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Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn

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  • sbw4224
    Senior Member
    • Sep 2006
    • 571

    Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn



    I just bought N° C magazine from a Superfuture member and found this article by Cathy Horyn written in 2002 fairly interesting - perhaps something to reflect on as fashion weeks are here. I don't have a scanner so I've typed it out.





    Does the Runway Lie?



    by Cathy Horyn





    I mean, can you really absorb enough information from a 15-minute runway presentation to know if a designer has done the big job or is merely show-boating? And then what becomes of that visual impression when it's bombarded with successive images that are unrelated? Does it pound everything into a kind of mental mush that absolves us of needing to care or feel about anything?



    My friend and whirling colleague Amy Spindler, the style editor of The New York Times Magazine, will often say, as she is exiting a plainly bad show, 'The runway never lies!'. To her, and perhaps to most of us who look at clothes for a living, you can tell rather quickly if a designer has something new or worthwhile to say. But I've been wrong. I've been hoodwinked by collections that seemed ingenious (Romeo Gigli's Paris show in the early 90's when he draped his clothes with Murano glass) and dismissive of others that in retrospect were actually speaking to our democratic times (the last show of Miguel Adrover before his dopey backers pulled the plug).



    In fact, the modern runway is a lie. It has allowed very average designers with a powerful, tabloid sense of communication to be perceived as great talents. It plays tricks on your senses - senses, of course, that have been radically altered by a culture that demands sound bytes and seems to be in constant fear of boredom. I don't blame someone like Tom Ford for knowing how to seduce people with his fashion shows - the always dark room, the music and atmosphere always reminiscent of another, freer time in fashion. He is as agiles as he is succinct. But I suppose I blame the audiences for not looking deeper, and for not expecting more.



    I don't have a great yen for the past, but I have plenty of curiosity, and I've often wondered what it would have been like to go to a Balenciaga show and sit there through 200 passages as Diana Vreeland and Carmel Snow smoked in the front row. And what did it sound like when Carmel, alone among the editors, clapped at the show that signaled Chanel's return? The salon, the silence, the rapt attention of the audience - this is not a wish for the good-old days. But think about what it must have meant to sit there and absorb the clothes at eye level. Balenciaga wasn't just interested in putting across looks that spanned the day of his clients; he was also determined to reveal the intimacies of a craft. And I am reminded, too, that at one of the lowest points in Yves Saint Laurent's life, in 1976, he produced one of the most exhilarating collections: a ready-to-wear show, based on Carmen, that had 300 looks and ran for three hours. 'You can't believe how exciting that show was,' Thadee Klossowski, who is married to Loulou de la Falaise, told me. 'I watched it twice.' At the end of one of Saint Laurent's last couture shows, with 90-some looks, I remember an American editor saying as she stood to leave, 'God, he should be paying us to sit through that.' Time, and the spontaneity of visual communication, is what has made fashion seem irrelevant.



    I have, like many people, a ready suspicion that most of what we see on the television news is only half the truth, or at least half the story. (The one obvious exception is Sept. 11, when the media, and hundreds of amateur photographers, reported the events as they were happening before everyone's eyes, in real time.) We expect the news to come to us immediately - that's what the media brightly promises, after all - but the meaning of those events dissipates as quickly as a summer rain. And then it's on to the next injustice or report of catastrophe. What this creates, it seems to me, is an illusion of involvement, even empathy, without the need to react. It's your surface involvement that sustains you, maybe because you sense that the real story is too complicated, and too horrific, to try to fathom.



    We heard a lot in the 90's, as designers bandied about words like 'marketing' and 'branding', that fashion was about surface. It was supposed to be fun and quick and - deeply? - of the moment. At the same time, designers took on more - more collections, more roles, and this elaborate plate spinning was supposed to impress the public. You also got the idea, a rather cynical one, that nothing was meant to last in the new fashion era, and therefore you weren't expected to judge anything to harshly.



    What we've found out, of course, is that most designers don't have the mental agility (or the discipline) of someone like Karl Lagerfeld to do more than one thing well. And what was wrong, anyway, with doing one thing exceptionally well? It's been said, almost as a defense for the lack of imagination and integrity, that younger designers sample the 70's and 80's because they belong to the postmodern age. And how often have journalists airily employed the word 'referencing' to describe what, in another era, would be called copying? But the trouble with referencing or postmodernism (as it's lightly understood these days) is that it discourages people from doing the real mental work that every creative process entails.



