Don’t expect Prada prices to drop anytime soon. Miuccia Prada explains to Women’s Wear Daily why her covetable designs cost so darn much. {WWD, Subscription required}
MTV Movie Awards host Rebel Wilson let both of her left nipples say hello onstage last night. {US Weekly}
How does Allison Williams wash her face every day? With cleanser and “a piece of sterile gauze.” Of course. {Who What Wear}
To survive in this business, you’ve got to have more than talent. You’ve got to be shrewd, savvy, determined—and a crazy-hard worker.
So here’s our list of the 50 most influential people working in New York fashion right now. To compile the list, we used our own knowledge of the industry combined with advice from inside sources.
Let us know what you think: You’ll find the entire Fashionista 50 list below. Click on the person’s name to read a full bio. And if you really want to click through the whole slideshow, you can do so here.
The Fashionista 50 slideshow. Click through for a bio of each of our picks.
We look forward to Bridget Foley’s WWD op-eds, mostly because it’s one of the few times the industry trade offers up a real opinion. (It wasn’t always so stale: read John Fairchild’s Chic Savages to learn all about WWD‘s heyday in the 1970s.) But this morning, the Fashionista team was collectively turned off by “Fashion Pound Puppies,” in which Foley lambastes Michelle Obama for requesting designers create inaugural outfits for her on-spec. “How does Michelle Obama get a pass on the ridiculousness surrounding her inaugural wardrobe selections?” she says. “The whole thing would be merely silly and undignified if it weren’t so disrespectful of the time and resources of others, some of whom have little of both at their disposal.” We were so annoyed by her presumptions, in fact, that Leah and I spent like 15 minutes talking about it over Gchat:
Today in news to keep those Christopher Kane/Balenciaga rumors alive: WWD is reporting that, according to sources, “PPR has held discussions with Christopher Kane about financial backing for the fledgling firm.”
“With modeling you have to say, ‘I don’t want that cookie.’ My hips are right on the edge of 35 inches, so if I eat too much I might go over to 36.”
The fashion press has pissed off YSL yet again.
Keeping up this year’s trend of open letters between fashion’s power players, YSL CEO Paul Deneve wrote a not-so-favorable one to WWD, which the trade published today. Oh and he threw in a little dig to Cathy Horyn as well.
Yesterday, WWD reported on Parisian clothing brand Zadig + Voltaire’s first foray into the hospitality business with a hotel set to open on the Left Bank in Paris sometime in 2014.
Seems innocuous enough right? Well, here’s where it gets bad, because, as it turns out, the new property won’t be all that hospitable–depending on what your race is, that is.
In what may be this week’s juciest, most dramatic piece of news, Oscar de la Renta wrote an open letter responding to Horyn’s harsh criticism of him and it was printed in today’s WWD.
Update: Horyn has responded.
The non-stop madness that is fashion week begins officially tomorrow (and unofficially today), meaning you have just a short time to prepare. That means stocking up on coffee, granola bars, doing your laundry, picking up your dry cleaning, submitting all of your ticket requests and rsvp’s, and–this is a fairly new one–making sure you’ve downloaded Read more →
While print publishing’s had a tough time in the states and in many parts of the world over the past few years, the magazine industry in China is apparently booming. As we already know, China has become a huge market for luxury fashion, but not everyone is just buying the clothes. According to a piece in the Times this past weekend, young Chinese women are spending huge chunks of their incomes on Chinese versions of Western fashion glossies such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, etc. They’re obsessed. And Western publishing houses like Hearst are making bank.
Fashion labels are putting even more money into advertising in China than in the states and these glossies practically have more ad pages than they know what to do with. Both Cosmopolitan and Elle have to publish twice monthly over there because one would be too thick to print and Vogue added four extra issues per year. So, is this it? Is China the antidote to print’s decline here in the west?
The thing is, these publishers’ ability to make money has little to do with their publications’ quality or popularity.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Fairchild Fashion Media, the unit of Condé Nast that publishes WWD and Style.com, announced that they had acquired NowManifest, which “hosts” fashion blogs BryanBoy, Fashion Toast, Anna Dello Russo, Mr. Blasberg, and Style by Kling. The acquisition is interesting because it means people who were once independent style bloggers are now part of one of the biggest media companies in existence. However, it also raises some questions, like…
Does Fairchild now technically own all of those blogs? Were the bloggers in on the deal? Or even aware of it? What changes will NowManifest and each of the blogs undergo as a result of the acquisition? What about editorial content?
While BryanBoy tells us he’s “thrilled to be working with Fairchild,” he reveals that he and the other bloggers–meaning Rumi Neely, Derek Blasberg and Anna Dello Russo–didn’t even know about the acquisition until less than 24 hours before it was announced–and even then he was lead to believe it was simply a partnership.
