How New York Fashion Week Created American Style

In the early 1900s, America took its fashion cues from the glam and glitz of Hollywood. And Hollywood — like most of the world — took its cues from the fashion houses of Paris. The New York City garment industry was based around the manufacturing trade, not the trendsetting designers that made Paris the couture capital of the world.

But all that changed in the 1940s when World War II took hold of Europe. “The occupation of Paris by the Nazis meant that all the Allied countries were cut off from fashion news for really the first time in centuries,” explains Valerie Steele, curator of the FIT Fashion Museum. That left Hollywood as the de facto US fashion capital. But a publicist and fashion enthusiast in New York, Eleanor Lambert, had other ideas.

In 1943 Lambert launched “Press Week,” a selection of designs curated from New York designers by the New York fashion press. The US fashion scene had been growing slowly through the 1930s, and now Lambert had created a platform to introduce their garments to the American public.

Polly Mellen, a fashion editor who knew Lambert, remembers how Press Week energized the American fashion industry. “It was so exciting, I ran to work every day.” And with good reason: “It was a whole different way of dressing,” Mellen says. “Less fancy. Less uptight. Much more exciting to a young person.” And that practical casual dress became the hallmark of American style. Paris took note. Mellen sees it as the beginning of a new reciprocity between continents: “I think it started Europe looking at us, the American fashion market.”

This story originally aired on the Fishko Files. It was produced by Sara Fishko, edited by Karen Frillman and mixed by Wayne Shulmister.