New York
Fashion Week

New York Fashion Week began in 1943 as "Press Week," created by the publicist Eleanor Lambert, then press director of the New York Dress Institute. The event’s purpose was explicit: with wartime travel restrictions cutting fashion editors off from Paris, Lambert organized a coordinated showcase to redirect press attention toward American designers, who had largely been ignored in favor of French collections up to that point. The strategy worked — publications including Vogue increasingly began featuring American design in the seasons that followed.

The event, known by the 1950s as "Press Week of New York," continued on an annual basis for decades before its modern consolidation. In 1993, the newly organized Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), under president Stan Herman and executive director Fern Mallis, unified the city’s scattered individual designer shows into a single scheduled event staged in white tents at Bryant Park, branded "7th on Sixth" after New York’s Garment District thoroughfare.

The commercial rights to "7th on Sixth" were acquired by the sports and entertainment company IMG in 2001, which ran the week’s production for over a decade. The tents left Bryant Park in 2010 for Lincoln Center, before the week moved to its current primary venue, Spring Studios in Lower Manhattan, in 2015 — reflecting a broader shift in the schedule away from a single anchor tent complex toward shows staged across multiple venues citywide.

The CFDA’s official Fall/Winter 2026 schedule ran 11–16 February 2026 across more than 60 runway shows and presentations, opening with Rachel Scott’s runway debut for Proenza Schouler. In December 2025, the CFDA announced that official NYFW events would prohibit animal fur starting with the September 2026 season, aligning New York with London’s 2018 fur-free policy.