Stephanie Steiner | Co-Editor-in-Chief

As much as I love fashion, sometimes I don’t understand it. And that’s okay. Because what most people don’t understand about fashion is that it is art, and art was never meant to be understood by those other than the artist who creates it. That’s what’s so fascinating about fashion for me — that clearly almost no one who is invited to New York Fashion Week sitting in that front row has any clue why the designer chose to use that fabric to lay that certain way or why they chose to have their models start dancing on the runway — it just happens and people are inspired and society reacts.

Fashion Week’s purpose is for designers to present their collections, usually in a high-fashion manner. But high fashion is never meant to go on the streets. It is insanely out of context because when society adapts it, they adapt a simmered down version of what they see on the runways.

Similarly, Fashion Week is a means of expression, a salute to all the hard work that goes on in the industry. However, there is too much work that goes unnoticed in the industry. The long hours spent sewing intricate pieces of fabric together aren’t what people are thinking about as the models strut the runway — they’re thinking about if and how this will become a trend that they can rave about. They’re thinking about how the next big brand will be different than the last. They’re thinking about how they can wear clothing like this without spending their life savings on it.

But there’s more that we should be caring about.

We should care about the factories and the production of our clothing — where it comes from and who makes it. We should care about why some clothes are very cheap and some are more expensive.

I have a great appreciation for companies that are bringing this concept to light. Everlane, for example, focuses on providing “radical transparency” to its consumers by featuring the makers and factories of the items they sell, along with how much it costed to produce it and how much they marked it up upon selling it. How cool is that? I hope this is what we continue to see in the textile industry and in the economy. I hope this is what provides more awareness for what goes on behind the glitz and glamour of the runway lights during New York Fashion Week.

While fashion is the art of expression, the work that goes behind it is a whole different story.

Photo by Stephanie Steiner