On the evening of August 21, thousands of people (all with a certificate of vaccination against Covid) gathered on the Great Lawn in Central Park in Manhattan to follow “We Love New York: The Homecoming Concert”, an event with which the city wanted to celebrate a sort of rebirth after the long silence of the pandemic. Last month an article in the New York Times reported that from 2010 to date New York City has welcomed 629,000 new residents, a figure that is a setback to those who already predicted the slow death of the city. Now, the Homecoming Concert, alas, was interrupted at its most beautiful by Hurricane Henri, but the energy it wanted to represent has not dissipated at all. Indeed, the upcoming Fashion Week is ready to pick it up and enhance it.
After two almost completely digital editions, on Tuesday 7 September the first shows in presence will be back in New York. Until the 12th Spring Studios will be the main venue for the events, 91 in all, and after weak editions, with the forfeits of names such as Michael Kors and Tom Ford himself, president of the CFDA who organizes it, and paid the consequences of a ‘ an organization so far not very fluid (Nyfw is actually the creation of two parents, Cfda and Img, which produces it), New York aims at relaunching it with a well-defined strategy: strongly enhancing fashion “made in the USA”.
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A national calendar of events and fashion shows
Already last February Ford had decided to redesign the official calendar of the event as the “American Collections Calendar”, an agenda extended beyond the Nyfw editions and which conveys all the events – fashion shows, presentations – of US brands every season. Although Los Angeles is an important manufacturing center, New York certainly remains the national fashion capital: according to the most recent data from the administration, its fashion industry involves 180,000 people, 6% of the city’s total workforce, and generates wages totaling $ 11.5 billion. About 900 are the fashion companies based in New York, chosen to live and work even by a third of the 19 thousand designers in the country.
Who comes back, who debuts (thanks to the White House)
The return to New York also convinced Thom Browne and Altuzarra to return, and Jeremy Scott, who will bring his creations for Moschino, and Peter Dundas are expected. Even in the debuts a patriotic wind blows: on the calendar, in fact, there are the first shows by Sergio Hudson and Markarian, the two brands protagonists of the presidential inauguration ceremony of Joe Biden last January and which grew quickly right after that catwalk. Hudson had dressed former First Lady Michelle Obama, and Markarian the new one, Jill Biden. The Markarian fashion show will be in the Rainbow Room, a historic restaurant in the Comcast Building, a new location that also expresses the desire to enhance the symbols of the Big Apple: the Fifth Avenue Association has also given its contribution to the new fashion week for the first time, providing 608 Fifth Avenue as a hub, a space distributed over three floors between Saks Fifth Avenue and Rockefeller Center. Instead, it will be a symbol of New York to host the Collina Strada parade: the Brooklyn Grange is the largest rooftop farm in the world, where about 45 tons of organic products grow every year: an interesting choice, also to speak in a different way. of sustainability, involving in the fashion industry a segment that is not directly part of it, such as food production.
The Met Gala will also celebrate American fashion
The most awaited date, however, is September 13, when Nyfw will have just closed: that evening the famous Met Gala will return, the first in the Covid era, which will open the exhibition “In America: a Lexicon for Fashion”, another piece of this convinced focus on American fashion which will continue next May with “In America: an Anthology of Fashion”, a retrospective that will go back to the origins of the country. It will be organized by the youngest committee ever formed, with Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Naomi Osaka and the poet Amanda Gorman, also the protagonist of the inauguration ceremony of the Biden presidency and who immediately after her performance signed a contract with Img Models. .