A fashion week is a run of days, twice a year in each major fashion city, when designers present their coming collections to editors, buyers and an ever-growing crowd of photographers outside the venues. The New York version began as a wartime workaround. In 1943, with Paris under German occupation and American journalists unable to travel there, the publicist Eleanor Lambert organised what she called Press Week, so that editors would finally pay attention to home-grown designers.
The early shows were for the press only and came to the editors, who stayed at the Pierre and Plaza hotels, while buyers did their business in showrooms. Later the circus wandered through lofts, galleries, restaurants and nightclubs, until a chunk of ceiling plaster fell during a Michael Kors show in 1990 and organisers concluded that a purpose-built home might be wiser. Two white tents went up in Bryant Park in 1994, and the calendar has been running at full speed ever since.