What is fashion week for?
Yes, we're asking again
Australian Fashion Week 2025 has just wrapped, and we are lucky to have it.
Late last year, IMG (which owned and operated fashion week in Sydney for two decades) abruptly pulled the plug. The schedule had already been announced. Participating designers (like the artistic upcycler Iordanes Spyridon Gogos, whose work is pictured, top) were understandably vexed, having already started working on their collections and show plans, and long relied on the event to garner press.
The question of how many rely on AFW for wholesale orders is harder to answer.
I think we can safely say that for those enjoying existing relationships with retailers, both domestic and international, fashion week is not the decide-all when it comes to orders. Not least because of the timing. Buyers have generally already decided who they’re going to order from well before May, and already allocated their budgets.
Which leaves us once again asking, do we actually need fashion weeks? Who are they for? Designers and trade? Media? Freelance creatives who make their living from events as well as photo shoots; the stylists, directors, hair and makeup teams. The many small businesses that provide services, from food to PR to transport? Influencers, photographers and the whole street style circus?
Answer: all of the above.
Then there are the existential questions, like: Does the whole fashion week concept not belong in a bygone era, given that it was invented back when new styles were revealed just twice a year, and jealously guarded by fashion’s elite gatekeepers, to be revealed only in the September and March issues?
That was the B.S. era - Before Smartphones
When I first worked at Vogue, we used to wait eagerly for the fashion director to return from Paris, then all crowd into a meeting room where she would painstakingly talk us through each look and theme. “Chanel opened with a bouclé shorts-suit in ice pink. Note the round-toe pump in silver…” And, “Wine! Wine is back! Gemma wore strapless burgundy taffeta at Marc…”
First we’d heard of it. I kid you not.
Then we’d set about putting these together…
Magazines actually still do this, but since anyone can watch the livestreams on their phones as they happen, they’re not nearly so exciting.
And so to the sustainability questions: Are fashion weeks at least partly to blame for fuelling the rapid trend cycle? Can anyone actually afford to do a runway these days without a corporate sponsor? How wasteful are these shows? What’s the carbon footprint of everyone flying across the country, if not the world?
During Covid, Simon Lock’s digitised wholesale solutions startup, ORDRE, co-authored a report with the Carbon Trust that attempted to calculate the emissions of the ‘Big 4’ fashion weeks (NY, London, Milan and Paris) over a year.
Considering “the travel activity of buyers from 2,697 retail organisations (approximately 11,000 individual buyers) and 5,096 fashion designers involved in the ready-to-wear buying process”.
It was… a lot.
Enough to light up the Eiffel Tower for 3,060 years.
Or keep 51,000 cars on the road.
Mr Lock was integral in the recent return of Aus fashion week (he journeyed presumably by plane, not boat, from his home in Paris) - a full circle moment given he started it in the first place. It was Lock’s company that sold the event to IMG in 2005.
Now, I’ve been attending on and off this whole time and (as a horrendously frequent flyer myself) I absolutely get the arguments for not having fashion week, or for having a scaled-back one, or for revamping its purpose and/or operating system, yet still I say this: we do need events to bring our industry together, market designers and support emerging talent.
Fashion gets a lot of flack, not least from me, but here’s another question for you: Why we don’t we hear people saying, “Oh they shouldn’t have the tennis! Think of all those players flying about!”
Or, “You know what, we shouldn’t have live theatre - they could just do it online.”
Or, “That boat show. Ugh! Look at them selling their fancy boats, it’s a bloody disgrace.”
Answer: Because fashion’s an easy target.
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