Is a Runway Show Worth the Investment? These First-Timers Think So

On Sunday, Aisling Camps kicked off the penultimate day of New York Fashion Week with a show at Bortolami Gallery in Tribeca, marking her runway debut. Now, on Monday, Heirlome and 6397 will follow suit, showing in runway format for the first time after seasons of preview appointments and lookbooks.

In recent years, brands and industry figures have debated the merits of a runway show, and whether it’s worth the steep investment for independent brands already jumping through hoops to make fashion financials work. But as the parameters of a show are changing and the cadence becomes less stringent, brands who once stayed shy of the show are now dabbling in the format.

New York-founded ready-to-wear brands Aisling Camps, Heirlome, and 6397 are all at different points in their brand trajectories, and have taken varying approaches to presenting collections in the past. Knitwear designer Camps had never shown at NYFW until last season, when she hosted a much-celebrated presentation.

On the other hand, Heirlome, which launched in 2022 focusing on tailored ready-to-wear, a portion of which is always in collaboration with a Mexican artisan, has always shown in a by-appointment, casual presentation format; same goes for downtown New York favorite 6397, which was founded in 2013 by Stella Ishii and evolved in 2023 when designer Lizzie Owens came on board alongside. Now, all three have decided the time is right to put on a production.

“A fashion show has, at times, felt like something you’re supposed to do, something you have to do, something that feels so unnecessary, so expensive, so this or that,” Ishii says. “But I feel like now it has a different meaning, with the stream of information and content all around us.

We’ve been working so hard on evolving this brand for the last four years, and everyone felt like it was time to really show the evolution.”

The financials are, of course, an obstacle, but as with everyone else, the designers found ways to make it work. Camps, who showed in presentation format last season but wound up doing a mini-runway, showed at Bortolami Gallery (art galleries are a popular venue this season, as they’ll typically host brands for free, as Bortolami did).

Last season, Camps went back and forth about a show. Ever careful about budgets, she decided to ease into it for her first moment truly on-calendar.

“Then, we got great girls casted and they need a walk,” she laughs. This season, she felt that, for a similar amount of money and effort, she might as well go all-in.

6397 is showing at Ishii’s The News showroom, where the brand has hosted its presentations ever since she launched the brand from her 2000-founded showroom. “We have budgets, so can we do this on a little bit of a glorified lookbook shoot budget?” Ishii says. “We didn’t want to get crazy — we don’t have the cash flow to do that right now.”

All said and done, it is partly about the optics. Heirlome’s founding designer, Stephanie Suberville, recalls last season, when she was one of few CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund (CVFF) participants not doing a runway show, because she’s always been cautious with the brand’s financials.

“We were like, it costs too much money, what’s the point? But I definitely felt last year that I would love to do one,” she says.

“As a designer, you always have that in the back of your mind.”

This season, Suberville turned to Ashlyn’s Ashlynn Park (who she met during CVFF last year) for advice on doing a small show on a budget. “I sat with her six months ago, and I was like, ‘Tell me everything.

How much does everything cost?’ And I made a list of what we needed to do.” The first order of business was to hire a production company to handle the logistics, a move the 6397 team and Camps both say was key. “The best thing was to sit with someone that has done it in a small way,” Suberville says.

“Because you can start spending money very quickly without knowing.”

Ishii and Owens are also hopeful that the show will be good for business, by showing the breadth of the brand via a wider range of models — and reaching more people via a buzzier format. “Having 30 different people wearing it in motion and then also seeing the types of people that are drawn to this brand, and maybe there’s some cool celebrities and all the other stuff that will contextualize it in a broader sense,” Owens says.

“We want sales and awareness.”

Changing cadence, shifting expectations

Once upon a time, once you started showing you couldn’t stop. This was part of Ishii’s initial hesitation.

“If you do it once, it’s kind of expected again and again. And we didn’t want to fall into that routine,” she says.

Now, this expectation has shifted. At New York Fashion Week, it’s the norm for brands to flit between runway and presentation formats and, some seasons, not show on-schedule, or at all.

Brands from independent Christopher John Rogers and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, to PVH-owned Tommy Hilfiger have adopted this more fluid approach.

Ishii and Owens are leaning toward showing again next season, but they’re not committing to anything until this first show wraps. Camps, a 2026 CVFF finalist, is going in with a similar ethos.

“This has been the year of stepping outside my comfort zone and testing things, seeing what works. We know it was successful last season, so let’s try to up the ante a little bit,” she says.

Maybe she’ll do it again; maybe she’ll pivot.

Suberville is operating with flexibility in mind. To start, her plan is to do a runway show once a year, rather than each season.

In February, she’ll cook up something else entirely. “Not the press room, but something totally different for fall that is more interactive and interesting,” she says.

Suberville reasons that Heirlome’s pre-collections are, commercially, as important as its main collections, even if they don’t get the same press. To her, the show is an opportunity to communicate the story behind Heirlome in a bigger way, which means she can be choosy about when to do so.

This flexibility has translated to the show itself. It’s more approachable now, Owens feels.

“I’ve been trained in so many other ways, where it’s like, it has to be this insane hundred-look collection that costs millions of dollars,” she says, noting that she’s realized this isn’t the case. Ishii wondered if their clothes were too normal.

“I had the insecurity that these clothes are too real, or not aspirational enough. Is this high level enough to even put on a runway?

But there are so many versions of the way people do it now.”

Suberville was also intentional about not changing her design process or ethos to ‘fit’ the runway. “Every season, obviously, there’s an evolution, but we’re not doing this crazy thing for the runway,” she says. “I’m designing what I like to design that I know I want to wear and I know my customer likes.”

The moment

For 6397’s Ishii and Owens, the experiential ‘you had to be there’ aspect of the show is intriguing at this moment. “There are just so many photographs of clothing that exist in all formats that a lookbook kind of means less, because it is just a series of photos,” Ishii says.

“It’s so hard to emote and share the complexity of a brand through still images alone.” 6397 uses similar models and the same photographer each season, which the team feels shows consistency but can fail to communicate the whole brand world. “It makes it feel even more important to have an event, a happening, something that brings everyone together in one place — and it’s for 10 minutes and you have to be there to get the full experience,” Ishii says.

It felt like the right moment to amp things up, Suberville says. Heirlome has seen significant growth in the last year, and she is also launching denim, but her biggest impetus to show was a collaboration she’s working on this season (Heirlome works with a Mexican artisan on each collection).

Maricarmen Jimenez is the daughter of the artisan Suberville collaborated with on Heirlome’s FW24 collection, who has since passed. “We’re the right place as a brand, but we’re also standing behind her as an artist and helping her launch,” she says.

“I wanted to wait to collaborate to give her the right visibility.”

There’s more storytelling capacity in a runway show, says Suberville, who feels that people often miss the artisanal collaboration her brand is rooted in. Ironic, given these pieces are consistently Heirlome’s bestsellers. “How do I tell these stories without being annoying and pushing it down people’s throats? I thought a show might be a better way to actually explain what we’re doing.”