Key takeaways
- The Iran war has put simultaneous pressure on polyester and cotton prices, with McKinsey estimating basic apparel prices could rise between 10% and 20% before consumers feel the full impact.
- Legacy American fashion houses dominated the Spring/Summer 2027 season: Ralph Lauren surpassed $8 billion in revenue ahead of his brand’s 60th anniversary; DVF returned to the runway for the first time in a decade under new artistic director Henry Zankov, turning a profit for the first time in ten years; and Calvin Klein continued its creative reassertion under Veronica Leoni.
- New voices arrived from unexpected directions: London-based Conner Ives brought his aesthetic home to New York for the first time, while Twitch streamer Kai Cenat debuted fashion brand Vivet after nine months off-platform studying textiles in Italy.
- On the same week Anthropic researchers resigned over AI safety concerns, Alice + Olivia partnered with Google-backed platform Glance to let guests generate photorealistic images of themselves in the new collection, putting the AI debate directly on the show floor.
This year, just before New York Fashion Week opened, the conversation around its viability had reached a pitch. Fashion journalist Amy Odell titled her latest newsletter “New York Fashion Week’s Death Spiral,” questioning whether expensive runway shows offered meaningful returns for all but a handful of designers, and noting that the week had become as much a vehicle for influencer content and brand activations as a trade event. Cosmopolitan published a piece asking New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to fix it. The debate around the week’s purpose started growing louder than the week itself.
Then, the Spring/Summer 2027 collections came out.
New York Fashion Week has never commanded fashion month the way Paris or Milan do; its power works differently. It opens the season, and when it delivers, it sends a charge of energy across the Atlantic that the European capitals absorb.
This September’s edition arrived against an unusually loaded backdrop: a war in the Middle East putting pressure on the economics of the clothes on those runways, and an AI debate that had reached Senate chambers and social media feeds simultaneously by the time the first show opened. Even so, the week made a case for itself. Established American fashion designers reasserted themselves on the runway, with real commercial weight behind them. New voices arrived from places the industry had not been paying attention to. And the AI question moved from Washington to the New York show floor itself.
An incendiary backdrop
The clothes on those runways are getting more expensive to make. The Iran war has driven oil prices sharply higher, and with the Strait of Hormuz no longer the reliable passage it once was, the cost of importing raw materials has risen across the board. The knock-on effect on apparel is direct: polyester, derived from fossil fuels, has surged to a near four-year price peak, while cotton has hit a two-year high as buyers scrambled for alternatives. Both fibers under pressure at the same time is, as McKinsey partner Julian Hügl has noted, structurally unusual. It removes the option to substitute one for the other, which is how manufacturers normally absorb cost spikes.
The numbers downstream are significant. Basic apparel prices could rise by between 10% and 20% before the full impact reaches consumers, and because brands typically place orders up to a year in advance, much of what was shown on these runways will only reflect those cost pressures when it hits stores in spring. Factories in key sourcing markets are already absorbing losses rather than passing them on, squeezed between rising input costs and buyers with no appetite to pay more.
Fashion week, as ever, proceeded regardless. But the economics underneath it have already shifted.
The American moment
The season’s most consistent story was American fashion designers using the runway to show up with conviction, along with clothes that backed it up.
Ralph Lauren opened the week at the Jack Shainman Gallery in lower Manhattan, a day ahead of the official calendar. His description of the Spring/Summer 2027 collection: “an irreverent take on romance that creates a new elegance.” In practice, that meant a white and navy palette threaded with Edwardian silhouettes, Fortuny-esque evening gowns, marabou-trimmed denim workwear jackets, fur-trimmed and brocade outerwear, and floor-length sinuous dresses cut from iridescent fabric and chainmail. The brand’s signature Americana preppiness — the pinstripes, the waistcoats, the suede — was still present, but deliberately understated, taking a back seat to something more dramatically feminine. Lauren is approaching his brand’s 60th anniversary and pushed past $8 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026. This collection was definitely a statement about where the brand intends to go, both creatively and business-wise.
Diane von Furstenberg returned to the runway for the first time in nearly a decade — the brand had continued selling throughout, but without a runway presentation since approximately 2017 — with Henry Zankov making his debut as artistic director. The homecoming was literal. Zankov spent four years at DVF before leaving to launch his own label, and his appointment coincides with the brand doing something it had not done in ten years: turning a profit, after CEO Gabby Hirata cut overall production by half. The Spring/Summer 2027 collection centered on the idea of a “woman in motion,” with wrap dresses, animal prints, gauzy chiffon, graphic stripes and open-weave knitwear — the DVF vocabulary filtered through Zankov’s more eccentric graphic sensibility. The two aesthetics met somewhere in the middle. In my opinion, what separates this runway return from a nostalgic exercise, is the commercial foundation beneath it — the brand is, for the first time in a decade, solvent.
Calvin Klein, now four collections into Veronica Leoni’s tenure as creative director, presented Spring/Summer 2027 at Terminal Warehouse, with three Walter De Maria sculptures lining the runway. Where Leoni’s earlier fashion collections leaned heavily on the brand’s minimalist 1990s roots, this season pushed into something more contemporary: perforated leather, textural camisoles, dynamic necklines, pops of bright blue, red, pink and yellow cutting through an otherwise restrained palette. The creative direction is now unmistakable. Whether it is translating commercially remains the open question; one that parent company PVH will surely be watching closely.
