Talk to Cathy Horyn about fashion and you quickly pick up on her need to see ‘the big picture’. As one of the industry’s most respected and feared critics, it stands to reason that her praise (or scorn) for any given collection be contextualized on both micro and macro levels. Combining silhouettes with sea change; designer’s whims with ‘the direction we’re all heading in.’

In recent years, fashion has been heading upwards and outwards, so often defined by its gargantuan scale. The sheer volume of brands, designers, shows, showrooms, VIPs, VICs, crowds, content, customers, collabs and, until recently, booming international markets, can make the industry seem indecipherable – fascinating to observe yet trickier than ever to summarize in neat soundbites. And it’s the big picture of Horyn’s own career which has afforded her the experience and authority to see it and say it how it is.

Back in 1986, the talented cub reporter Horyn answered an ad in The Detroit News looking for a ‘good writer, no fashion experience necessary.’ She got the job and quickly found herself dispatched to Milan and Paris to learn her beat while covering the seasonal collections. Stints at The Washington Post and then glitzy 1990s-era Vanity Fair soon followed, before, in 1998, she landed the plum role of chief fashion critic for the New York Times. Horyn’s 15 years at the Times cemented her reputation as both a truth-telling pundit and consummate writer. Inspired by the American New Journalists of the 1960s and 1970s, Horyn took to observing fashion’s great and good from within while always remaining somewhat removed, allowing herself the space to serve her readers, and not just the industry’s PR machine. As if to highlight this point, since 2016 she’s juggled her current role as fashion critic-at-large for New York magazine with becoming a one-woman industrial flower farmer in rural Virginia. The spectacular incongruity of a professional life that now spans the brilliance of both John Deere and John Galliano would, one suspects, be of some amusement to her literary heroes Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe.

Nonetheless, it was firmly in her role as fashion critic that Cathy Horyn recently sat down for a chat with System. With the industry currently in a holding pattern, awaiting numerous creative reboots and designer debut offerings – not to mention businesses facing market turbulence – now was an ideal time to get her big-picture take on where fashion might be heading. The conversation began on the final afternoon of Paris Fashion Week, and continued during follow-up phone calls in the ensuing weeks, as designers were being hired and fired, and tariffs loomed large.

Jonathan Wingfield: Did you sense a direct response to current global affairs or fashion industry uncertainty on the runway this season?
Cathy Horyn: When the shows are on, and I felt it particularly keenly this season, it’s very hard to see the big picture. There’s such a bombardment of ideas and strengths and weaknesses. When I think about what’s going on in the industry right now, and all the confusion that comes with designers moving houses, I think of the Joan Didion line, ‘The center is not holding’. Looking back over this season’s shows, it does feel quite business as usual, although the designer shake-ups have largely placed things in limbo. Nonetheless, I don’t think that’s affecting people’s interest in fashion – look at all those young people outside Miu Miu in a state of delirium.

What do you think draws them to the shows?
Is it fashion? Or is it the arrival of the celebrities and influencers? At Miu Miu, it seems like the celebrities fuel a huge level of interest. Thinking about that Miu Miu show: there was a reserve of energy for Miuccia, especially after the Chanel show just before it, which was so flattening and not very good. Chanel is obviously in a holding pattern, as is Gucci. It’s baffling to me that people – whether that’s executives or reporters – seem to forget that this is a historical problem, and so an equally historical solution is required, which is to put creative people in those roles as opposed to trying to run them with executives, with their executive ideas of what’s creative. So much gets run by numbers now, and you sense things are increasingly shaped by the marketing people. I mean, how many more celebrities can Gucci wrangle? It feels like they’re dressing everybody. I appreciate that it’s all about getting numbers and views, but that can only take you so far.

When you think of Gucci today, what is it that comes to mind?
It makes me think back to the dreadful state that Gucci was in when Tom [Ford] and Domenico [de Sole] took over in the mid-1990s. The problems were different then from what they are today – too many licenses, too much wholesale, it was too spread out – but they just came and revamped the whole thing, and gave it a different vision. The same thing with Alessandro Michele, he gave it a different vision. And that can have such a tonic effect on a brand. So I don’t understand how Prada manages to have great revenue numbers and a real creative force to it, yet so many other brands seem to be adverse to that dynamic. I just don’t get it. You need people with big, creative ideas. You need people who know what young people want to wear, and who are connected to what’s going on in the world. You have to have trust in those people.

