Let’s not forget, it was Helmut Lang who set the date to make the New York shows go first on the international calendar when he moved from Paris to New York and scheduled his show in early September and everyone followed suit. If NYFW was after Paris probably nobody would attend? The new chairman of the CFDA Thom Browne made a strong case for New York being a creative and not just commercial fashion town. His Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince based fashion fairy tale was an event. Browne built an impressive set with a stranded airplane in the middle and a giant skylight with stars at The Shed in the Hudson Yards Development to make a strong case for runway clothes to serve as a dream and experiment. But the general mood was normcore, meaning clothes which can go from the runway straight into real life. If clothes reflect past events and our emotional response to it, it comes as no surprise that in times of war and post-Covid designers fear for their livelihood and keep it simple and relatable. Or what New York does best – sellable. It will be interesting to see where Thom Browne with the intellectual support of his better half, the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton – a proper fashion history scholar – will take New York fashion week with his creativity first mandate. Browne also won his trademark court case against adidas, so the year started well for him. Here are a few more notable shows we saw.

Tory Burch

Gone are the weekends in the Hamptons or Caribbean clothes and in is the wardrobe of a city slicker. Tory Burch clearly spends more time in Manhattan these days than in the country. With her husband Pierre-Yves Roussel as CEO, she can focus on design only. Her invitation of an ancient sculpture gave away her key idea. Burch must have spent weeks in the studio to sculpt her tailoring onto the bodies of her fit models. All the single-breasted jackets looked terrific and well, sculpted on the body. Mixed with interesting colors like acid green and a dash of sex appeal as in her corset-based outfits, this was a winning step forward for the house.

Gabriela Hearst

Hearst likes to champion historically important women of achievement. This time she looked at Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray who was at her time a competitor to architects like Mies van der Rohe but never given the same spotlight. The precision in lines and shapes of Gray was translated into a tailoring-based show of subtle elegance. The flashes of color from Gray’s interior carpets in dresses and suiting jolted the audience and the collection into life.

Thom Browne

This was a tailoring tour de force taking on the best of Japanese masters in the craft like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. Browne and his studio deconstructed and reconstructed jackets, skirts, shirts and pants in a wild material mix where woolen pinstripes clashed with white silky surfaces and sleeves were tied together and knotted to make for a maximalist fashion moment worthy of The Little Prince novel inspiration. Children’s eyes see things bigger, and the designer put a magnifying glass on all his silhouettes.

Michael Kors Collection

Men’s tailoring is one of the main staples of a good Michael Kors Collection show. Add some statement coats, a dash of the Wild West with leather fringing, animal prints and a color palate of rich browns and greys and you have the recipe. This season it all felt a bit flat and the sliced panel skirts looked ill-advised.

AlphaTauri

Nothing like being determined. After pitching up a truck at Pitti Uomo for several seasons now, Red Bull controlled AlphaTauri has set its sights on the buzziest fashion market in the world – the US. Benefitting from Formula 1’s unprecedented popularity, the Salzburg based fashion brand led by Ahmet Mercan came to Lincoln Center and brought along its streamlined performance and function wear to unveil the latest race car design of the Scuderia AlphaTauri. Of course, the two pilots Yuki Tsunoda and Nyck De Vries and models in face masks came along.