Fashioning a Men's Week

The long defunct men's fashion week is making a go at being revived at New York's Pier 92.

IMG, the owners of Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week, and ENK, the operators of The Collective and Blue men's fashion trade shows banded together this season to pull together an abbreviated schedule of men's shows. The designers, Charles G. Bailey, Conference of Birds and Nicholas K showed last night and Obakki, Andrew Buckler and Orthodox will show tonight in an annex to the Blue trade show.

Years ago (at least eight, maybe 10) there actually was a separate men's fashion week that designers in New York supported. Men's clothing usually takes longer to produce, so men's collections are shown in Europe in late June through mid-July. New York's men's designers used to show after Milan and Paris, but many men's designers felt they were not getting the attention their collections needed, so they moved to show in Milan. Americans Calvin Klein, John Varvatos and Michael Bastian still show there, and did so last month.

Attempts have been made to make the first day of New York's fashion week, usually the first Friday in September, into an all-menswear day. The menswear collections that do show then get exposure to the press. However, the retail buyers who attend the shows have usually done already done their buying, as dictated by production schedules that have been in place forever.

"It's insane," said Kelly Cutrone, who was producing this week's shows through her company People's Revolution. "Designers are showing their clothing to retailers to do the orders and then waiting two months to show to the press. If they had an original idea, they won't get credit for it because people will think they had two months to review the other designers on Men.Style.com."

"Fashion people are leaders. It's time for someone like Tommy Hilfiger to say, 'hey, I've made my money. Why don't I help the next generation of men's designers'," she continued. "The editors from DNR, Details and GQ showed up because they believe in it. American designers should refuse to go two months late."

Cutrone is right that something has to be done. It either needs to be all one, showing in July, or all the other, showing in September. This half show now/ half show later schedule is starting to look like the fiasco that was women's fashion week in the late 1990s when Helmut Lang moved his New York show to take place before the European markets. Many designers scrambled to show in September and others stuck to the scheduled dates in October and all lost out, as most retailers and media came to New York once, so either they saw the show or they didn't.

I suspect this is the start of a long and continuing conversation. Stay tuned ...

by Lisa Marsh