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No Runways on a Yom Tov

Fashion insiders face Koufax conundrum

by
Marc Tracy
August 19, 2010
Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Whitney Museum of American Art
Designer Yigal Azrouel in June.Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Whitney Museum of American Art
Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Whitney Museum of American Art
Designer Yigal Azrouel in June.Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images for Whitney Museum of American Art

The earlyness of Rosh Hashanah 2010/5771 (three weeks from yesterday!) is wreaking havoc on New York City Fashion Week, whose early-September iteration—at which designers debut spring collections (confusing, I know)—is overlapping with the holiday. Various Jewish “industry insiders” are planning to sit out a couple days in observance of the yontiff (London’s Fashion Week will face a similar Yom Kippur problem). Even one of the designers, Israeli Yigal Azrouel, has had to reschedule a show. “Because New York is such a Jewish center, people have come to assume that things will get planned around Jewish holidays in a way that they wouldn’t be elsewhere,” said Izzy Grinspan, of fashion Website Racked.

I would make a joke, but I can’t improve on Andrew Silow-Carroll’s. “Wait,” he wrote, “I thought Rosh Hashanah WAS a fashion show.”

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.