    Strange as it must seem, the people I admire in fashion are those who have in a way dropped out, or who insist on doing things with a kind of quiet rigor - Azzedine Alaia, Martin Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto, and Jean Paul Gaultier, who, though hardly quiet, has managed to extract more from his aesthetic since going into haute couture. Experience now rules - and what is experience but the slow evolution of time and understanding?



    Earlier this year, I came out of the tunnel of working with Bill Blass on his memoir, Bare Blass, and I wondered if I had spent too much time absorbed in one man's past to recognize what was happening today. The New York fall collections had just commenced, and as I went around to the shows, looking at some of the new designers whom people were cooing about, I thought 'Am I just not seeing what all the fuss is about?'. To me, this new talent seemed so marginal against the life of Blass, whose career began in the late 40's in the back rooms of Seventh Avenue and took years, years, to really develop.



    But I realized my reaction to the runways was based on something more, something personal. Because in the process of shifting from newspaper deadline writing to book writing, I had learned what it means to truly understand a subject. I had to slow down, go more deeply through the layers, and give everything a perspective longer than six months. It is someone you need in this business more than ever.

  • Seventh
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2006
    • 270

    #2
    Re: Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn

    Great article, totally agree with the sentiment. [Y] Thanks for taking the time to type it up and post it!

    Comment

    • Faust
      kitsch killer
      • Sep 2006
      • 37852

      #3
      Re: Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn



      What a great article, thanks for posting.



      I absolutely agree, of course. It's great that she brings up the problem of the audience - I've shifted to that view myself a while ago. After all, what we buy is what makes one designer successful and another one not, and if we keep buying trash, we will keep seeing trash offered. Same goes for Hollywood, and entertainment in general. Not that this problem is going away - how do you educate a mass audience to know what's good and what's bad? You'd think it would be different with high fashion, that is certainly a niche discipline, but...



      I also like her comments about how fashion ARTIFICIALLY has become transient. I can't emphasize the artifice of it enough, because to most people transiency of fashion is a natural phenomenon. One of the parts of my Masters thesis was about permanence in fashion over transience, and guess which designers I mentioned [73]

      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

      Comment

      • Mirror&Rack
        Senior Member
        • Sep 2007
        • 116

        #4
        Re: Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn

        Thanks, sbw. Very well spoken. I find that some of my more favored designers working today don't present shows in a conventional runway sense, either randomly or not at all. I'm not a huge van Noten fan, but I like that he does no print ads, or any advertising for that matter. I appreciate Margiela's irregularity when it comes to the adherence to standard or regular presentation, not to mention Poell's lack altogether of runway participation. When it comes to the cyclical regularity of developing or carrying on an aesthetic, i echo the author's sentiment that it is important to use a more lengthy outlook to truly gauge a designers work, and overall relevance. I think that personal permanence is something to strive for.

        Comment

        • nqth
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2006
          • 350

          #5
          Re: Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn



          I am wondering if this means we will see CH in showrooms more often, or maybe at all? bc it is like she writes quite a lot about lies, butdoesn't say a word about the truth.


          EDIT, GOD, she wrote that 7 years ago. and she has not started visiting showrooms, still sitting at the shows:P

          Comment

          • Mirror&Rack
            Senior Member
            • Sep 2007
            • 116

            #6
            Re: Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn

            nqth:

            I am wondering if this means we will see CH in showrooms more often, or maybe at all? bc it is like she writes quite a lot about lies, but doesn't say a word about the truth.

            EDIT, GOD, she wrote that 7 years ago. and she has not started visiting showrooms, still sitting at the shows:P


            LOL.....if she fatigues ten minutes in, why would she, it would be so much more work....

            Comment

            • tony
              Member
              • Sep 2007
              • 88

              #7
              Re: Does the runway lie? - Cathy Horyn

              Hm, yeah i think its a well written article, but unfortunatly why should things change?Its working good for those who are not thinking.

              Comment

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