The electricity went out during one of the runway shows. At another, the fashion editors got stuck in a broken elevator. But the last straw was when ceiling plaster came crumbling down on both the models on the catwalk and the press in the front row at one of the New York Market Week shows in 1991.

The models brushed the dust off their shoulders and kept walking, says Fern Mallis, who served as Executive Director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America from 1991 to 2001, but Suzy Menkes and Carrie Donovan, two of the top fashion editors in the world at the time, raised a fuss and basically said, “We live for fashion; we don’t want to die for it.”