The hitch hiker download.flickr.com/148/379714376_9264f980f1_m.jpg” alt=”" width=”180″ height=”240″ />Fashion Week, it seems, could not arrive at a worse time. New York is in the midst of a cold, hard recession; while many have lost their jobs and are wondering how to pay their bills, it’s understandable that a parade of high-end luxury clothes might be seen as irrelevant at best and a slap in the face to middle-class New Yorkers at worse. But fashion is suffering, just like everything else!

Marc Jacobs is slashing the number of invites to his show by half; he’s also canceled his after-party, while other designers are eschewing the runway altogether. Betsey Johnson and Vera Wang, two Bryant Park veterans, have decided to put on “intimate presentations” at their private showrooms. They’ll surely spin these as “creative decisions” or “alternate endeavors,” but at the end of the day, these designers just don’t have the money to put on a proper, celeb-attended, technologically advanced runway show. Unfortunately, since so much of Fashion Week is glamour and extravagance, the removal of top-name designers from Bryant Park’s runways is far more than just a symbolic gesture–the entire industry is changing, attempting to cut costs while keeping up airs of aesthetic distinction. It’s like coaching a football team while your star quarterback is sidelined with an injury; you still have to try your best, but it’s quite evident that your best pales in comparison with your glory days.

Perhaps the biggest symbol of the shifting nature of the luxury fashion world is the announcement that in 2010, New York Fashion Week will move to the Lincoln Center. The space change will be inconvenient for those who actually put on shows, but the tragic importance of the move lies in the fact that Bryant Park will house fashion’s biggest names no longer. For years, Bryant Park has said it’s wanted Fashion Week out, but the combination of big names and monetary investment in the area probably convinced the Park’s overseers to suck it up. Now that Fashion Week is being forced to scale back, however, the Park can finally afford to send it elsewhere.

All this basically means that even rich people are suffering, kind of, in this recession, and pretty soon the only fashion we’ll be able to afford will consist of potato sacks and hand-me-down Birkenstocks. Hooray!

Photo: Flickr courtesy of Art Comments