Somehow it felt fitting that our first visit to New York Fashion Week for The Refined Woman would occur during a snowstorm. It was a flurry of runway shows, shaking hands and swapping cards, hailing cabs and photographing everything we laid our eyes on. It was all at once overwhelming and wonderful.

Overwhelming because from the outside it seems to be all about what brand you are wearing and who you know in the industry. The fashion world revolves around what can be seen from the exterior. It can be intimidating to enter that world when you feel that you don’t measure up. Yet, the reality is that though some might make Fashion Week about those things, it’s not everything that it is.

There are some truly wonderful aspects to New York Fashion Week, and those are the parts we want to focus on—parts that are beautiful and fun and make us excited to be artists, stylists, and photographers.

The creativity that each designer puts into each runway show—down to the music, the lights, the feeling that each collection gives you—is an exhilarating thing to behold. At the end of each day as we scrolled through our images from each show, it was the creativity of each designer that filled us with the motivation to do it all again the next day (even when that meant staying up late to post those images and waking up early to make it to the next show).

What we found though is that if you are kind, and if you work hard, amazing things can happen. There is no industry this doesn’t apply to—even fashion, as intimidating as it can seem.

We met people who took the time to stop and connect amidst the chaos inside the tents at Lincoln Center. Those are the moments that made Fashion Week for us. The moments that we could connect with others about what excites us. It made us want to go back next year and find someone new and assure them that there is more to fashion than meets the eye.

Now that we’ve told you all about it, here are some of our favorite photos from NYFW…