Fashion, Like It’s 1999—Remembering the Runways of 25 Years Ago

As a twenty-something fashion news editor at Elle Magazine in 1999, I didn’t go to the runway shows in Milan and Paris. I got nightly updates from my boss who called on a landline from the Principe or the Meurice, and I followed along via Women’s Wear Daily, hard copies of which were delivered to Elle’s offices in an inch-high stack each workday. During fashion month, a fellow editor and I would cut and paste WWD’s page ones and color and black-and-white doubles into a big scrapbook, sometimes adding the New York Times’ Thursday and Sunday coverage. Those scrapbooks were the only reference we had until brands sent out lookbooks, but it was just the top brands that did so, and it could take a month or more to receive them.

It was a you-really-had-to-be-there time in fashion. A time, laughed Nicolas Ghesquière in Vogue’s September issue, when “fashion used to be for weird people.” The launch of Style.com, which posted daily coverage of the runway shows starting with the spring 2000 season, and the more recent advent of social media changed all that, prying open the once insular world to the fashionable masses. As the aforementioned Vogue profile of the Louis Vuitton artistic director points out, Ghesquière’s most recent show was seen by an estimated half-billion people.

Weird hasn’t gone out of fashion. Not least of all at Vuitton, where Ghesquière has been refining his singular vision for 10 years now. But 1999—the last time the collections weren’t captured online for public consumption—was a year of runway extremes, a quality exaggerated by the relative scarcity of images. (That Vogue Runway has any 1999 collections at all is down to the exacting, time consuming work of Laird Borrelli-Persson, who organizes, cleans, and digitizes old slides in Condé Nast’s photo archive; in fact she’s added five new ’99 shows to the dropdown today.)