(New York) In the heat and with an eye on the strike in Hollywood, New York launches its Spring-Summer 2024 Fashion Week on Friday with the returns to its catwalks of the brand Helmut Lang and heavyweight Ralph Lauren.
The festivities have already started, outside the official calendar, with a sensual fashion show filled with transparent materials at Coach on Thursday evening, briefly disrupted by the animal rights organization Peta.
In the setting of Manhattan’s central library and under the eyes of fashion popess Anna Wintour, seated next to Jennifer Lopez, an activist infiltrated the middle of the models, her body naked and covered in paint with registration ” Coach: leather kills » (“Coach: leather kills”), followed by another holding a sign with the same inscription.
Wednesday evening, fashionistas and celebrities (Naomi Campbell, Doja Cat, Naomi Osaka, Gigi Hadid) had already been able to meet in the large auditorium of the Manhattan Center for the Victoria’s Secret evening, around the film that the lingerie brand will broadcast at the end of September on Amazon Prime.
The film, titled Victoria’s Secret The Tour 23and which highlights the work of designers and artists from Lagos, London, Bogota and Tokyo, must replace the brand’s famous fashion shows, accused of conveying the caricatured image of a woman as an object, and abandoned in 2019.
Yellow taxi
The official calendar offers a shower of young talents and emerging brands, among established names and a handful of heavyweights (Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, 3.1 Phillip Lim, Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst, Carolina Herrera, Tory Burch, Luar), the recipe that allows New York to get the ball rolling at fashion weeks, before London and the most popular, Milan and Paris.
For the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Steven Kolb, the program highlights “the strength of this city, in terms of creative thinking” and shows that New York remains “a cornerstone” of fashion.
Under the humid heat of the New York summer, a six-day marathon kicks off Friday afternoon in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Helmut Lang, who marked the 1990s and 2000s thanks to to the minimalist aesthetic of the Austrian artist.
Helmut Lang the designer left fashion in 2005, but Helmut Lang the brand continued to exist, bought by Prada, then by the Japanese group Fast Retailing, also owner of Uniqlo.
She returns to the catwalks of the Big Apple with a collection concocted by her new artistic director, Peter Do, considered one of the best talents in New York fashion.
The parade is announced with nostalgia, through the image of a yellow taxi, a nod to the founder, the first fashion designer to put his name in advertising on the neon lights of these vehicles at the end of the 1990s.
Fewer red carpets
Another brand to make its return on Friday, but in Brooklyn, where many of the fashion shows have migrated, the giant Ralph Lauren, symbol of the “ preppy » (BCBG) and incarnation par excellence of American fashion in the world, with its annual turnover of more than 6 billion dollars. The Bronx-born designer’s brand has not shown in New York since 2019.
The season is marked by the double strike of Hollywood screenwriters and actors for better remuneration, reducing red carpets for previews to a minimum, so many lost opportunities for brands to dress stars and let it be known.
“Red carpets are certainly a way to address the public,” puts Steven Kolb into perspective, but the fashion shows and content broadcast by brands on social networks will “contribute to a truly audible and visible Fashion Week,” assures -he.
