The Billion

Dollar Fashion

WeekBy Angelique O’RourkeImage via fashionisers.com

Eleanor Lambert

founded the Council

of Fashion Designers

of America and

created the first

Fashion Week in 1943.

Image via new york times.

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, here with current president of the CFDA Diane Von Furstenberg, publicly shows his support for the industry on the eve of fashion week this year.

This year, Mercedes-Benz

fashion week will bring in

an estimated 850 million

dollars to New York City.

532 million will go to tourism, entertainment, eating out, and other events associated with traveling to the city for fashion week.

The fashion industry in New York City employs 5.7% of the workforce, almost two hundred thousand people.

Pete Savignano/Getty Images for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week

Despite the big money involved,

the models who walk runways

typically earn $150-500 for

walking in shows. Some designers

offer compensation only in trade;

meaning free clothes.

Marc Jacobs, whose

Spring/Summer ‘15

line is pictured here,

didn’t start paying

his models cash

until Spring 2013.

Image via fashionisers.com

Sarah Ziff, picture here by Owen Bruce for Pulp Magazine, is a model who founded

The Model Alliance, a worker’s-rights organization for those in the industry, to help ensure models get fair pay and reasonable working conditions.

Cindy Ord/Getty Images

“You cannot separate people, their yearnings, their dreams,and their inborn vanity from their interest in clothes.”

-Eleanor Lambert

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