New York Fashion Week 2026 at Gotham Hall

Credentials, cameras, and what New York Fashion Week looks like when you are the one documenting it…

There is a particular electricity that exists nowhere else in the world quite like it exists at New York Fashion Week. Not the electricity of the front row — though that energy is real and palpable and impossible to ignore. The electricity I am talking about lives somewhere further back, in a tighter space, in a room within the room where the photographers stand.

The media pit.

It is where I spent last weekend. Camera raised, body pressed into the collective focus of many other photographers who were there for the same purpose… to document the event.

It was my first Fashion Week. It will not be my last.

On Arriving

Manhattan during Fashion Week is a city that knows it is being watched. The energy is different — sharper, faster, more intentional. Even the light seems to understand what week it is.

I arrived with my equipment and a quiet mixture of readiness and reverence. Reverence for the event, yes — but more than that, for the people who make it. The designers who have poured something deeply personal into every stitch of every garment that will walk that runway. The teams surrounding them — makeup artists, stylists, creative directors, models — who have given weeks, sometimes months, of their expertise to the service of a vision that belongs to someone else and that they have nonetheless made entirely their own.

That generosity of craft is what Fashion Week is actually about, when you are standing close enough to see it.

The Collaboration That Needs to be Talked About

Fashion, at its highest level, is an act of radical collaboration.

What the audience sees is a model moving down a runway with the particular ease of someone who has trained for years to make the extraordinary look inevitable. What they do not see is everything that preceded that moment. The makeup artist who has been in the building for hours, whose hands have touched every face that will walk that show. The stylist who has adjusted the same hem sixteen times because the sixteenth time is the right time. The creative director whose entire function is to hold the vision — the original, true, uncompromised vision — and protect it through every logistical complexity until it reaches the light.

And the designer. Standing somewhere just offstage, watching something that lived first in their imagination step into the world for the very first time.

Photography has given me the privilege of documenting the moment a person becomes fully themselves in front of my camera. What I witnessed at Fashion Week was that same phenomenon — but orchestrated across an entire creative team, an entire collection, an entire world that someone built from nothing.

It was, without qualification, one of the most beautiful things I have ever had the privilege to witness.

My Photographers Peers

I want to say something about the people I shared the pit with, because it matters and because I was not entirely prepared for it.

They weren’t competitive they were collaborative.

Working press photographers — veterans of Fashion Weeks in New York — who had every reason to be territorial and every reason to be generous, and who chose generosity. There was a respect in that space that felt almost ceremonial. A shared understanding that we were all there for the same reason: to find the image, to hold the moment, to send it out into the world in a form that honored what we had witnessed.

I came into Fashion Week as a newcomer. I left with colleagues. With people whose work I admire and whose company I am grateful for. The community of working photographers is one that takes care of its own, and I felt that in the most tangible way last weekend.

The Photographs

They are everything I hoped they would be.

Runway light is an education in itself — demanding and directional and completely unforgiving of hesitation. You learn quickly that there are no second chances, that the moment exists for a fraction of a second and then it is gone, and that the only preparation that matters is the kind you do before you ever walk into the room.

I was prepared. And the images reflect that.

There is a particular satisfaction that has nothing to do with pride and everything to do with alignment — the feeling of looking at an image and knowing that it is true. That it is the moment, exactly as it was. That nothing was lost between what I saw with my own eyes and what the camera held.

That is the only standard I have ever cared about. And Fashion Week, in its intensity and its generosity and its extraordinary compression of time, gave me images that meet it.

What the Runway Teaches You About Everything Else

A runway show is, when you strip it down to its essential truth, a love story between a vision and the people willing to give everything they have to bring it to life.

And I think that is what life is too.

The designer does not build a collection alone. The model does not walk that runway alone. The makeup artist, the stylist, the creative director — none of them could produce what they produced last weekend without the others. Every person in that building brought something irreplaceable. And the only reason it worked — the only reason it was beautiful — is because every single one of them trusted the people beside them enough to let the whole be greater than the sum of its parts.

The runway taught me that vision without collaboration is just an idea. That the most beautiful things any of us will ever create — in fashion, in business, in love, in family — are the ones we did not build alone.

I am profoundly grateful to the Bureau of Fashion Week for welcoming me into this world. For a photographer who believes that every image is an act of trust — being trusted with this one felt like everything.

Jaz*