Do you think Gucci needs a radical reworking, and is Demna the right designer for the job?
Yes and yes. The only puzzling thing is no one put two and two together. I’d heard rumours about Demna leaving Balenciaga, and then heard that he wanted to move to Los Angeles, where he already has a house, and have a baby, which would be quite reasonable at his age. I pictured him taking a break from fashion and enjoying his life. And so all I could think of, quite selfishly, was how much I’d enjoyed the whole arc of what he’s created at Balenciaga – it’s a prototype for how to approach a heritage brand. And so I definitely think he could do a great job at Gucci.

How would you define what it is that Demna brings?
Demna raises the excitement and the revenue; that combination is so rare in this business. Yet there’s this assumption that he’s going to go into Gucci and sort of Demna-fy it. I don’t think we should make those assumptions. He’s one of those talents – and there are very few of them – who is able to get inside a brand, solve its issues, and figure out what it needs. He’s really good with product. He’s really good at motivating people around him and working with good talent. He’s really good at orchestrating the big production, which makes people excited about fashion and seeing it in the big picture. And so, yes, I think it’s a really good match. I particularly liked what Stefano Cantino [Gucci CEO] said during the press conference when they announced it: ‘We needed a strong and opinionated designer.’ I mean, most big brands do. Gucci struggled with Sabato de Sarno; he wasn’t the big engine that you need to create that narrative, or that big-picture view of what a fashion brand can be today.

Were you surprised that Hedi Slimane did not get appointed to Gucci?
Well, I think Hedi would have been really good at it. I think he would have been good at Chanel, too. I think you can put Hedi in pretty much any classic ‘bourgeois’ brand, and he can make it cool. At the time Matthieu Blazy was appointed the role at Chanel, Bruno Pavlovsky [Chanel’s president of fashion] expressed in a comment in Women’s Wear Daily his preference for not knowing what a potential creative director would deliver before their appointment. And I think that’s perhaps the downside of Hedi: you sort of know what you might get. It’s perfectly great, but it doesn’t have the surprise element. The scuttlebutt is that when you talk to CEOs or headhunters who’ve worked with him, you hear that he wants too much control over the whole brand – the design, the image, the look of the stores. He’s not wrong to want all that, but it’s a question of tolerance. How much control would the Kering people be willing to give up? So I think that’s probably the explanation. But you just don’t have big, creative minds like Hedi or Demna every generation. It’s somewhat worrisome that we don’t have that coming through. Like, who is going to be the next guy or woman in their thirties – the age Demna was when he arrived at Balenciaga – who can take on something like that and transform it?

You’ve been pretty vocal about your admiration for what Demna’s done at Balenciaga. Do you have a highlight?
I’ll never forget that parliament show. I remember Juergen [Teller] and I were sitting next to one another, and we just started giggling because the depictions of people in those banal suits of power were so accurate. They could have been bodyguards, or they could have been bureaucrats. Then that lady in the rigid ball gown, like she’s a little ballerina in a jewellery box. I remember talking to someone else right after the show who said, ‘That was appalling! The utter hopelessness…’ And Demna, of course, loved that reaction.

What surprises you about the fashion industry in 2025?
I naively assume that new designers are going to bring newness, so I guess I’m surprised by the fact their ideas aren’t all that new. What Duran Lantink does gets a lot of buzz, and he executes it really well, but most of his ideas have already been done by other people.

Would you say the lexicon of fashion design has been largely defined and now it’s more a case of what designers do with that language, how they mix and match or rework it?
I think it is that. It’s like R&B and rock, and how that continues to be redefined over and over again. Look at how much of Margiela’s influence permeates what goes on today. Those kinds of people don’t come along very often, and we are overdue another Margiela, another McQueen, another Helmut Lang, probably another Rei Kawakubo. As for Duran, a lot of people have been interested in him for the last two or three seasons. He is good, and there’s no question he’s got a wonderful sense of humour. I don’t know him personally, but I see his clothes and think there’s a joie de vivre there, there’s a wit, there’s an exceptional ability to manipulate shape and fabric and forms. All that’s really positive… but it’s not new. The floating waist was done by Demna at Margiela about 15 years ago. The tubular shapes could probably be traced back to Rei Kawakubo. But, yes, he does it in a fresh way that feels sparky and fun.

