New Yorkers have complained about fashion shows since time immemorial — or since 1903, when Sixth Avenue dry-goods emporium Ehrich Brothers hosted the first one in the US.
In the intervening years, police have tried to stop them; editors have tried to tame them; the industry, and the designers themselves, continue to try to improve or disrupt them. And New York’s relevance as a fashion capital has continued to shift in relation to the more exclusive chic of Paris.
“New York Fashion Week has always felt like it has needed to prove itself,” said historian Dana Goodin, who co-hosts the fashion podcast “Unravel.” But, she added, that’s part of the cyclical, mercurial, fickle nature of fashion. “Everything changes so rapidly.”Twelve years after Ehrich Brothers brought the Paris-born “fashion parade” to the States, department stores across the country were holding their own shows or opening parties to showcase the latest trends and styles.
According to William Leach’s “Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture,” these presentations were at once democratic and, sometimes, almost stupidly extravagant. They often revolved around a theme, such as “Napoleon and Josephine” or “Monte Carlo,” for which the late Gimbels’ Herald Square location had casinos, roulette tables and fake Mediterranean gardens installed in the store.
These shows, wrote Leach, could draw crowds of thousands and were “so potentially disruptive to the ordinary conduct of city life” that police required merchants to take out licenses for them and even “threatened to terminate them altogether.”
Most of the American-made fashions at the time were just knockoffs of French couture, and the shows weren’t for the press, but for customers. The fancier, made-to-measure houses did host viewings of their latest collections for journalists. But those shows weren’t quite as fun.
The couturier Mainbocher, for instance, “only served ice water [at his presentations],” fashion historian Caroline Milbank told The Post. “The focus was solely on the clothes, not on socializing.”
Fashion shows became so commonplace that Vogue’s longtime editor Edna Woolman Chase complained in her 1953 memoir that a lady couldn’t “lunch or sip a cocktail . . . without having lissome young things in the most recent models swaying down a runway 6 inches above her nose.”
It wasn’t until World War II that the American fashion industry would come into its own — when rich, well-heeled Americans could no longer rely on Nazi-occupied Paris for their couture.
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