Cheddar News anchor Hena Doba joins Fern Mallis, founder of New York Fashion Week, for a walk-and-talk touching on the origins of the weeklong event and how it became one of the biggest celebrations of fashion in the world.  



<div class="block">Cheddar News anchor Hena Doba joins Fern Mallis, founder of New York Fashion Week, for a walk-and-talk touching on the origins of the weeklong event and how it became one of the biggest celebrations of fashion in the world.  </div>

Wake Up With Cheddar

Walk and Talk: New York Fashion Week Founder Fern Mallis

And Fashion Week has been the leading event in fashion for decades. I had the chance to catch up with a legend in the fashion industry. Here's my walk and talk with Fern Malice, founder of New York Fashion Week first. I want to say thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. You are and I don't use this word lightly. I do a lot of these interviews, but you are an icon. You are a fashion powerhouse for those who don't know, Fern actually created New York Fashion Week as we know it. Now having American designers and compete with Milan and Paris. Tell me more about that. Well, you know, it's hard to believe it was 30 years ago. This September, my God. Um It was common sense. Uh It happened because of an accident. I had just joined the C FDA as executive director. I was selected, there was an accident during Market Week which is kind of what fashion week used to be called. So if there were 50 fashion shows and 50 different locations, you know, nobody talked to each other and some uptown downtown midtown, you know, somewhere in the closet, some night. And then the next day, some, they had to do a bar mitzvah in there and everything had to come down and then somebody rebuilt it up again. It was just crazy. But that particular week Michael Kors had a show in an empty loft space in the Chelsea building. And if you've been to those fashion shows, you know, when the music goes on, the bass music is so loud, everything trembles and moves. Well, this time, the ceiling started to crumble over the runway and it was Mike Michael always had the best model. So it was Cindy and Naomi and you know, Linda and a lot of them and plaster started coming down on their shoulders, landing on them. And then when chunks of plaster literally fell down in the lapse of Susie Man from the International Herald Tribune, Carrie Donovan from the New York Times. They wrote the next day we live for fashion. We don't want to die for it. And I mean, nobody remembers what was in that collection. They were looking for emergency exits. And um I said, I think my job description just changed and it was not, I wasn't hired to create a fashion week, but I said this is crazy and this isn't, you know, this isn't fair to the American designers who are really talented and are never getting their fair shake of the, of the, of the press and the business. And it became a mission to find safe sound locations that were, you know, we organized modernized and centralized fashion week and we have to talk about all your charity work $100 million in donations for breast cancer organizations. $8 million for AIDS charities. You just came from a charity event from Dallas over the weekend. Why is this so important to you because you've been doing this for decades? Well, I think it's important for everybody. It's important to give back and to pay it forward. You know, I mean, I loved being when I was director of the C FDA, galvanizing all that talent and all of those egos that bring attention to a pause and to do the right thing. Um Fashion targets, breast cancer was an event that we organized at C F B A with Ralph Lauren being kind of heading up the design aspect of this Blue Target and we wound up licensing it to like 12 countries and that's in Brazil. It made more money than you could imagine. They built a new wing of a hospital in San Paulo for breast cancer. Uh It was extraordinary and that came on the heels of the C FDA doing several seventh on sale benefits and AIDS benefits. But before I got to C FDA, I was a family board member of which uh because I made a speech this weekend in Dallas was 38 years ago and it was when AIDS was like, what is HIV what is it? Why, why are all our friends dying? We didn't know what was happening and we started the design industry Foundation Fighting Aids. You have interviewed till this day, the biggest celebrities, the biggest names in fashion. Tell me more about it. Well, fashion icons with fern malice is something I am very, very proud of. Um I'm almost as proud of that, if not more than creating Fashion Week because Fashion Week has kind of come and gone. It's dissolved. It's not the same, it's all very different. But these interviews which have materialized so far into two books are in the Library of Congress. They exist. It's a historic record of these lives of everybody from Calvin Calvin Don or Tommy Tom Ford, Mark Jacobs, Michael Kors Bruce Webb or Bill Cunningham. Uh and then the second book, Valentino and Victoria Beckham and Tim Gunn and the Masons and Sandra Rhodes in London and even my interviews in there um that Bey Smith did with me, you know, and the interviews are about who are you? You're more than a name on a label. I'm not, my interviews are not about, tell me about spring 2021 versus fall. It's tell me about your parents, tell me about their bedroom you grew up in. Where did that influence come from? When did you know you wanted to do this? And when you did it, what did you do first? Who did you call when you got a first order.