Hedi Slimane Disses Fashion Critic Cathy Horyn, Bans Her From Saint Laurent Shows

 

Cathy Horyn is having a busy Spring/Summer 2013 fashion season. In fact, it’s a wonder she has time to attend and critique designer runway shows at all.

Oscar de la Renta took out a full page ad in WWD after New York Fashion Week in September comparing the New York Times fashion critic to “stale 3-day old hamburger” in response to her dubbing him the “hot dog” of American fashion in her critique of his Spring/Summer 2013 show. 

Lady Gaga sided with de la Renta via Twitter,  and wrote a letter to V magazine about the writer, reigniting her year-old spat with Horyn over her advising Donatella Versace not to give Gaga archival designs for more music videos. But during Paris Fashion Week, Gaga pulled out all the stops, rewriting her song “Cake Like Lady Gaga” to insult the writer, and letting her designer pal Thierry Mugler play it during his Spring 2013 collection.

On the recorded song, she rapped: “Cathy Horyn, your style ain’t dick,” and insulted her boyfriend, Liz Claiborne exec Art Ortenberg, rapping, “Ortenberg, you can suck my dick / Walk bitch, you ain’t Lady Gaga.”

PHOTOS: Paris Fashion Week  

She continued: “Walk a mile in these foot-high heels/ I run in these, you ain’t runnin’ shit/ You chew beef, I wear meat… I’m getting fat, and so is my bank account.”

The latest development is that L.A.-based designer Hedi Slimane  — the much lauded creative head of Saint Laurent – is so annoyed with Horyn that he didn’t invite her to his first RTW collection in Paris this week. She wrote a review from digital images, pronouncing the collection “a nice but frozen vision of a bohemian chick at the Chateau Marmont. Or in St. Tropez. Mr. Slimane’s clothes lacked a new fashion spirit.”

Horyn also blamed her exclusion from Slimane’s show on a 5-year-old grudge and explained it on her On The Runway blog.

“Despite positive reviews of his early YSL and Dior collections, as well as a profile, Mr. Slimane objected bitterly to a review I wrote in 2004 — not about him but Raf Simons. Essentially I wrote that without Mr. Simons’s template of slim tailoring and street casting, there would not have been a Hedi Slimane … Anyway, Mr. Slimane insisted that he was the first to show the skinny suit,” Horyn writes.

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“It was a silly debate,” she admits. “Who cares? As time went on, he also felt (as best as I can tell) that I gave preference to Mr. Simons in my coverage of the men’s shows. If I gave him attention, it was because his work and my reporting into the key early part of his career merited it. I haven’t spoken to Mr. Slimane in five years.”

Now they are speaking — one might call it sparring — via social media: Both on her blog and on his Twitter.  Slimane posted his frustrations about Horyn’s behavior on his Twitter, creating a newspaper-like graphic he calls “My Own Times.”

STORY: Pierre Berger Says Hedi Slimane “Should Be Left To Do Fashion In A City He loves”

In his tweet, he calls her a “schoolyard bully” and makes a dig about the slow sales of her book about designer Bill Blass. He promises she will never get a seat at a Saint Laurent show. But she “might get a 2 for 1 at Dior” (where Raf Simons is the designer). Hedi also calls Horyn a “publicist in disguise.” And that’s some hardcore smack for a NY Times journalist. To read Slimane’s “My Own Times” post, click here.

In response. Horyn has fired back, telling WWD that “it’s all silly nonsense to me.” Now Slimane is respnding again on Twitter, writing, “What is a ‘silly nonsense’ to me is Catty Horyn still singing her tired bias tune for the NYT. This is an embarrassment for the newspaper.”

Can a fashion critic do her job if she is banned from top fashion designers’ shows? And if that’s the case, will Horyn be advised to be less critical in her reviews?

Tell us: What do you think of this fashion free-for-all?