It's 9 p.m. in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and I'm watching a fashion show by a designer I've never heard of. It's the fourth fashion show by a designer I've never heard of that I've seen tonight, and according to the schedule, there are two more to go; they run the shows back-to-back here at Aurora Fashion Week, shuttling attendees up and down the stairs of a town-hall type of building near the center of town. The designer is called Alina Muha, and actually, her clothes aren't bad. But not for the first time this week, I find myself wondering: What am I doing here?
On a factual level, I know the answer to that question. I was invited to attend Aurora Fashion Week and to speak at one of its offshoot events, and given that my lifelong love affair with Russia had been unrequited until now, I jumped at the opportunity. My days are filled with the Hermitage, and tracing Raskolnikov's anxious steps up and down Sadovaya Street, and practicing my terrible Russian on curbside pierogi vendors, and eyeing Saint Petersburg's rather remarkable-looking techno-goths. I'm having a grand time, in other words. Then night falls, and it's back to the back-to-back Aurora Fashion Week shows. I have the distinct impression that the Aurora directors want me to report on these shows, or review the collections. I wouldn't be doing anyone any favors if I did.
Aurora is a relatively new event on the fashion calendar, and it's only to be expected that it's still riding with its training wheels on, as far as organizing and programming a fashion week is concerned. There was a whole naïve "let's put on a show!" enthusiasm about the event that I found rather winning, in fact. And as a fashion journalist, I'm always keen to find talent in unexpected places—one of my very favorite collections last season was from Maki Oh, a label based in Lagos, Nigeria. I don't believe for a moment that New York, London, Paris, and Milan have a monopoly on fashion. I do believe that the fashion weeks in these cities serve a very clear purpose. In case that purpose isn't self-evident to anyone reading this, here's my take, in a nutshell. Twice a year, the best, most innovative, and most commercially important fashion brands convene, in these four cities, to preview their upcoming collections for fashion editors and retailers. The retailers come to buy; the editors to report and to get ideas for fashion editorials and the like. Throw in some parties and some street-style paparazzi and a lot of very hungry people trying to get taxis, and that's fashion week. It's work. And so when I ask myself the question "What am I doing here?" at Aurora Fashion Week, what I'm really asking is, "Is this work?" And further: "Is anyone here working?"
I don't think so. In the past decade, as the audience for fashion has grown more global, there's been a synchronous advance of the idea of fashion week not as a venue for work but as a form of entertainment. And cities everywhere want a piece of that action. That's led to the proliferation of a new kind of fashion week, one in which the spectacle of catwalk shows is treated largely as an end in itself. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about fashion weeks like the ones in Tokyo, or Sydney, or São Paulo, or Mumbai, which serve regional fashion industries and are working events like the ones in the established fashion capitals. I'm not talking about the fashion week in Miami, which is focused on swimwear. Nor am I talking about Copenhagen Fashion Week, say, or the fashion week in Berlin that starts tomorrow and kicks off Style.com's expanded global fashion coverage. Again, those are events that serve discrete and distinctive fashion scenes.
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