The fashion industry takes a lot of heat: mainly it’s accusations of being too trivial to actually matter in the real world. When attending fashion weeks you realize just how vast this “trivial” matter is. As you would expect, it all started in Paris. The founder of Haute Couture, Charles Frederick Worth invited socialites to view a selection of his pre-made original designs shown on women walking around simple runway. It was a novelty at the time, but it proved to be a great success and soon other designers followed. Thus, the Parisian Fashion Week was born. During the second World War, the occupation of France forced the world to look to other countries for a fashionable kick. Eleanor Lambert took advantage of it and shifted the press’ attention to New York and their local designers, calling it the Press Week. Giovanni Battista Giorgini was inspired by Lambert’s move and brought the press to Palazzo Pitti in Florence so that Italian designers could showcase their craftsmanship to the world. As Italian fashion grew in popularity the city of Florence couldn’t keep up and so the event was moved to Milan. In 1975 Milan presented its first Settimana Della Moda. A few years later London fashion week followed, completing the big four.
This year’s Copenhagen Fashion Week made clear what a big platform the fashion world actually is. As a discipline, fashion can be a way of communicating the simplest yet most intricate matters and fashion week poses as the elevated media for this subtle form of communication. Fashion weeks don’t simply serve as a way of showing the trends for upcoming seasons. Rather, it is a way of discussing topics, promoting talent and innnovation, as well as marketing one’s country via a highly acclaimed channel. At Copenhagen Fashion Week it was made clear how important sustainability is to the industry and the world, while Eva Kruse pointed out how fashion week brings jobs and opportunities to the table. Designers of Copenhagen were also given the opportunity to master their creative flow into a spectacular show, which Henrik Vibskov certainly showed to be a master of, with his fantastic watershow. The simple fact of putting oneself on the map might be enough of a reasons why fashion weeks were established in the first place and are still emerging all over the world, from Toronto to Copenhagen, all the way to Shanghai. In fact, fashion weeks have proved to be an excellent way to enhance the reputation of local designers and promote local creative industries in an ever more globalized world.
