As couture-clad leggy models slink down the runway this week at the annual Seventh on Sixth fashion show in New York, some other folks will be slinking their way to the bank—and not just the fashion houses hoping to get in on the $180 billion U.S. consumer-apparel market. Those who will also cash in include the backers of this increasingly high-profile, not to mention increasingly mainstream, spectacle.

Seventh on Sixth is part of a growing industry in itself. The event, as well as fashion weeks everywhere, has become bigger than just the business of buying and selling clothes, and the people who run fashion weeks are thinking bigger than New York or Paris runways. They’ve turned organizing shows into a profitable business, and are trying to bring fashion exhibitions in line with other forms of entertainment, such as sports and film.

Today, the events, managed by talent agency IMG, are profitable, sponsored, expensive to be in, expensive to attend, and spinning off into new locations around the globe. Forget the frocks and flocks of fashion editors; fashion week itself is a budding big business.

“There are cities and countries all over the word calling,” says Fern Mallis, vice president of fashion at IMG. Besides the well-known Paris and New York shows, IMG has either produced, bought, launched, or sold sponsorship for fashion weeks in Los Angeles; Miami; Sydney; Singapore; Lakmi, India; London; Hong Kong; Mexico City; and Moscow, as well as the more obscure fashion haunts of San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston. Mallis won’t reveal its total revenue is on the events, but says its fashion division is “growing fast.”

It’s a young business. Until 1991, New York’s designers were left to do their own thing. But that year, the ceiling of the Michael Kors showroom came down on fashion journalist Suzy Menkes’ head and the Council of Fashion Designers of America decided it would be better if it took charge. That November, CFDA rented a space in the Hotel Macklowe and asked designers to show there. Starting price for a small designer was $1,300—a pittance considering that then, at the apex of the supermodel age, it was said that Calvin Klein spent $250,000 on models for a single show.

Two years later CFDA launched a parallel group, Seventh on Sixth, and, inspired by the tent that housed the1992 Democratic National Convention, decided to hold the shows in Bryant Park. The cost of entry rose to $12,000, which included lights, runway, seats, clothing rails, mirrors, tables backstage, and security. (For a smaller fee, designers could and still can be listed on the official schedule and show wherever they like.) Eleven sponsors, including Clairol, General Motors, the New York Times, and Prescriptives, were enlisted to help cover the total costs of about $1.25 million. Evian, the title sponsor, paid a reported $200,000 in addition to providing bottled water for attendees.