A brief history of the front row fashion show

With New York Fashion Week coming up next month, all eyes will be on runway show seats like the catwalk front.

We know that celebrities and A-listers sit in front of fashion week shows to raise their profile, flaunt their latest styles, and show their loyalty to a brand.

And the brands benefit from celebrity cachet and the buzz that comes with it. Whether they’re influencers or actors, the stars who front fashion week have practically become legends. But was it always like that? It wasn’t long before Anna Wintour and Nicki Minaj were sharing the front row together.

As long as there have been runways, there have been front rows. He has had temporary fashion runways since the 1860s when Charles Frederick Worth showed his collection at Longchamp Race Course.

But in the 1920s, Parisian designers like Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet and Elsa Schiaparelli attended her latest couture salon shows. In the year In 1931, Elsa Schiaparelli showed a set at Saks in New York, but photographers were not allowed to attend. Still, from there, Front Row culture developed.

When it comes to front row fashion photography, however, Christian Dior’s 2010 He definitely had A-listers. Take this photo above, by photojournalist John Chillingworth Harper’s Bazaar Editors Marie-Louise Bousquet and Carmel Snow sat in the front row at the Dior show, with Avedon in the second row behind them — all of the industry’s top talent.

In fact, Dior runway shows have always been full of socialites and even royalty. The photo below shows Princess Margaret in 1988. Talk about fashion royalty.

It became more common in the 1960s with the rise of French designers such as Yves Saint Laurent (who opened the Rive Gauche boutique in 1966) and Pierre Cardin. Stars such as Barbra Streisand, Marlene Dietrich, Catherine Deneuve and Bianca Jagger attended Saint Laurent shows in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the first celebrity brand collaborations was the friendship between Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn.

In the year It wasn’t until 1973 that the world first recognized Paris Fashion Week (New York Fashion Week was founded in 1943). Cardin, below, attends the Thierry Mugler runway show in 1980.

In the year As the 1980s rolled around, Andy Warhol and Brooke Shields fronted the Valentino show in 1982. And of course Halston had his own celebrity camp.

His friends, like Studio 54’s Steve Rubel, Jagger and his model partners sat in the front row, as did Lauren Hutton, Marsha Berenson, and Karen Bjornson, all of whom sat in the front. They were all stars, but it was a personal feeling. They were friends, it didn’t seem like a corporate partnership.

In Italy in the early 1950s there were runways in Florence featuring designers such as Simonta Visconti, Schubert and Emilio Pucci.

Meanwhile, Chris Moore, the undisputed king of catwalk photography in Paris, London and New York, will be showing a photo-driven runway show from the 1960s. He mostly shot models and remembered a famous designer – Kenzo Takada, the founder of Kenzo.

“Kenzo Takada changed everything about the approach to fashion; in the early 1970s, when most of the shows were still small and cramped gatherings in crowded spaces, Kenzo took Paris by presenting shows with a more music festival atmosphere.

“Happy, funny models [were] He’s full of energy and having a great time, of course showing off his sunny, good looks and smiley face.