And Cathy Horyn’s mother said, “You? A fashion writer?” But Cathy Horyn took the position (with a closet full of Laura Ashley dresses) at a Detroit daily in 1986 because two weeks in New York each year to cover the collections sounded good to her. Today Horyn, the New York Times fashion critic, visited Portland for a lecture at Lewis & Clark and gave a talk at the Portland Art Institute.
Horyn talked about her luck, getting to a metropolitan daily when they still sent fashion writers to New York for the collections (before so many newspapers slashed budgets and cut fashion as a “frill”), expecting them to return to edify the lady readers as to, “how to dress well.” Now, Horyn says, how to dress well is the last thing on the fashion writer’s mind, as a “docile and complacent media” treats fashion as entertainment where the show’s the thing, fashion weeks are corporate-branded like sports stadiums, and there’s a frenzy around designers and editors. She mentioned a number of fashion-related stories that deserve further (or any) coverage, the green movement, the crafts movement, youth subcultures’ influence, the increasing US Latino population, and the near complete loss in the US of apparel manufacturing.
It’s this kind of thinking that makes a writer like Horyn matter. Sure she will tell you about a cuff or a mood in a collection, but she’s heavyweight enough to think well beyond the runway or the cash register to consider a broader swath of culture and society. She noted that one can, “use fashion as a prism to look at the world,” and referred to the ill-fitting suits of the British seamen released from Iranian captivity.
One reminder that Horyn’s prism differs vastly from that of the fashion students in the audience surfaced in response to a question about “independent designers,” where she cited the example of the legendary Azzedine Alaia, independent because he isn’t owned by LVMH. Many in the audience were probably thinking of non-corporate labels that aren’t carried in department stores.
Horyn speaks in a dry, matter-of-fact manner in the same deep alto you can hear on her recorded critiques during fashion weeks. “There is still room for someone to come along and do what no one has done before,” Horyn said, “something that makes perfect contemporary sense, and make a business out of it.” She recalled seeing early Martin Margiela shows while sitting on a washing machine in a Paris laundromat in which the garments were made of trash bags. But it is the business end that seems to interest Horyn most. She’d rather talk business and marketing with Harvey Weinstein than about which Halston dresses he’ll reissue from the archive now that he’s invested in the label. She noted that the electronic era is creating new markets and marketplaces, she shouted out Alvin Toffler’s niche and particle marketing, and spoke about future interactive possibilities in the creation and selling of fashion.
Bullish on blogging, she mentioned it numerous times, Horyn started a blog three months ago and said she loves it. “I love having another way to express myself. And I welcome the conversation, the thoughtful commentary on the blog.”
Asked about haute couture, she said, “It is dying. It will be dead.” She noted that only three designers remain alive who are “in possession of the knowledge and skilled in the techniques, and those designers are now in their ’70s: Lagerfeld, Alaia, and Valentino.” She named great designers including, “Raf Simons, Alber Elbaz, Miuccia Prada, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, and Nicolas Ghesquiere,” noted about Yves Saint Laurent that, “from the most irrational life came the most coherent design.”
She used the word “contemporary” as a positive value numerous times, but noted that its definition varies. Still she says, “show me something contemporary.” In the next breath, she described the man standing outside of Stumptown with her at 6:55 a.m. in a suit that fit well, “no tie, good, and sneakers…bicycle sneakers. And that was contemporary.”
Of Portland, she said she’d never been before, but had talked on the phone with people at Mario’s regularly, checking in with how designers do there.
Fun Cathy Horyn fact: “I’m not a fan of Target or H&M,” she said, “but I am a fan of WalMart. I’ve fooled a lot of people with that.”
Style quotient of attendant crowd of approx. 120: average, but was elevated by the cute girl sitting next to me in bright, busy Nike sneakers, a red headband worn ’80s style over her shiny black shagged hair. Kudos too (for attention to detail) to the girl whose light green eye shadow matched, no kidding, the shade of her green plastic mod sunglasses.
WHAT TO DO NOW?