Introduction to Fashion - Part 1: Schedule

When I started to become interested in Fashion, I found it hard to keep up with all the fashion terms and most of all understand how the fashion industry works. Introduction to Fashion will be a series of short posts to help introduce anyone into the world of fashion.

I think one of the hardest things to grasp is the schedule of the collections in the fashion industry because there are quite a lot; 6 alone for womenswear and it can become extremely confusing. Honestly, I still hard it find nowadays to keep track of which fashion weeks are happening when and so I hope that this can act as a guide for those of you who are interested in the fashion industry.

Rick Owens Fall/Winter 2013
Source: Vogue.com

Most designers present 2 collections a year, however if you're working for a multinational fashion label, you will most likely present more than 2 collections.

There are 2 major collections per year; Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter or Autumn/Winter seasons. The Spring/Summer womenswear collections start at New York fashion Week in September and end in Paris in October. Meanwhile the Fall/Winter season for womenswear start in New York in Feburary and end in Paris in March.

Menswear Fall/Winter shows start in January in Milan for typically less than a week followed by another short week in Paris and the Spring/Summers collections are presented in June.

The other major shows for the year are the Haute Couture shows. They too like the ready-to-wear shows have two season, Spring/Summer (S/S) and Fall/Winter (F/W or A/W). These shows are typically occur a week after the Menswear shows in Paris. While Haute Couture is exclusively shown in Paris because of it's origins, in October 2011, womenswear Haute Couture was also shown in Singapore for the first time.

Ready-to-wear collections for the S/S are in stores by February and it is not until August that the F/W collections arrive in stores, and so a lot of designers have started to produce inter-seasonal collections such as Pre-Fall or Resort/Cruise to bridge the gap between collections but also feed into the fast paced changes in trends in fashion.

Inter-seasonal collections are shown between the traditional F/W and S/S seasons. These collections are usually much more commercial than the main season collections, however they don't attract as much press as the traditional collections do. The inter-seasonal collections are Resort/Cruise which is before Spring/Summer and Pre-Fall which occurs before Fall/Winter

Unlike the traditional seasons, there is no determined schedule for these shows in any of the major fashion capitals. However Resort/Cruise collections are mostly shown around May/June and Pre-Fall collections around November/December.

Inter-seasonal collections are often not shown in the fashion capitals of the world. For example, Karl Lagerfeld often presents Chanel's Pre-Fall and Resort/Cruise collections away from Paris, most recently, Chanel presented the Resort 2014 collection in Singapore.