“It felt like a block party,” designer Marc Jacobs said of last year’s Fashion’s Night Out, in which 800 stores joined the fun.
It brought shopping back to the “social ritual people enjoy” and had a “beautiful sense of community,” he recounted.
It took Jacobs two hours to walk the two blocks from his office to his Mercer Street store because people were stopping him in the street every two minutes.
To give fashionistas some ammo to inspire their sprees, Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour will be selecting the strongest fall trends for the runway on Sept. 7 at Lincoln Center, New York Fashion Week’s new home, in what will be the city’s largest-ever public fashion show.
Wintour — who dreamed up Fashion’s Night Out with Council of Fashion Designers of America President Diane Von Furstenberg to get more people into stores during the recession — brought New York’s top designers to make the announcement with her last week at Manhattan’s City Hall.
Donna Karan, Vera Wang, Zac Posen, Tory Burch, the duo behind Proenza Schouler, actress-turned-designer Mary-Kate Olsen all attended.
After last year’s event, Saks Fifth Avenue CEO Steve Sadove noticed the tide turning for sales.
“We’re not back to where we were,” he said, “but we’ve started to see people smiling again.”
