After splitting with her husband, Mohammed (Eddie) Kamali, in the mid-1970s, she took to camping in the woods with a boyfriend. “It was cold,” she recalled, “and I was always getting up at night to go to the bathroom.” On one particularly nippy night, she threw on her sleeping bag and sprinted for the bush. “As I was running,” she said, “I was thinking, ‘I need to put sleeves in this thing.’ ” The rest is rag-trade history. Variations of that seminal Kamali design have inspired generations of puffy down coats. An emblem of urban survivalist chic, the original spiked in popularity after 9/11. “When it really looked like slim pickings for selling anything, we were making sleeping-bag coats out of every piece of fabric we had,” Ms. Kamali recalled. “That coat is what kept us in business.”
”"Always In Her Element", Ruth La Ferla For The New York TimesNew York Times
Quote Of The Day: A New Chapter In Fast Fashion
Consumers know that a lot of interesting fashion is now available for less, a result of the decade-long trend of democratized design that introduced to the American market stores like H & M, Zara and the Topshop store opening Thursday in Manhattan. But for working women and many customers out of their 20s and 30s, those designs skew too trendy or are inappropriate for office attire. It is almost as if that democratization had overlooked an entire segment of the population: baby boomers who want a version of fast fashion for grown-ups.
”"Irresistible and Affordable", New York TimesQuote Of The Day: Cathy Horyn Reflects On Fall 2009
Retailers seemed almost surprised that designers had managed to cram so much style into classics like the coatdress without overdoing it. As Mr. Frasch said, “It’s fashion, but it’s not going to be going out of fashion.” Julie Gilhart, the fashion director at Barneys New York, brought up the Lanvin sheath with the twist, which will cost about $2,300. “It’s the kind of dress you can wear, then put away in your closet for 10 years. When you bring it back out, people will say, ‘What is that?’ And you can say, ‘Yeah, it’s a 10-year-old Lanvin.’ ”
”"Two Words For Fall: Toughen Up", New York TimesQuote Of The Day: Cathy Horyn Takes On Wintour...Again
It’s embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession--For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the “charms” of Wal-Mart and Target. A similar obtuseness permeates a fashion spread in the January issue, where a model and a child are portrayed on a weekend outing with a Superman figure. Is a ’50s suburban frock emblematic of the mortgage meltdown?
”"What's Wrong With Vogue?" by Cathy Horyn, Dec 31 2008.The Runway Scoop Shoutout: Marc Jacobs Ads and the New York Times
Our network partner, The Runway Scoop, reported on Cathy Horyn's musings on modern fashion ads. The Runway Scoop brings up a good point, that creative persons presumably would spawn creative advertisements, although Horyn postulates that confidence is really the key. Marc Jacobs' work with Juergen Teller, has revolutionized our conception of fashion advertising and many, therefore, wonder just which of the two is responsible. Horyn, in a separate article on the duo, asks Teller about Jacobs' influence in his work, to which he replied, “He was the person who really said, ‘Just do what your heart feels.’...He gave me the license to be myself and that is extremely rare that he supported me.". Teller has shot all of the advertisements for Marc Jacobs since 2005 and the last two season's advertisements for Yves Saint Laurent. Shoutout: Fashion Reportage In The Salon
First things first, we 'aint no blog. We called our weigh-in on the New York Times piece concerning the 24/7 stress of blogging, a Coutorture Salon. To clarify, these bloggers are our Network Partners and we have Salons when we chat about people's conception of our 'digital sweatshops'. This is fashion after all and if we're going to work ten or eleven hours days, you better believe we're going to invent fancy titles for ourselves even if we're stuck in our pajamas for fear that we might not get our dozen posts up before lunchtime (not to mention organize and produce, er, original content). So, the NYT wasn't so off-base in articulating the stresses. What they failed to do was quit their fascination with the concept of blogging and, well, the word itself, and put the whole thing in the context of journalism at large. What do our network partners think? Well let's just say they didn't take the bait either. Check out Shiny Style for her piece on "Blogging Sweatshops"and Girl Woman Beauty Brains for her piece called, "Bloggers' Spirit Lives On". 
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