New York Fashion Week means that fashion lovers, including the most experienced in the business and those barely starting out, will flock to New York to unveil, judge and promote the latest trends. But it wasn’t always this way. From its beginning, fashion week was a much smaller, much more exclusive gathering solely for top store buyers and fashion editors.

New York Fashion Week
Fashion Week isn't just for the fashion elite anymore.

Abby Schreiber, associate fashion editor at Paper magazine, thinks that this creates a need for Fashion Week to regroup and "One thing I hear again and again is just how overwhelming Fashion Week has become," said Abby Schreiber, an associate editor who covers fashion at Paper magazine. "The number of people interested in Fashion Week has ballooned," she said. "It's not as exclusive anymore."

Katherine Heigl, New York Fashion Week
Katherine Heigl at Fashion Week - the shows have become regular haunts for celebs of all calibers.

The dizzying growth of Fashion Week has brought it to the point where some buyers wait to see the collections privately, while the seats at actual shows are occupied by fashion students, bloggers and overexposed celebrities. Still, some insiders think that this can prove to be a good thing for the event. You've got bloggers from Japan and India and fashion street-style photographers from Russia. You're exposed to the entire world by showing at New York Fashion Week," Jay Godfrey, a designer showing in New York for the first time, said. "We can show during New York Fashion Week at 1:30 p.m. on February 6 and by 1:31 p.m. on February 6, those images are in the most far-flung places you can imagine."

Kelly Osbourne
Reality stars have also become regulars at the shows.

This year, designers – even the biggest names are seeking to scale down their shows and are therefore in need of smaller spaces, Jarrad Clark, vice president and global creative director for IMG, said for Reuters. While the shows are smaller, Fashion Week itself is bigger than ever, with 2,500 members of the media registered to attend this season's Fashion Week, which officially kicks off on Thursday and ends on February 13.