Manhattan Adult Entertainment: New York Fashion Week will have its last event in Bryant Park
But what has Fashion Week meant for Bryant Park? Nostalgic reflections from Anna Wintour, Patricia Field and many more will plaster the Bryant Park Tents for the grand farewell before next season’s move to the Lincoln Center performing arts complex.
It started as a symbiotic relationship in 1993. “Our mission was to organize, modernize and centralize,” says Fern Mallis, Fashion Week’s mastermind, of the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s decision to move the catwalks. At the time, the shows were known as “Market Week.”?They were haphazard and sometimes hazardous — a piece of the ceiling fell during a Michael Kors show. Before Fashion Week, “nobody thought New York had designers that were creative,” Mallis says.
Bryant Park was undergoing its own renaissance, shedding its nickname “Needle Park” for the drug dealers, prostitutes and the homeless who had taken residence there since the 1970s. “But we weren’t glamorous,” notes Bryant Park Corporation president Dan Biederman. “They brought us glamour.”