By Dexter Mullins
NBC News

 

While designer Tracy Reese was putting the final touches on her models before her show on Sunday, hundreds of fashion aficionados streamed in to find their seats. The house lights dimmed, the music kicked up in volume and the crowd quickly grew quiet.

Once the tarp was removed from the runway, the lights flew up and the first model stepped out in her stilettos and commanded the attention of the room. The near deafening thunderous snapping from the media cameras at the end of the runway made it clear the show had begun.

Just another day at New York Fashion Week.

As the glitz and glamour comes to an end today, it’s hard to imagine a time when the star-studded event didn’t exist. But New York City wasn’t always the style icon it is today.

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“Fashion Week developed slowly – first in Paris, and then in New York,” said Dr. Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

There are more dramatic shows on the European circuit, but New York has become one of the most important shows of the bunch. For anyone who was privileged enough to grab a ticket to this year’s fall 2012 Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, they could certainly call the styles sauntering down the runway pieces of art.

Eleanor Lambert, known by many in the industry as the Empress of Fashion, was indeed the driving force behind New York Fashion Week, as well as many other major milestones in the industry.

“It was much later in the 1940s that Eleanor Lambert realized, ‘If we really focus it on a week and bring in journalists and buyers we can get much greater attention for fashion.’  And now of course they're dozens and dozens of Fashion Week's everywhere from Johannesburg to Mumbai from Rio to Copenhagen,” Steele said.

Lambert is credited with propelling the careers of Norman Norell, Oscar de la Renta, Anne Klein and Halston to the level of prominence they enjoy today. During the 1940s and 50s big fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar primarily focused on Paris as the epicenter of fashion.

Lambert’s belief that American fashion was important put her at odds with editors initially, but as she made more American designers known, they slowly came around. While serving as director of the New York Dress Institute during the same time period, she introduced the concept of two centralized fashion weeks, one fall and one spring, in an effort to try and organize uncoordinated showings by designers.

From those efforts, New York Fashion Week was born.

“I think for a lot of people in the industry, fashion week is like the crème-de-la-crème of fashion,” said Deena Campbell, Associate Editor of Uptown Magazine.  “I also think it's like an industry get together. You get to see a lot of the editors and designers. It's just a fun way to kind of see and be seen for me. And I think a lot of that translates into our pages as well when we send our stylists to the shows.”

What started as a small and concentrated effort to give American designers a voice in the industry has transformed New York into the capital of the fashion industry. Organizations like the Council of Fashion Designer of America , also a creation of Lambert’s, have brought philanthropic efforts to fashion and recognition among the industry with the CFDA Awards – considered the Oscars of fashion.

Now that fashion week is such a large scale event, it draws a different audience.

“Ten years ago, fashion week was a very exclusive, very private affair where buyers and stylists and the press would come in to a very closed environment, look at something, choose which images would be portrayed to the world, and then you'd have to go buy a magazine in order to see what was being favored,” said Simon Collins, Dean of the School of Fashion at Parsons The New School for Design. “That was how it worked.”

“That's all different now. Everyone knows that Style.com has the runway shows 10 minutes after they show. In fact, you can see them simultaneously,” Collins said.

There are live shows streaming from YouTube and many of the major fashion sites have slideshows up within minutes of a show ending. Some groups like MADE, an arm of fashion show sponsor the Milk Group, have an app that lets users attending their fashion shows instantaneously view images of looks that walk down the runway and get buying information for them.

After New York Fashion Week ends today, designers will go back to work making new styles for the upcoming season and consumers will be waiting anxiously. 

“Fashion's become not just a major socio-economic force, but a kind of popular obsession for people,” Steele said. “Kind of like big-time sports.”