5 shows that prove that New York Fashion Week is not dead Despite some claiming otherwise

The New York Fashion Week, seen from the eyes of a European, who also lives and works in Milan, is something peculiar: accustomed as we are to having the big European brands right in front of us, giants that have dominated the industry for decades, what happens on the other side of the ocean seems small and far away – but it is not necessarily so. American design often ends up the victim of a certain prejudice (from which even the author of this piece suffers from occasionally) that leads to consider it secondary to the work of European designers. Even giants such as Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors (who presented a very valuable collection this fashion week) receive very lukewarm attention compared to the great European luxury brands, while cult American brands such as Bode, The Row, Enfants Riches Deprimés or ERL either do not attend, or present elsewhere (The Row moved to Paris this year, to name one) or have occasional presences as in the case of Pyer Moss, who practically disappeared after its couture show last July. Meanwhile, american designers who become famous (from Teddy Santis to Tremaine Emory and Rhuigi Villaseñor, to name a few) enjoy enormous influence but operate in a sphere very far from the classic luxury fashion that New York Fashion Week follows.

Yet, taking note of this curious configuration for which American fashion is more influential than ever but the American fashion week is not, to define in a too tranchant way the New York Fashion Week as something irrelevant is to generalize unnecessarily. If it is true that New York does not have the same impact as Milan or Paris, it is also true that to dismiss all the collections in bulk as insignificant means not recognizing the excellent work signed by a series of creatives who would attract much more praise and resonance if they weren't victims of the Eurocentric prejudice.

So here are 5 shows that show that New York Fashion Week is not dead.

Laquan Smith

Maryam Nassir Zadeh debuted as a boutique, presenting her first collection way back in 2012. In recent years her aesthetic inspired by vintage, a friend of an apparently chaotic styling but built with a very careful eye has been refining more and more, culminating with the last two collections and especially in the recent FW22 which, in addition to having brought body positivity also in menswear, has managed to lower the creative language of the designer in an aesthetic that is both very personal but also extremely wearable – a voice of the hands on fashion of which we will surely hear about for a very long time in the coming years.