Fashion Week Goes Minimal

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City has become one of the top photo ops of the year for style bloggers, not to mention an important badge of merit and success. In the past, a ticket to a designer's show represented acceptance and influence within the fashion industry for a blogger. Now, however, it appears that many of these personal-brand empires, big and small, are going to have to find a new way to participate in Fashion Week as IMG, the company ultimately responsible for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, has decided to discontinue inviting many of the bloggers that have become recent fixtures at Lincoln Center.

IMG seeks to make invitations to fashion shows the highly covetable right of industry insiders it once was-- as they were before the sea of social media swept over fashion week. Catherine Bennet, IMG's senior vice president and managing director, spoke earlier this week with the Wall Street Journal, telling them that 'Fashion Week was becoming a zoo,' which has more than a ring of truth to it. Lincoln Center 'has been swarmed with fashion bloggers, street-style photographers, and fashion fans...in addition to the hundreds of journalists and scores of celebrities.'

This will most likely be welcome news to those who have been attending the shows long before they became the thing to do: buyers, editors, and highly respected clients, many of whom have been bemoaning the three-ring circus Lincoln Center has become. As IMG aptly put it in a recent press release, 'What used to be a platform for established designers to debut their collections to select media and buyers has developed into a cluttered, often cost-prohibitive and exhausting period for our industry to effectively do business.' However, employing this selectivity is not the only change IMG plans to make at Fashion Week: look forward to new satellite venues for runway shows with an eye to increasing space and comfort, as well as digital presentations showcasing collections from the ranks of fledgling designers.