WHY IS FASHION IMPORTANT?

I'm so happy to note that this is extracted from her last column. According to Vanessa Friedman, the outgoing fashion editor of the Financial Times, this is why fashion matters:

"If anyone ever challenges me about fashion and its legitimacy, I have a very simple answer – one that I wish I had had in that long-ago job interview, and one I would like to leave with you. Why does fashion matter? The world is not run by naked people.

Beyond that is an even more basic truth about why this subject is worth so much investment of time and attention: everyone has to get dressed in the morning. Everyone, on some level, thinks about clothes; about how they want others to see them, metaphorically as well as literally. It is one of the few universal subjects."

I have to say that I'm not a fan of the American Ms Friedman; I disagree with most of the columns she's written for the paper (which I really like and read regularly) over the 11 years she's been there. She's going to join the New York Times, to replace the revered Cathy Horyn, and I shudder to think how strangely boring and irrelevant the fashion coverage will become at that title.

Of Saint Laurent Paris

“Hedi Slimane did a remarkable job. I liked last Monday’s fashion show very much: the Saint Laurent collection exceeded my expectations. The house needed both a renovation and a return to its roots and, with Hedi, we have started down that road. I totally stand by the house of Yves Saint Laurent and the decisions made by its teams or its artistic director, and I didn’t appreciate that some people tried to use me by linking my name to chatter about invitations or the seating of this or that person,” - Francois-Henri Pinault, chairman and chief executive officer of PPR, parent of Yves Saint Laurent

One of the purportedly stolen Yves Saint Laurent erotic drawings

In further Saint Laurent related news, WWD reports that Saint Laurent's business partner and long-time lover Pierre Bergé, who seems unwilling to let the late couturier lie in peace, is alleging that a portfolio full of personal items (including a journal, a portrait of his mother he did as a teenager and several "erotic drawings") was stolen from the Saint Laurent apartment several years ago. They are now in the possession of an anonymous German businessman who claims to have received it from one of Saint Laurent's former lovers, Fabrice Thomas, his chauffeur of that time.

The Notion

"The notion, recently put forth by the luxury-goods executive François-Henri Pinault, that European houses can show Chinese consumers how to be sophisticated is ridiculous, Ms. Prada said, and quite possibly will only lead to banal products." - Cathy Horyn

A Frustration Voiced

"A frustration voiced a lot these days — by art directors, writers, bloggers and others — is that people aren’t actually creating new things today. They are repeating, mimicking, collecting, downloading, endlessly commenting upon — activities that may be interesting and that may reflect the present moment but are not about creating anything. One could even argue that they are the opposite of creativity and produce the feeling of being in a prison." - Cathy Horyn