When the news came in July that Joseph Altuzarra, too, would be among the American designers taking his runway show to Paris for the spring 2018 season with plans to show there indefinitely, it read as a bandwagon decision. By then, Proenza Schouler and Rodarte had already shown their spring collections in Paris during couture, and a few weeks earlier Thom Browne announced that his spring women’s show would be in the French capital, where he has been staging his men’s runway shows for years.
The simultaneous departure from New York Fashion Week of those labels, four of New York’s top talents, felt like an exodus, and stirred no shortage of conversation about the critical state of NYFW. For the most part, the on-the-record reasoning behind Paris over New York was international business growth, but Altuzarra contends that he is largely motivated by something else.
“The simple answer is that I’m French and I want to show in Paris,” he said during a late summer interview with his chief executive officer Karis Durmer in Altuzarra’s New York studio in the Woolworth Building. “I grew up in Paris. I’m half French. I feel very French in a lot of ways and it’s obviously a big
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