New kids in town
Two of the week’s more interesting moments came from designers who arrived at New York Fashion Week from somewhere else entirely.
Conner Ives is from Bedford, New York. Most people assume he is British as he studied at Central Saint Martins and has shown his collections in London since graduating in 2020. For Spring/Summer 2027, however, he crossed the Atlantic in reverse, presenting his first New York Fashion Week show under the title “Across the Pond.” The collection was vivacious and unapologetic: flamenco fringe, chinoiserie florals, a collaboration with historic Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes that produced two deliberately disheveled banker suits, and a mint-green finale gown, inspired by Parisian dressmaker Callot Soeurs, that Ives nicknamed “Lady Liberty.” Iris Law walked in a red matador catsuit; Hari Nef wore a “Bring Back Shame” red T-shirt that will likely be the season’s most-photographed piece. Whether he plants a flag in the Big Apple permanently remains open — he was characteristically non-committal when asked — but the collection made a strong case for his presence on the fashion week calendar.
Kai Cenat arrived from considerably further away. The Twitch streamer — arguably one of the platform’s most-watched figures — announced his fashion brand Vivet in December 2025 and spent the following nine months building it in public: traveling to Italy to study textiles and documenting every step in a physical journal of fabric samples and handwritten notes, shared online page by page. The Spring/Summer 2027 show on September 12 was livestreamed and operated on a see-now, buy-now model, with members of his online community, including Any Means Possible (AMP) collective members Duke Dennis, RayAsianBoy and BruceDropEmOff, walking alongside professional models. Lauryn Hill and stylist Law Roach, who had served as a mentor throughout the process, sat front row. The collection itself was dark and utilitarian: leather jackets, tracksuits, distressed outerwear, fur coats and technical bags, with the “beginner” hoodie anchoring the accessible end. Whether Cenat’s design can sustain that community over time, remains to be seen.
Beyond the runway
Everyone knows that Fashion Week is never only the shows.
Coach turned 85 and celebrated it at full force. Creative director Stuart Vevers staged the Spring/Summer 2027 collection at Pier 36 on September 9, opening in monochrome black and grey, clothes built around the practical tension between a working day and the evening that follows it, before the final eight looks arrived covered in sequins, confetti and party hats. “Having 85 years behind us gives us the confidence to look forward,” Vevers said. The afterparty, Coach Club 85, extended the celebration into the night, with artist Violet Chachki emerging from a large-scale birthday cake. The brand, now a roughly $7 billion business with genuine Gen Z traction, had the energy to match the milestone.
On the evening of September 10, Kering hosted its fifth annual Caring for Women dinner at The Pool in Manhattan, co-chaired by Salma Hayek Pinault, Simone Biles, Pamela Anderson, and Dakota Johnson, among others. The event raised over $5 million for four organizations working to end violence against women and children. In just five years, the dinner has become a fixture of the NYFW calendar and a stern reminder that the week’s influence extends well past the catwalk.
Then there was the COS show on September 13, which will be remembered less for the collection than for what happened on the runway. PETA activists stormed the show at 175 Water Street over the brand’s use of wool, making their way onto the catwalk with signs reading “Sheep Beaten and Bloodied for Wool.” CFDA CEO Steven Kolb intervened personally, physically restraining two activists, pulling one to the floor and covering her mouth as models continued to walk. He posted an apology on Instagram shortly after. PETA is pursuing criminal charges.
The other debate
On September 9, as the first shows were opening, Jacob Coxon — a researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic — resigned publicly on X. His post was direct: neither company was “acting responsibly,” and the industry was “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” The post reached 130 million views within 24 hours and drew responses from more than 20 politicians. Two further researchers, Joe Benton from Anthropic and Josh Engels from Google, announced their own departures within days. A concurrent NBC News poll found that 70% of American adults are now more worried than excited about AI.
On the other side of Manhattan, at Alice + Olivia’s Spring/Summer 2027 presentation at 583 Park Avenue, guests were generating photorealistic images of themselves wearing the new collection as it showed, via Glance, a shopping platform backed by Google and InMobi, already live on millions of Samsung smart TVs. The activation was called “See Yourself in the Show.” Guests uploaded a selfie; the technology produced images of them dressed in the new collection in real time. The intent: to dissolve the line between spectator and participant.
The two moments capture AI’s current reality with some accuracy: the same technology, applied differently, carrying different stakes. The debate about which side wins is happening everywhere now, including, as of this September, during New York Fashion Week.
New York Fashion Week: Total recall
What we learned from New York this September is straightforward enough: American fashion designers are reclaiming the runway with commercial weight behind them, while new voices and innovative technologies are arriving from places the industry had not truly been looking.
Critics have been writing New York Fashion Week’s obituary for years, and the conversation around its relevance reached a new pitch just as this edition opened. However, whether NYFW is struggling or thriving may be the wrong question. What this September showed above all is that it is still capable of producing moments that matter. And that, for now, is enough.
