Fifty years ago, a part of Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue became Fashion Avenue.

On Sept. 23, 1972, the portion of Seventh Avenue between twenty sixth and forty second Streets within the Garment District, got here to be known for all that was bringing it to life: fashion.

Though the subtitled Fashion Avenue moniker was intended to be temporary at first — it was a part of a campaign to revitalize Recent York as a worldwide fashion city — the name stuck and has since remained synonymous with American fashion.

On the time, the renaming campaign was spearheaded by the Fashion Capital of the World Inc., a gaggle formed a 12 months earlier and comprised of a board of fifty influential business leaders, most hailing from the ladies’s apparel sector (those from the menswear industry would join at a later date). Noted industry businesspeople in addition to designers like Jerry Silverman and Abe Schrader were a part of the group. Oscar de la Renta also lent his name to events the group hosted, which had economic support from the City of Recent York and then-Mayor John Lindsay.

Aside from the road’s renaming, promotional moments led by Fashion Capital of the World Inc., included a series of events and fashion shows in September 1972 as a part of Recent York’s first week-ong fall fashion festival. The aim was to draw buyers from world wide to advertise and solidify town as the style capital of the world.

The entire fanfare, including a live fashion show in front of Rockefeller Plaza, was captured within the pages of WWD, in addition to being broadcast on local television, successfully boasting a number of Seventh Avenue designers and their industry counterparts — from clothing to accessories, the events and promotions highlighted Fashion Avenue’s factory staff, buyers and contractors who, just as then, proceed to make American fashion an important economic powerhouse today.

And further driving American fashion to the fore, a 12 months after the Seventh Avenue renaming, the famed Battle of Versailles — so dubbed by WWD’s legendary publisher John B. Fairchild — a fashion show pitting American designers against their French counterparts all within the name of raising funds for the ailing historical site, all but confirmed America, and Recent York City particularly, as central to the worldwide fashion industry; not only as a spot to live, work and do business, but as a good fashion capital in its own right.