Twice a year, designers all over the world reveal their latest collections to an eager audience of fashion writers, editors, and admirers at fashion week events. From front row perches, the fashion elite watch as models, garbed in fanciful clothing, strut imperiously down the runway.

Every choice made, from the pieces selected to the music to the models’ hair and make-up, is directed toward showcasing a designer’s high-end collection for her clientele. But with each day, news headlines bear grimmer tidings of a deepening recession. As unemployment rates soar, and the average consumer has less disposable cash, can a luxe industry like high fashion remain relevant?

While the fashion industry often seems insular and prone to excess (last year, a Singapore fashion show featured a diamond-encrusted thong), the impact of the recession on its collective attitude is undeniable. The New York Post reported that several designers, including Vera Wang, Betsey Johnson, and Carmen Marc Valvo, opted out of showing their fall lines at Bryant Park for New York’s fashion week, citing the exorbitant costs involved.

Overseas, things were equally saturnine. “The mood during London fashion week was much the same as it was in New York,” said Maria Divaris, a freelance fashion writer and former fashion editor for Marie Claire. “[It] was slightly more somber and more understated. A lot of designers have downsized a bit, audiences were smaller, some collections featured fewer looks than usual and some designers chose to have small presentations in their showrooms in lieu of having pricey runway shows.”

But Divaris noted that designers and insiders are also mindful of how the recession is affecting potential customers, adding that “designers are raising the bar this season, creating a better quality product with more reasonable price tags in order to attract buyers.”

This kind of tacit admission of the economic crisis seems to be industry-wide. Fashion editors, currently serving a cash-strapped readership, are mixing designer pieces with inexpensive clothes and accessories. Divaris refers to this trend as “the Michelle Obama effect.”

Eschewing the remote, mostly aspirational quality of Jacqueline Kennedy’s signature look, Mrs. Obama has often seemed intimately connected to the average woman; her choice to wear an $148 off-the-rack dress for her appearance on ABC’s “The View” surprised and charmed the public. Pairing high fashion like Thakoon with cheaper items from J.Crew, Obama has proved to be something of a fashion renegade, an icon for recession-era style.

Divaris believes that fashion styling will continue to mirror Obama’s eclecticism, contributing to a climate wherein “editors will be much more sensitive and selective about the high-priced clothes and accessories they choose to feature. There will be a lot more focus on how real women dress and shop while still maintaining high end style.”

Now is perhaps the most crucial time for an embattled fashion industry to prove its worth to middle class shoppers, especially since high fashion (from outrageously priced haute couture to slightly more reasonable ready-to-wear pieces) has seemed to exist in its own rarefied bubble. Impractical designs draped across underweight models often feel like a message from designers to the average woman: you’re not a part of our world. Factoring in the economic woes of a demoralized population, it is easy for consumers to feel like the fashion of Paris and Milan catwalks is irrelevant to everyday life.

Daniel Saynt, founder of FashionIndie.com, acknowledges that high fashion often seems like a universe unto itself, but also notes that “the high fashion world is meant to inspire. That inspiration forms ideals of grandeur” for the average shopper. And Divaris is quick to point out that high fashion doesn’t intentionally cultivate an air of exclusivity, clarifying that “One doesn’t have to be a size 0 and have deep pockets to be able to look fabulous and be on point with the latest and greatest fashion trends.”

She explains that many prominent designers today are “taking high end ideas and making them attainable for a much larger market,” by creating affordable lines, like Roberto Cavalli and Stella McCartney for H&M or Alexander McQueen for Target.

From a practical standpoint, offering these less-costly alternatives in retail chains benefits high fashion designers. If they don’t bring their designs to the masses, the “trickle down” effect will. Knowledge of the “trickle down” effect entered popular culture through a significant moment in The Devil Wears Prada.

Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep playing a fictional analogue of Vogue editrix Anna Wintour) holds up two seemingly indistinguishable cerulean belts for appraisal. Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), her assistant, stifles a guffaw at the notion that an appreciable difference exists between the two. Fixing Andy with a steely glare, Miranda expounds on the significance of fashion designers’ choices: “In 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin,” she finishes, gesturing toward Andy’s blue sweater.

Miranda’s point is that the trendsetters determine high-end style, but it inevitably reaches the general public. A cursory glance of retail stores confirms this theory. The “it” dress of last summer, the Herve Leger bandage dress (worn by everyone from Victoria Beckham and Beyoncé Knowles to Lindsay Lohan), now exists in budget-version form, with a few alterations, in stores such as Mandee’s and Strawberry.

Unless designers wish to see other, less competent hands transform and make money from their creations, creating less expensive, quality clothes for a broader clientele is the surest way to remain profitable and relevant. In this way, the “gods of fashion” as Saynt calls them, can offer “little glimpses at their greatness,” while maintaining a place in popular culture.