Do a Google search of “What is the purpose of a fashion show?”—the search engine’s most popular query related to the term fashion show—and almost 4 billion results come up. That will look like a lot of results to the untrained eye, but an insider will tell you that’s nothing. There is no topic more thrilling, and more likely to wind us up, than the purpose of a fashion show.

But it’s not just the showgoers who are wondering for what higher purpose they are accruing both blisters and airline miles. As the international Fashion Week machine revs up for the industry’s first round of women’s ready-to-wear shows of the 2020s, it seems as though every corner of this business is questioning the purpose of fashion’s biannual system of organized weeks and hourly catwalks. “I think this is the big illusion in this industry, that it’s just about shows, but it’s not, really,” Loewe and JW Anderson’s Jonathan Anderson—by every measure a star of the fashion show system—told Vogue Runway at the end of last year. Anderson says the other aspects of his job as a creative director constitute at least 70% of his work. “The shows are a smaller proportion. Sometimes, people don’t want to hear that,” he said.

Phillip Lim, a designer who launched his 3.1 Phillip Lim brand at New York Fashion Week in 2005, is stepping away from the show system entirely. Also speaking to Vogue Runway last year, he bemoaned an industry-wide shift that has affected his business, saying, “It hasn’t been about clothes for a while [in fashion]. It’s been about everything else, and the circus of it all. I know we’re not in the circus business.”

Where some, like Lim, are rejecting runway shows in favor of store events, presentations, dinners, or social media–led campaigns, others seem confident that the runway is the only way forward. Perhaps none are more wholeheartedly pro-catwalk than Marc Jacobs, who has begun labeling his clothing with the word Runway and the date of his fashion shows.

What’s murkier and more confusing is the gray area between full-throttle fashion shows and nothing at all. Designers who want to stay engaged with the fashion system on their own terms must figure out where to show, when to show, and how often to show. With more than 500 collections to be presented in New York, London, Milan, and Paris over the next four weeks, the disparity in how this industry believes a fashion collection should be presented is immense.