®The runway did not begin only as entertainment.
Fashion houses needed a way to show clients what could be ordered. Worth is often credited with helping formalize presentation on live models, and later couture houses developed seasonal presentations into recurring moments in the fashion calendar.
That history puts commerce and spectacle in the same frame. A show can be theatrical while still serving an extremely practical sales function.
The modern runway later accumulated press, celebrity, digital media and broader cultural meaning. Those later layers should not be projected backward onto the earliest salon presentations.
The interesting pattern is how a utility becomes a media format.
A practical demonstration can evolve into storytelling once an audience begins to value the event itself.
Fashion has long understood that showing the product can become a second product: an experience that shapes how the collection is remembered before anyone buys it.