What did you see this season that you liked, and that felt genuinely new?
I like this kid in London, Yaku [Stapleton], a lot. He did a presentation in the [British Fashion Council’s] NewGen space. Sarah Mower alerted me to him, and I’m glad she did. He set up these tableaux vivants that were supposed to be a group of people living on a desert island: they were playing chess, they were talking, and the way they were dressed was kind of streetwear, but placed into the arena of fantasy. Talking to Yaku, I learnt that he’s 27, grew up in St. Albans, and graduated from Central Saint Martins. As a kid he began playing role-playing games. So when he created his brand two years ago, it combined elements of streetwear with Afrofuturism and the whole role-playing world. What you’re seeing are these kinds of fantasy shapes combined with streetwear; there’s not even a real language for it yet, which is what’s so interesting. And he happens to be a very bright kid, fun to talk to. There’s no hype or bullshit with him, and he already has a decent business.

Do you sense that someone like Yaku could have a future at a big house?
I don’t even think that’s the point. He doesn’t belong in any of those houses; they wouldn’t know what to do with him. The ideal scenario for him would be to have a wonderful partner with a good investor who won’t screw anything up while giving him the means to build a better website, better distribution, all those kinds of things. I think he’s so bright that he can get there himself, but you know how it works – you need investment to really get things moving. The other designer I liked a lot, also in London, is Steve O Smith. He’s a finalist for the LVMH Prize this year. He grew up in London, studied drawing and painting at Rhode Island School of Design, then went to Central Saint Martins. He’s very good at illustration: he does sketches of women – René Gruau, Joe Eula kinds of things – that he then converts into dresses. Each dress looks like a sketch.

What are they made of?
He emulates the tone and depth of the sketches by working in tulle, organza and crêpe to create these multi-layered effects. Everything is cut out by hand. The final result is quite different from the initial drawing, and even the first iterations of the layering, but you can see that it derives from a sketch, with that movement and energy incorporated into it. He lives in north London with his partner, they work in the business together. He’s got one sewer, I think, a Scottish lady. He’s strictly custom. Prices start at $12,000, and he’s at capacity for orders.

That’s not an easily scalable business.
Exactly, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be scaled. Someone said to me, ‘Well, how long can he keep doing that for?’ And I was like, ‘He’s too young to be worrying about that right now.’

Is the LVMH Prize a poisoned chalice for someone like him?
I don’t think it has to be. And, you know, what Steve does has to be done by hand. He wants to move into colour next, he was showing me these Paul Cadmus drawings because he was really interested in their colours. He said half-jokingly, or maybe completely seriously that he wanted to do a dress based on a Matisse so it ends up looking like the painting. Not that it’s going to look like Saint Laurent’s Picassos, that’s not what he has in mind. He said the references kind of go through his hands and then become something else. I think Steve’s very open minded about what he’s doing, I don’t think he’s chasing anything. Like Yaku, Steve has a good head on his shoulders. I think he’s comfortable in his life.

That feels almost like the antithesis of an LVMH Prize-winner’s ambition?
Well, we may need to return to more traditional models of operating. It amazes me when I see some of these younger designers on the schedule. Is it family money or something? Because I’m wondering how they stay in business.
The eternal question.
The other guy in London that I like a lot is Michael Stewart from Standing Ground. I think his work seems to flow out of the tradition of Alaïa; not that it looks like Alaïa, but it seems to have the same discipline. Like so many young designers, his goal is to show in Paris next year, and I think he actually belongs in Paris. He makes beautiful clothes; again, it’s pretty much a custom business. He might be able to do some scaling for certain things, but he probably needs an investor.

It’s telling that his goal is to show in Paris.
I think if you can get on the couture calendar – and Michael would certainly qualify for that with the kind of work he’s doing – you’ll get the attention of a wider audience, and access to the couture customers who come here. It was Steve [O Smith] who told me that he came to Paris during one of the recent couture seasons and just took over a storefront somewhere. It probably helped that Eddie Redmayne and his wife Hannah [Bagshawe] wore his clothes to the Met Ball last year, but an American couture client, in Paris for the shows, stopped by and ordered something right away. So I think there’s definitely a future if you’re doing something that special. Ten years ago, everybody looked up to Margiela, McQueen and Alaïa, because of their originality. And I remember asking Azzedine about it at the time: ‘Can new or younger designers have the kind of business that you have?’ And he just said, ‘Well, to do that you have to work all the time.’ And he did. He was constantly working. But these young designers in London I’m talking about have exceptional skills at cutting, sewing… they can do all of that.

