While Peter Som and Cacharel are skipping Fashion Week for one reason or another, H&M plans to return to the runway with a show at Paris’s Rodin Museum this February.
The Swedish retailer is following in some big footsteps: Versace, this will be the first time the brand’s main collection has appeared on the runway in eight years.
But other mass-market retailers have come to the runway in recent years too: Topshop Unique has been on the London Fashion Week calendar since 2005 and sponsors the venue where debut in Spring 2012 was one of the most talked-about of that season. Now it’s one of the most anticipated – and well-attended – presentations on the New York calendar.
But what does it mean when mass-market labels are staging the kinds of shows once reserved for brands that deal in four-figure price points? It could be a simple matter of cost. In 2009, Forbes reported that the price of a runway show “can easily hit $75,000,” and last September The Independent found that designers were “often running up bills in the hundreds of thousands” during Fashion Week. It may simply be easier for a big company like H&M to foot the bill than it is for smaller operations like Chris Benz and Betsey Johnson – both of whom have canceled their shows in New York next month.
“We felt excited about the collection, and we really wanted to show it,” H&M spokesman Hacan Andersson told WWD. If H&M is proud enough of its own wares to put them up against the likes of Chanel and Sonia Rykiel, then that excitement makes sense. Will other brands like H&M be emboldened to do the same?
Source: FULL ARTICLE at fashionologie