NEW YORK FASHION WEEK

Name: New York Fashion Week
Start: 2027-02-10
End: 2027-02-16
Location: New York

February and September · New York · Five or Six Days · Since 1943 · Fashion

By invitation · Arranged for members who are asked

The full cast of a New York Fashion Week show gathered for a portrait in a downtown loft — I · The Cast

Dates: 10 to 16 February 2027September 2027, dates to follow
WhereVarious venues, New York
DressLounge suit
AdmissionBy invitation of the host
The weatherIn February New York reaches about 42°F by day and 30°F at night, and rain or snow falls on about one day in three.
The tableThe Court dines afterwards at Balthazar, 80 Spring Street, New York (balthazarny.com).
In companyA member who holds an invitation tells the Secretary, and the Court brings its members together where it can.RSVP tells the Secretary that a member means to attend. Send passes the engagement’s name, its date and the address of its page to whomever the reader chooses, or, on a computer, copies the address; the Court itself sends and keeps nothing.RSVP

New York Fashion Week shows the autumn collections in February and the spring collections in September. Five or six days each time, across venues scattered through Manhattan.

It is the oldest fashion week in the world. Paris, Milan and London all came afterwards, and all of them copied the format.

Models walking a daylit runway before a seated front row at New York Fashion Week — II · The Front Row

The Invention

In 1943 the Germans held Paris and the American fashion press could not get there.

Eleanor Lambert was press director of the New York Dress Institute, an association of garment unions and manufacturers. She understood the absence of Paris as an opening rather than a problem, gathered a showcase of American designers for the national and regional press, and called it Press Week.

It worked at once. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, which had filled their pages with French clothes for decades, began printing Americans. Norman Norell and Claire McCardell became names. By the mid-fifties the thing was an institution.

Lambert had already created the International Best Dressed List and helped start the Museum of Modern Art. She went on to begin the Costume Institute’s benefit, which became the Met Gala, and to found the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She made her last public appearance at New York Fashion Week in September 2003 and died a few weeks later, aged one hundred.

Models standing in look order behind the curtain backstage before a New York Fashion Week show — III · Backstage

The Wandering

The shows stayed scattered across the city for fifty years. In 1993 the CFDA put them under tents in Bryant Park and called it Seventh on Sixth, after the garment district’s avenue and the park’s.

They moved to Lincoln Center in 2010 and left it in 2015 after a dispute over the use of public parkland. Then Skylight Clarkson Square. Then Spring Studios. Then out across the city again.

New York has a list of buildings that changes from season to season.

A model in a black-and-cream crochet dress walks the marble floor beneath a spiral staircase at Proenza Schouler’s spring 2027 show, the front row behind at New York Fashion Week — IV · Proenza Schouler

What to Know

Every seat is given. There are no tickets, and the front rows belong to buyers, editors and the houses’ own clients.

The calendar is kept by the CFDA and descends directly from a printed schedule that Ruth Finley began in the 1940s and ran for seventy years, telephoning houses herself to stop them clashing.

February shows autumn and winter. September shows spring and summer. Both run six months ahead of the clothes reaching a shop.

The week is worth something to the city. The figure usually quoted is close to nine hundred million dollars.

The mistake is thinking the shows are the week. Most of what matters happens at the presentations, the showroom appointments and the dinners, and a good many people who come for fashion week never sit down at a runway at all.

Questions

When is New York Fashion Week in February 2027?

The CFDA’s Fashion Calendar lists New York Fashion Week Fall-Winter 2027 for 10 to 16 February 2027. The September 2027 dates are to follow; the September 2026 season ran from 10 to 15 September.

Can the public go to New York Fashion Week?

The shows on the official schedule are attended by invitation. The CFDA has opened the week to the public by other means: in September 2025, through a partnership with Rockefeller Center, shows were streamed for anyone to watch at the Rink and the Channel Gardens.

How does a designer get on the New York Fashion Week schedule?

The CFDA owns and organises the Fashion Calendar and the Official New York Fashion Week Schedule. Since acquiring the Fashion Calendar in 2014, it has admitted designers to the official schedule through a formal application process.

What should you wear to New York Fashion Week?

The CFDA publishes no dress code for the week. The Court wears a lounge suit.

The opening look of Altuzarra’s spring 2027 show, a black leather jacket over a full plaid skirt, beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Woolworth Building’s lobby at New York Fashion Week — V · Altuzarra

The Court

New York Fashion Week is not the Court’s own, and the Court will not pretend it can seat a member at a show. Those rooms belong to the houses.

What the Court arranges is the week around them: showroom appointments, the presentations that welcome guests, and the tables where the collections are actually discussed. Getting there, where to stay, and the table afterwards are sought on a member’s behalf, as for the Court’s other engagements.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.