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1、A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FASHION SHOWFashion scholars have penned histories of the high heel, the corset, and the little black dress, but no one has yet written a definitive history of the fashion show. The omission is curious: The fashion show is not only the promotional linchpin of a multibillion-do
2、llar industry, it was also central to the development of the American department storeand thus to the rise of American consumer culture. The problem may be that the fashion show, like any performative enterprise, is by nature ephemeral. Or perhaps its that the fashion crowd, always in pursuit of the
3、 next thing, lacks the archival impulse: Why hash over yesterdays clothes? Whatever the reason, as Valerie Steele, chief curator and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told me: The topic of fashion shows remains to find its historian.It is, however, possible to stitch tog
4、ether the tale of New Yorks semiannual Fashion Week, which commenced once again last Friday in the tents at Manhattans Bryant Park. Fashion Week in its earliest incarnation was, in some sense, a bid to overthrow the sartorial tyranny of the French. According to Steele, the event got its start in 194
5、3, when a well-known fashion publicist named Eleanor Lambert organized something called Press Week. Lambert was a canny PR maven who recognized that it was a propitious moment for American fashion. Before World War II, American designers were thought to be reliant on French couture for inspiration.
6、When the Germans occupied France in 1940, one of the ensuing calamities was that buyers, editors, and designers were unable to travel to Paris to see the few remaining shows, and the fashion world frettedwould American fashion founder without the influence of French couture? With Press Week, Lambert
7、 hoped to give editors a chance to seeand more important, write aboutthe work of American designers, who, freed up to create without the anxiety of French influence, were quietly making innovative strides with indigenous materials and techniques, writes Caroline Rennolds Milbank in New York Fashion:
8、 The Evolution of American Style. Ruth Finley, publisher of the Fashion Calendar(a pink-and-red schedule that the industry finds indispensable) was present at those early shows. As she tells it, Press Week was held alternately at the Pierre and Plaza Hotels. Journalists and editors stayed on-site, w
9、hich meant there was none of the modern dashing between tents and taxiing around. (Buyers, a key constituent at todays shows, were in those days forced to visit the designers showrooms for a look, Finley says.) Lamberts plan worked. As Milbank writes, magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, whose e
10、ditors were besotted with French fashion, began to feature more work by American designers and, most crucially, to credit them by name. (Many supposedly unknown American designers had been working for years, but their clothing usually bore the label of the retailer for which they created.) American
11、styles were praised as modern, streamlined, and flattering, and American ready-to-wear designers were finally garnering the respect previously reserved for European couturiers. Press Week, which continued through the late 50s, eventually featured work by designers like Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta,
12、 Mollie Parnis, and Pauline Trigere. Long before Lambert entered the picture, however, there were fashion shows in America. William Leach writes in Land of Desire,his excellent study of the rise of capitalism, that in 1903, a New York City specialty store called Ehrich Brothers put on what was likel
13、y this countrys first fashion show, in an effort to lure middle-class female customers into the store. By 1910, many big department stores, including Wanamakers in Philadelphia and New York, were holding shows of their own. (American retailers had likely witnessed what were called fashion parades in
14、 Paris couture salons and decided to import the idea.) The events were an effective way to promote merchandise, and they improved a stores status in the eyes of its clientele: Showing couture gowns bought in Paris, or, more frequently, the stores own copies or adaptations of these garments was evide
15、nce of connoisseurship and good taste. The irony, of course, was that the stores emphasized the exclusivity of French couture, even as they made itor some approximation thereofavailable to a mass-market audience. By the 1920s, the fashion show had gone mainstream. Retailers throughout the country st
16、aged shows, often in a stores restaurant during lunch or teatime. These early shows were often more theatrical than those of today. They were frequently organized around themesthere were Parisian, Persian, Chinese, Russian, and Mexican shows, Leach notesand often presented with narrative commentary. Wanamakers 1908 show, Leach writes, was a tableau vivant styled to resemble the court of Napoleon and Josephine, and the models were escorted by a child don
