New York Fashion Week continues with splashes of color, Snapchat

Global Business

Photos by Fernanda Calfat, Frazer Harrizon for AFP; John Minchillo, Seth Wenig for AP.

New York Fashion Week continued Monday with bright and primal looks from veteran designers Diane von Furstenberg and Carolina Herrera. The biannual fashion week opened last Thursday, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars to the city and outweighing the economic benefits of the U.S. Open, the Super Bowl or the New York City Marathon.

Furstenberg revealed lace, satin, and the color red paired with black to create a sexy collection.

“The show is called seduction,” the designer said in a pre-show interview Sunday. “It’s THAT woman. She’s a little bit of a double agent. During the day she commands the room, and at night she inspires fantasy. It’s very seductive.”

New York Fashion Week costs are astronomical for designers

New York fashion week beats out other fashion cities like Milan, London and Paris making the city a hub for the biggest fashion event of the year. Shows take months of planning and can cost, at minimum, around $100,000 to organize.

Her looks for daytime included updated takes on DVF’s timeless wrap dress, including the first item down the runway, a sleek version in white, worn by none other than model-of-the-moment Kendall Jenner, half-sister of Kim Kardashian. Tweed and pinstripe — both in soft, feminine iterations — were part of the daytime scheme as well. Moving to night, out came the more daring looks involving lace, satin, plunging necklines (and backs) and that red-black combo.

At show’s end, Von Furstenberg took not a victory bow but a victory lap, sauntering up and down the U-shaped runway and blowing kisses to guests, who included singer Kesha, Paris Hilton, and of course Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

CCTV America goes behind the scenes at New York Fashion week and caught up briefly with design guru Carolinaherrera Carolina Herrera. Here’s what she had to say about the one thing all women need. Watch the full segment on Global Business America at 7 PM Eastern in the U.S. and 8 AM Beijing.

Posted by CCTV America on Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Herrera was inspired by the element of water, sending out dresses Monday that fluttered with long metallic droplet embellishment and prints evoking ripples and ocean sprays. A touch of crimson red popped among the muted whites, blues and grays, in a touch of alligator skin on a multi-textured wide scarf and full-skin short looks for cocktails and day.

“This collection I have been calling ‘Making Waves,’ because it’s all about the elements of water. It’s the waves. It’s all the form and colors that the water has in different aspects. And I love it because it has so much movement, and all the materials I designed especially with the water in mind,” Herrera told The Associated Press in a backstage interview.

Opening Ceremony also created a stir Sunday, starting their show on the look-before-it-disappears social media app Snapchat.

The design collective put out selfies of its buddy director Spike Jonze with company co-founders Humberto Leon and Carol Lim and showed off the filmmaker’s 35-millimeter photography on display in the brick-and-mortar world.

Opening Ceremony used Jonze’s images on the collection and snapped exclusive sale of new T-shirts on the phone shopping app Spring.

Snapchat is popular among young people looking to hide their cyber-whereabouts from their parents. But it’s fast filling up with commercial, news and entertainment content.

The week of fashion is an economic boon to the city. The scores of designer fashion shows, big-spending celebrity clients and lavish parties generate an annual economic impact of $887 million, according to a newly released analysis by the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

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More than 230,000 people attend the February and September shows that unveil the coming season’s designs, packing into hotels and restaurants and yielding an estimated $532 million in direct visitor spending, it said.

About 180,000 people are employed in the fashion industry in New York, according to the study.

The week’s economic benefit tops the annual U.S. Open tennis tournament, which generates about $800 million, the 2014 Super Bowl in New Jersey that generated about $550 million and the New York City Marathon that generates $340 million, according to the report.

In the works are two additional Fashion Weeks dedicated solely to menswear, said Steven Kolb, head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. The first will be held July 13-16 and the other in January.

This Fashion Week, which concludes on Feb. 19, will be the last in which many main events are held in tents at Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.

Under settlement of a 2013 lawsuit over use of the park for commercial purposes, Fashion Week will need a new home after next week.

Story compiled with information from AP and Reuters reports.