Suzy Menkes, that Fern Mallis, the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America at the time, decided to bring some order to the situation.
She cajoled Hearst and Condé Nast into backing the idea, and almost every designer, including Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, into signing on. In 1993, fashion week moved to tents in Bryant Park, and in 2001 IMG bought the event from the CFDA. In 2010 it moved to Lincoln Center.
Though the artistic association was theoretically attractive to many designers, the costs of switching from Bryant Park to a union location helped send IMG’s budget up a reported 60 percent. To pay for the change, it was forced to seek more and more sponsorship.
“IMG pretty much had to take money from whoever would throw it at them, which is how they ended up with Sweet’N Low cocktails in pink plastic martini glasses,” Ms. Bennett said. Big names, worried about the cheapening of their brands, began to desert the official venues in droves.
Still, even without commercialization as an excuse, the same designer diaspora has occurred in every main fashion-week city, with brands abandoning the Fédération Française de la Couture’s main venue in the Louvre, and the Camera Nazionale della Moda’s site at the Fiera in Milan.
“Designers just don’t like to show in the same place as each other,” said Brian Phillips, the chief executive of Black Frame, a public relations agency for fashion, architecture and art. “They are very aware of context.”
At the same time, social media hit fashion, from street style to bloggers, and celebrities joined the scrum; suddenly, consumers wanted in.
“Fashion week just became this monster no one understood how to control or redirect,” Ms. Mallis said. “We all said the industry needs to sit down and figure out how to reinvent it, but who had the voice of authority?”
Enter the new WME/IMG. If it could offer designers something they could not get for themselves, they could be lured back. And what WME/IMG could offer was packaging.
It’s what it did with shows such as “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Tina Fey, its creator and executive producer, is a WME client, as is its star, Ellie Kemper, as is its pilot director, Tristram Shapeero, as is one of its writers, Charla Lauriston. So why not with fashion shows?
After all, the megalith owns every piece involved except the designers. It owns Art & Commerce, which represents photographers like Steven Meisel, as well as makeup artists like Ms. Westman and hairstylists like Mr. Pita. It owns the Wall Group, which represents stylists like Ilaria Urbinati, who dresses Bradley Cooper, and Micaela Erlanger, who dresses Lupita Nyong’o. It owns IMG Models, which represents Ms. Kloss, Ms. Kerr and Gisele Bündchen. It works with athletes like Serena Williams and LeBron James.
And WME works with front-row-ready Hollywood stars like Amy Adams and Michelle Williams and Ben Affleck, and the agency can put it all together in a glossy package with a great big pixel bow.
Indeed, it has already begun: Beyond the basic show package (venue, runway, backstage, security, lights, catering, live stream) that WME/IMG offered New York Fashion Week, it organized an opening event at Christie’s to unveil the first retrospective in this country of the work of the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, an Art & Commerce client.
IMG will also host a party with Twitter to celebrate the #fashionflock, which includes WME vlogger clients like Mr. Dallas, Lauren Giraldo and Lohanthony; the D.J. will be a WME client, Brendan Fallis.
It is, in theory, win-win for everyone involved.
Yet only about a third of the shows on the fashion week schedule are currently part of the WME/IMG roster; the rest, and most of the tent-pole names such as Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler and Diane von Furstenberg, are showing independently. A few (Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger) are “district associates,” which means they will be part of the WME/IMG schedule and app, but will not appear in the company’s venues.
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