Do you think that London has reconciled itself to be an incubator for young talent rather than a city for dominant luxury businesses? When you think about Paris from an industry perspective, LVMH has become the defining ‘brand’ – it’s come to represent what fashion means in the city. By the same rationale, you could argue that the most enduring and defining London ‘brand’ is actually Central Saint Martins.
I think designers in London may be heading in three different paths. The first one, the most lucrative, the most sustainable, is the students – coming out of Central Saint Martins, the Royal College of Art, and some of the technical schools in the north of England – who have ideas and skills, and who will end up working in a design studio in Paris or Milan, and who may end up becoming the design director of that team, not necessarily the creative director. And that’s great. The other path, I hope, is the path of Yaku, who comes along once in a generation, maybe once every two generations, who has an idea that’s based on his time, that you could only invent today because of, say, the language of the Internet or AI. I think the third path is the one that Steve O Smith and Michael Stewart are on. Michael is saving up money to show in Paris, and Steve is running a small, sustainable business; he’s at capacity, the V&A just bought one of his dresses. He’s very happy doing what he’s doing. But I’d like to think that Steve and Michael can survive by making things that are couture, or custom. Where that goes, I don’t know.

Do you think an important aspect of your role is to frame what you’re seeing through the lens of the business, the markets, and how brands are performing? Or should that side of things not cloud your judgment on what designers are creating? Our entire discussion today could be exclusively about the state of the business, with little talk of clothes or new designers who’ve caught your eye…
Exactly. I was talking to a designer recently, someone I know pretty well, about this whole ‘anti-rich’ movement that’s emerging across the world. People are sick of elites and their privilege. I say that, but of course you look at Instagram’s coverage of fashion and it’s still glitz and glamour and socialites. I just feel like everybody is lazily stuck in that marketing pitch of ‘fashion is luxury’, so they feel like it has to be presented in that way. It bores me. And I’m so tired of all these brand ambassadors. It just seems phony to me. The other day, I saw Tilda Swinton getting out of a black car on Rue Cambon and going up the stairs to Chanel. I just thought, ‘I don’t really believe that. What is she doing there?’ It doesn’t make sense to me, even though Tilda wears a lot of different brands’ clothes. When I said this to a friend of mine, expecting him to agree with me, he just replied, ‘It’s all about mathematics now in the fashion houses.’ It’s pay to play. It’s entirely transactional.

Earlier this week I was talking to the people from Launchmetrics – the company that provides brands with all the data about the shows, the best-performing posts, the best-performing brand ambassadors and so on, in terms of what they call Media Impact Value. They had calculated that the average Media Impact Value for each front-show seat at a big show in Paris is now $77,000.
The other day, I talked to a woman at Schiaparelli who helps bring in VICs [Very Important Customers] – an international community mostly from London – and she was saying that the houses now expect ready-to-wear VICs to spend a pretty significant sum each and every season to be eligible for a show invite. And if you’re a couture customer who last bought something two seasons ago, that no longer makes the cut. I think of the Nan Kempners of the world, who never bought over long periods of time; it was a blouse here, a jacket there, and that’s how they built their wardrobes. In the current climate, Nan Kempner would have to up her spend or she’d be vetoed from the couture shows.

To go back to the original question, do you feel that it’s important to be aware of the business when you’re going in and looking at collections?
Just from experience, I do understand the types of business. I’ve always had good relationships with a lot of executives over the years – at Kering, LVMH and Richemont; people like Domenico De Sole, Sidney Toledano, Michael Burke, Ralph Toledano, or Siddhartha Shukla, who’s now at Lanvin. I have regular conversations with those guys because they’re great to talk to about the industry. But you have to really get into the nitty-gritty of what each company’s issues might be; maybe one company is not doing so well because they’ve stopped selling knits, or they’ve shifted the cut of their clothes, or they’ve lost their merchandiser or one of their design team… So I’m aware of all those elements that can explain what’s going on in a house. But given the choice, I’ve always preferred talking to creatives.

Do you think the pendulum is swinging back towards the culture of the designer? It felt like some of the brands had a moment of operating in a post-designer manner, with the CEOs and marketing teams steering creative decisions.
It’s a historical fact that houses work better when you have a very talented creative director and a very capable CEO. That combination of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, of Domenico De Sole and Tom Ford, of Giancarlo Giammetti and Valentino. I do think we’re beginning to see the pendulum swing back. I don’t think it’s completely reached its full swing. It certainly appears that there was thinking, both at Kering and LVMH, that the strength of ‘brand’ would prevail, and that the marketing departments would be able to carry some of these big houses forward. Yes, those things are really important in today’s world, particularly the marketing, there’s just no denying how that works today. But look at Chanel. I used to get so annoyed when editors or stylists would say to me during the Virginie Viard years, ‘They’ll never fire her because she makes them so much money.’ That’s not the point! Money isn’t everything. It is really about a long-term game. And I always think that the Wertheimers [Chanel owners] are really good at that, although they don’t have a lot of expertise in replacing designers.

