Nia Bowers
Photo Courtesy of: The Bureau Fashion Week
By its own account, The Bureau Fashion Week did not start as a multi-city production company. It started, according to the company’s own history of itself, in small rooms with emerging designers and audiences of about fifty people. More than a decade later, the company says that same operation now runs fashion weeks across eight cities. The gap between those two numbers, fifty guests in a room to a company staging shows on two coasts in a single season, is the actual story, and unlike some of the company’s bigger claims, this one comes with a name change attached that can be checked.
A Company That Used to Have a Different Name
The Bureau Fashion Week was previously known as The Society Fashion Week, a rebrand reflected in the company’s own LinkedIn page and in older hiring records, including a past announcement welcoming a new Senior Director of Global Partnerships to what was then called The Society Fashion Week. Name changes in event production are not unusual when a company outgrows its original footprint, but this one lines up with the company’s own description of its growth, from an operation built around one market to a business the company says now spans eight cities on a bi-annual calendar.
The people behind that growth are not a single founder story. Krissy King, who runs her own swim label Krissy King the Label, has been seen in past interviews as co-founder and producer of the company alongside her husband Brady King, framing it as a business the two of them built together and continue to run as a family operation, with their children traveling to shows as part of that routine. Brady King, listed on the company’s own site and in business records as its president, is the one who continues to push the business forward and perfecting all the SOPs and marketing.
The Newest Piece of the Map
What a Decade of Growth Looks Like on the Ground
The clearest evidence of that growth is not a revenue figure. It is the calendar itself. In a single recent stretch, the company staged New York Fashion Week in February at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, Los Angeles Fashion Week in March at The Lot Studios in West Hollywood, and Miami Swim Week in May at a venue in Miami Beach, before turning around to prepare a second New York Fashion Week for September. That is four multi-day productions across three cities inside of roughly seven months, run by a company that says it still keeps every stage of production, from staging to model casting, under one roof rather than handing pieces of it off to local vendors in each market.
The company also says it has hosted more than 50,000 guests across its history and has been mentioned in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and WWD, claims that come from the company itself rather than from those outlets directly, and are worth treating as the company’s account of its own reach rather than independently confirmed figures. What is independently checkable is the trajectory: a name change, a public co-founder story involving two people rather than one or a corporation, and a production calendar that has gone from a single city to a five-market circuit that includes New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Paris.
A decade is a long time to run the same idea, that fashion week does not need to stay closed to the public, without the concept either failing or getting bought out by a larger operator. The Bureau Fashion Week’s version of that idea has instead grown a new name, a second co-founder’s public profile, and a calendar that now runs twice a year in its home market alone.