This season, New York Fashion Week (NYFW) commences at a dire moment for US multi-brand retail. Brands, many still reeling from the Matches and Ssense bankruptcies, are now faced with the reality that they are unlikely to receive payment for any of the money they were owed before Saks Global filed in January. That doesn’t change the key purpose of the fashion show (beyond the noise): designers — many of whom, in New York, are independent — getting in front of the people who will buy, stock and sell their clothes.
Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman will all have buyers attending fashion month this season, the company confirmed to Vogue Business. Many brands will host these buyers at shows and appointments, cautiously optimistic about the retailers’ future under Saks’s new ownership. But some founders remain ambivalent; others are opting for smaller order sizes for the time being.
The Saks bankruptcy puts pressure on an event already strained by tough economics. Each season, NYFW — populated by primarily independent designers — prompts discourse about the big names leaving (last year, Willy Chavarria joined a long lineage of New York designers decamping for Paris) and the impossibility of running an independent fashion brand and putting on a show with already-limited funds and institutional support.
Still, season after season, New York designers show up on-schedule, knowing that a show (or a presentation) is the best way to get in front of the buyers who are in town for the week, before heading off on their fashion month circuit. This season, as brands are more cognizant than ever of the need to diversify their wholesale offerings, who will be in town and buying — and what are they looking for?
Who’s in town?
Though retailers’ own budgets are increasingly constrained, the usual US players will be in attendance — Bloomingdale’s, Moda Operandi, Net-a-Porter, The Webster, Mytheresa, and Nordstrom among them. US boutiques like Oakland’s McMullen, Atlanta’s newly relaunched Jeffrey, and Elyse Walker will also be in town for the week.
Jeffrey founder Jeffrey Kalinsky is only planning to take appointments, not attend shows. “I usually have a list of people that I don’t know but I want to know, and I’m reaching out months before market and trying to make appointments,” he says. “I just think my time is better spent in a showroom. I need to know the price of something, not just if I like it.” Plus, Kalinsky says, given shows are no longer solely for buyers and fashion press, he can do his job better in showrooms than from a show seat (where visibility is not guaranteed).
“It’s not necessarily that they have to be here sitting at a fashion show,” luxury consultant Robert Burke says of buyers in town. “The showrooms like a CD network in New York play a very pivotal role for brands.” He anticipates that there will be a number of showrooms that will be very busy with specialty store appointments over the next week, for both New York and international brands.
Emily Dawn Long, for instance, is one of the brands that Rickie De Sole, VP fashion director at Nordstrom, is excited to see this fall, having recently launched the brand. Emily Dawn Long doesn’t show at NYFW — but is throwing a dance party at Soho’s Sub Mercer on February 13. (She also hosts appointments at her Lower East Side showroom — not just during fashion week.)
Not everyone is coming to New York. Atlanta’s Ant/dote won’t have any buyers in town, the retailer confirmed (founder Lauren Amos has attended NYFW in the past); nor will Los Angeles-based Maxfield.
