The once-private fashion show generates enormous public interest. But the near-instant exposure comes with a side-effect: Designers are finding that the immediacy of runway images can make clothes feel dated by the time they hit stores.

"It's bittersweet," Proenza Schouler's Jack McCollough says. "[Accessibility] gets more people interested in fashion because it's more reachable. But at the same time, it's there faster so people get bored of it quickly." He adds that knock-off companies get a jump-start on sending out copies before the originals even hit the market.

There are no easy answers. "There's very few companies that could afford to do a show and then have stock, in the hopes that people are going to want to buy what they just showed," Duckie Brown's Daniel Silver says. "That would be an enormous undertaking and an enormous outlay of money -- and really taking a chance."

Proenza Schouler, Phillip Lim and Diane von Furstenberg are among the designers who are trying out different approaches to carry customer interest over from show season into retail stores.

This season, Lim teamed up with American Express to put on a consumer show (tickets came with a 20% discount at 3.1 Phillip Lim) that paired a chatty informality with access to Lim's newest collection. The consumer show is "not about having editors check, check, check. It's about the emotional side of shopping," Lim says. (Diane von Furstenberg put on an American Express consumer show last season.)

Just before New York's fashion shows started, Proenza Schouler starred in Loic Prigent's "The Day Before," a Sundance Channel documentary that followed the team in the final hours leading up to their Fall 2009 collection. Not coincidentally, the show premiered as the collection was hitting stores. Having the show's premiere coincide with the fall collection is a way to "create excitement about a collection when it actually exists in the store," designer Lazaro Hernandez says.

Duckie Brown's designers attend trunk shows and private events where they discuss clothes with customers. But they say that there is something special about the built-in lag from runway to store racks. "I think people should be more patient. Just wait," Steven Cox says. "There's very little these days that we get to anticipate," Daniel Silver adds.