WME Group is bidding farewell to New York Fashion Week.
WME has sold the intellectual property, trademarks and logos of New York Fashion Week, NYFW and NYFW: The Shows, along with the associated digital assets, to Signet Fashion.
Signet Fashion is a media and entertainment company focused on developing, acquiring and monetizing intellectual property across film, television, live experiences, gaming and digital media.
According to Signet, “The company plans to build upon New York Fashion Week’s global legacy, through expanded live programming, digital content, media production, brand partnerships, and year-round audience engagement. Additional details will be announced at a later date.”
WME said it had no comment.
WME Fashion has been slowly moving away from the world of fashion shows and focusing on its representation business with IMG Models, The Wall Group and Art + Commerce. WME continues to represent many of the world’s leading models and creative talent across fashion, including stylists, makeup artists, photographers, creative directors and other industry leaders. WME acquired IMG, the sports and fashion powerhouse, for $2.4 billion in May 2014.
The Council of Fashion Designers of America continues to own and organize The Fashion Calendar and Official New York Fashion Week Schedule and is responsible for scheduling and governance of NYFW.
“The Official New York Fashion Week Schedule has long been stewarded by the CFDA and remains the authoritative calendar. New York Fashion Week, under the CFDA’s leadership, is at its best when others contribute through events, partnerships and experiences that support designers and strengthen our industry. We welcome Signet’s investment and look forward to seeing how its efforts help create new opportunities for designers and contribute to the continued success of New York Fashion Week,” said Steven Kolb, president and chief executive officer of the CFDA.
Sources said that WME put the NYFW intellectual property and trademarks up for sale two years ago, and several different parties looked at it, but had signed nondisclosure agreements so couldn’t discuss the assets or the price.
“The social channels [the website, social media handles] are what’s actually valuable,” said one source.
In February, N4XT Experiences, which produced its first season of The Venue Collective as a partner in KFN in September 2025, came up with a new name, NYFW Collections, (N4XT split with its Kilburn Media partner Mark Manuel, a Hollywood executive and financier, after one season) and a slate of fully contracted venues across New York City in an effort to strengthen NYFW.
When told of the Signet acquisition of the trademarks, Imad Izemrane, founder and CEO of N4XT Experiences, said Friday, “The more people who come into our world and into our industry with the right intentions and the more infrastructure and the more support we can give the designer community the better.”
He said his NYFW Collections shouldn’t be impacted with a change in ownership of the trademarks. He said the name, New York Fashion Week, is not ownable. “New York Fashion Week by itself is not ownable, it’s descriptive versus distinct trademark. It’s a big difference,” he said.
“The most important thing is, what is the New York Fashion Week business? The New York Fashion Week business is to have a great relationship with the designers to create an infrastructure that’s going to support the fashion industry and the designer community. You curate an incredible group of designers that you put together and with that, you can sit down with partners, sponsors and packages and use those sponsorship deals to support the industry,” said Izemrane.
He said they’re still finalizing their designers for September, but they should have 18-20 designers participating. “We’re going to have the strongest and best lineup we’ve ever had,” said Izemrane. Among those participating in NYFW Collections are Diane von Furstenberg, Altuzarra, Prabal Gurung, Henry Zankov, Forme, Aknvas, Sergio Hudson, and Kim Shui.
Elizabeth Sulcer, June Ambrose, Zanna Roberts Rassi and Jenna Lyons at the Prabal Gurung fashion show at Cipriani 25 Broadway last February.
Gilbert Flores/WWD
NYFW Collections also offers no-fee venues and supports the designers financially. “Everyone needs different types of support,” he said. The shows take place in venues from 42nd Street to the Financial District. “We don’t want to hold designers into this one specific format that they need to be in the same space in the same venue. The whole point is that we wanted to accommodate designers to have creative freedom and have their own unique spaces and venues,” said Izemrane.
He said he finances these shows through sponsors and partners and has “an incredible partnership” with SAP, and plans to reveal another big partner that’s joining. During fashion week, they do an experiential activation with SAP to showcase the latest technology that powers the fashion retail industry.
Sources said that the investors in Signet are the same investors in Kilburn Media, and Signet’s acquisition of the NYFW trademarks could be a signal that Kilburn may be looking to start up again with a stake in the fashion world. Mark Manuel of Kilburn couldn’t be reached for comment.
Susan Scafidi, founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School, said a company can indeed own the trademarks New York Fashion Week and NYFW, and does. She recalled around 10 years ago when an entrepreneur came along and called themselves Fashion Week Inc., and decided to trademark New York Fashion Week and NYFW [neither IMG nor CFDA had ever trademarked the full phrase or acronym before] and sued IMG and CFDA collectively for using it.
“So there was drama, and they finally settled this. And in fact, there was a court ruling saying, ‘Well, you know, sure you registered it and you maybe can own the online, but in the U.S., use gives you rights to marks.’ The lawsuit went on for five years and was finally settled in 2020.” Her guess is that WME/IMG paid some money, and trademarks were assigned to IMG, who owned them.
She said other companies coming in and using NYFW have to be “super careful” about not creating confusion because that could lead to another round of lawsuits. She said Signet, who now owns the trademarks, can now use them as they like. “But that means that everyone else using variations of it could have some issues,” she said.
“I mean everyone wants in on New York fashion because it’s glamorous, right? And whether there’s actual money in it or not, that might be another story. It’s never really seemed to have that kind of return on investment, shall we say?” said Scafidi.
It has become increasingly clear over the past few years that WME Fashion hasn’t been able to monetize NYFW as it had hoped. In 2024, IMG began making big changes in its operation of New York Fashion Week and pivoted from producing a centralized venue for NYFW: The Shows to concentrating its efforts on facilitating brand partnerships and creative collaborations between brands and designers. Through Focus, a creative and production agency, the company continued to produce fashion shows, consumer experiences, tastemaker dinners and events globally.
In December 2023, IMG said it would exit Spring Studios as the official hub of NYFW: The Shows, and set up a new central location at the Starrett-Lehigh Building at 601 West 26th Street in Chelsea for the fall 2024 season in February. Spring had been the central hub since February 2018, where it would build out the venues, sell sponsorships, have collaborations and manage logistics for designer runways.
But even though this was the central hub, designers continued to hold shows all over New York City — in Brooklyn, Chelsea, the Upper West Side, Roosevelt Island, Midtown and the Upper East Side.
In the most recent February slate of shows, WME Fashion didn’t have any programming during NYFW.
IMG’s affiliation with fashion week began in 2001, when IMG acquired the 7th on Sixth trademark from the CFDA, and IMG became the producer and commercial operator of NYFW. The company had hoped to synergistically combine them with other things that IMG was involved with, such as global television and sponsorships. IMG managed sponsorships, venue logistics and production of the shows which were then held at Bryant Park. IMG relocated the main NYFW venue from Bryant Park to Lincoln Center in 2010, but after legal disputes had to leave after the February 2015 shows (and lost Mercedes-Benz as its name partner) and headed downtown to places such as Skylight at Moynihan Station and later, Spring Studios. IMG started using specific branding, “NYFW: The Shows” in 2015, which became the central event platform.
