Paris Fashion Week

Paris Fashion Week
Magdalena Frackowiak in Elie Saab at Paris Fashion Week F/W 2011
Genre	Clothing and fashion exhibitions
Frequency	biannually
Location(s)	Paris, France
Inaugurated	1973
Organised by	French Fashion Federation

Paris Fashion Week is a series of designer presentations held biannually in Paris, France with spring/summer and autumn/winter events held each year. Dates are determined by the French Fashion Federation. Fashion Week is held at venues throughout the city.

In addition to ready-to-wear shows, there are men's and haute couture shows, which are held semiannually for the spring/summer and autumn/winter seasons.

Paris Fashion Week is part of the global "Big 4" fashion weeks, the others being London Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week and New York Fashion Week. The schedule begins with New York, followed by London, and then Milan and ends in Paris.

Although the first fashion week was held in New York, the event itself derives from "salon shows" ("defiles de mode," literally "fashion parades") in Paris couture salons.

A fashion week consists of a week of organized events of multiple designer’s collections. Before this organized event was recognized in New York City, fashion showings were being held in Paris as early as the 1700s. These early showings were only to clients purchasing items and were shown on mannequins. In the 1800s, showings began to change. Charles Frederick Worth, noted for haute couture, began showing multiple pieces together and of a higher design. Jeanne Paquin is the first designer to make her showings public and Paul Poiret is the first to host parties after his events.

Haute Couture, the style of high sewing, was created by Englishman Charles Frederick Worth.

In the mid 1800s Mme Pauline von Metternich, an Austrian Princess and wife to the Ambassador of Paris, saw one of Worth’s sketches and employed him to make her a gown. He gained much recognition through his powerful clients and opened his own haute couture house in Paris in 1858, which sold luxury fashion to upper class women. In 1868 the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture was created to set the specifications to determine what constituted a ‘couture house’. The group decided that to be defined a piece of haute couture the clothing must have been; custom-made to fit the wearer, hand-sewn by multiple skilled artisans in the separate fields of embroidery, stitching, and beading, and only the most high quality of materials may be used.