In fashion, do all roads lead to France?

That’s the obvious conclusion as designer after designer decamps — even just temporarily — to Paris from New York, London or Tokyo. It’s as if the only way to be taken seriously is to show in the French capital (the latest example: Telfar Clemens), as if being a part of the grand finale of ready-to-wear month is the ultimate sign that one has arrived.

Now, two French-fashion exhibitions in New York are examining some of the reasons.

“Paris, Capital of Fashion,” at The Museum at FIT , focuses on the spare-no-expense, color-drenched explosion of finery that took off in the Ancién Regime (from the 15th to 18th centuries ) and hasn’t stopped since; “French Fashion, Women, and the First World War,” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery , depicts how the French fashion industry persevered amid hardships and, by war’s end, gave the emerging modern world a pretty good idea of how it would dress.

“Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain” is the well-known comment by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who first organized craft workers into strictly regulated guilds that fended off imports. It was all about “shaping France’s identity and giving France a cultural and economic importance on the international stage,” said Sophie Kurkdjian , co-curator of the Bard exhibition.

The FIT show documents “how Paris acquired and retained its status as our foremost fashion capital,” according to Valerie Steele , the museum’s director and chief curator. The display in the first gallery depicts France “within a global context, in dialogue with other fashion capitals,” she said — engaging in savvy business tactics that have long included not just organized French labor, but the co-opting of foreign talent.