Cathy Horyn

In Milan, where fashion week is currently underway, Giorgio Armani recently decided to ban Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn from his show, which took place last night. Aside from the 73-year-old designer’s apparent displeasure with Mr. Horyn’s write up of events preceding the show (and, perhaps, an unflattering comment she made about one of his trousers last year), the real reason for his decision has been a matter of speculation. Filing a dispatch from the northern Italian city, The Daily has just provided additional details and developments concerning the exile.  read more »

At the Marc Jacobs spring 2008 runway show last fall, painter John Currin spoke to Times fashionista Cathy Horyn about the designer’s collection: “So often when sex is done in fashion, it’s what is hard, interchangeable and jaded. This seemed very romantic,” Mr. Currin said at the time.

The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly informed us that florals for spring are not groundbreaking. (Whites, on the other hand, are worth a peek—at least that’s the word over at Style.com, which today posted a lookbook of chromatic-free runway fashions—79 of them—for the season when trees blossom, Paris looks pretty and such.) When groundbreaking is called for, it’s Marc Jacobs, tastemaker du jour, people call—or at least look to for consistently thunderous threads. Indeed, he alone seems to set the cutting-edge standards for spring, summer, fall, et. al.  read more »

In an effort to discover just how much fashion has changed over the last decade, we stumbled across this Charlie Rose interview with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. It was conducted in September of 1995, which gives it a kind of fascinating edge. Ms. Wintour also comes across as rather endearing, which is sort of funny.

Aside from admitting her excitement over Wire magazine and the then-forthcoming magazine George, which was launched by the late John F. Kennedy, Jr., she speaks of “an underground German designer named Helmut Lang” and a new designer out of Italy, Miuccia Prada.  read more »

The Transom was rudely rejected from up-and-coming design hotshot Alexander Wang’s show at Bumble & Bumble’s Meatpacking District salon this afternoon, despite the fact that we were on the list—and we weren’t the only ones.

This fiasco owed to a most unwelcome last-minute guest: the city’s Fire Marshal, who made it his business to ensure that the space’s capacity of 200 was in fact kept to—well, 200 (one wonders if this will be the case with the rest of the nine shows scheduled to take place at B&B?). Wang and Co. had clearly invited many more than that, and a tattooed publicist bemoaned the fact that their allotted 200 included both models and photographers, which left space for, like, no guests!  read more »

New York Times' fashion arbiter Cathy Horyn analyzes the five years in the fashion industry since September 11, 2001:

Five years ago I was going to get my hair done. It was my birthday and, egged on by a blue-sky morning, I was treating myself. The first plane had already hit when I entered the salon on East 43rd Street. By the time I left, the towers had fallen and a cloud of ash had risen over lower Manhattan.

Related: 5-Minute Video of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11. [Memory Hole] What We Said. [Morning News]

It's Fashion Wake! From Women's Wear Daily to Cathy Horyn, the critics of fashion have for some time now found themselves unwilling to get in the slightest bit worked up. And all the rah-rah happy-club everything-is-pretty baloney surrounding the shows ill-serves the designers. Isn't there a point, after all, to the dialogue between critics and artists and consumers?

The Transom had a lovely chat yesterday with John Fairchild, the 78-year-old former publisher of WWD. (He has more to say in the story.) He was at The Ritz in Paris. ("I'm retired. I'm taking it easy," he said, by explanation of his whereabouts. Awesome.) Given the stentorian past of the publication, it was surprising to hear him say that perhaps the fashion press should just become, essentially, magalogs.

"I think the ideal situation," Mr. Fairchild said, "is that the consumer should see as many beautiful pictures of the clothes that the press can print, and then they can buy them. They don't read all the blah blah! The only people who read the reviews are the designers and the people who write the reviews. You think some lady, who's about to spend eight thousand dollars, who's about to buy the dress, will read the reviews?"

Hmm. We suppose she wouldn't.

After New York's fashion week belches to completion on Friday, well, it's off to London on September 18th, then Milan on September 24th, and Paris on October 2nd. Sheesh!

"You've gotta remember," Mr. Fairchild said, "that, until the Europeans show, what you're seeing now could change quickly. What you're seeing on the runway may never appear. It might never appear on the scene. I mean, it could! But the thing is, I always remember—who knows what's going to sell? Who knows? No one knows! It's the lady who buys the clothes. She is the ultimate. The rest is blah blah!"  read more »

— Choire Sicha