They haven’t needed to.
That long Karl Lagerfeld period extended into Virginie Viard, and more recently the studio team that’s been managing it, so we’re talking 45 years of one person’s vision – albeit one of the most modern, revolutionary designers of the 20th century. So the public has not seen a Chanel besides the one that Lagerfeld supplied. I’m not knocking Karl. He had the experience and the wit to be a wonderful designer. But now, with Matthieu Blazy, I think Chanel made the best decision it possibly could. It’s a chance to write a whole new chapter without Lagerfeld, which is really important. This is the challenge for Matthieu, and I think this too should be a sweeping change. So, to answer your question, yes, I do think this is a testament to the capabilities of a designer. There are other signs in other houses: putting Sarah Burton at Givenchy is a really positive thing. She’s a total pro. I’m hoping that Dario Vitale at Versace will also be a really positive sign.

What about Dior? Jonathan Anderson is all but confirmed in writing to be taking over most of Dior. It got me thinking: Celine’s revenue at the point of Phoebe Philo’s departure was probably between €500 million and €1 billion. Hedi Slimane came and effectively dismantled that brand and business – the existing customer went elsewhere – and LVMH then had to invest hundreds of millions for it to get to today’s scale, which is more than €2.5 billion. Ultimately, the risk paid off. But when you think about the prospect of Jonathan Anderson’s quite radical creative direction potentially dismantling Dior’s existing €10 billion business… that’s a monumental risk. I mean, what happens to all those Peter Marino-designed Dior stores? Are they suddenly subject to a Jonathan Anderson makeover? There is risk and uncertainty built into all of these creative reboots, but the further up the scale, the higher the stakes become.
You’re right, it’s not comparable. It’s so interesting on many levels because Jonathan did wonders at Loewe – he created great accessories and all of that – but the thing that was interesting to me was when he made that shift about two and a half years ago, with that first surrealist collection. It looked so different to all the hippy-dippy Ibiza stuff he’d been doing in various iterations. That showed a maturity in Jonathan and his stylist Benjamin Bruno. It took a lot of risk to do that, but the risk at Dior is undoubtedly bigger. I do think they have to do it, though. I do think it’s time, and it’s going to be a real test for Delphine Arnault and the powers that be within LVMH, and obviously Bernard Arnault, to see if they’re willing to make all those changes.

Would you say he’s a good fit there?
Dior is a couture house, a fashion house. It is based on making clothes, and it has a look. So it’s going to be interesting for Jonathan, because he very much thinks about how things are presented. He has that supertanker to turn within the Dior organization to convince people that there’s another way to think about fashion, and to think about Dior. The second, and much bigger challenge is he has to create a universe that women want to enter. But Jonathan now has to do that with clothing that is based on an historical form, that you can’t deviate too much from. He’s also got to be much more familiar with a woman’s wardrobe, much more familiar with a couture atelier – assuming he does couture, which is another challenge, because I don’t think it can be too conceptual. It’s a lot to get his head around. To go back to your question, I think they do have to make a radical shift. Maybe not what John Galliano did – that was in the late 1990s; it was a different time, different fortunes, different tolerances – but I think the expectation for change is there, and it should be a significant change.

Would you say the relationship be-tween a designer’s creativity and the fashion house they work for is being constantly redefined?
Jonathan may become a good example of this. He’s plugged into what’s going on and super aware of the creative side, the business side, the marketing side, the curatorial side, the cultural side, the need to be a public figure… It would be so fascinating to hear about the give and take that he has with his CEO. It’s got to be one of the biggest challenges that there is, one that I don’t think I’ll ever fully appreciate as I’m not inside the day-to-day experience of producing for a machine. But I think that if fashion businesses don’t factor in the time that’s required to be creative, and the pauses that designers really need, then I can’t imagine what that’s like. You have the brutal scenario that you had with Galliano. I think Marc Jacobs could attest to that. I think McQueen, in his time, could have attested to it. Honestly, it would make an interesting case study for Harvard Business School.

You mentioned Sarah Burton at Givenchy before. Is there enough in the Givenchy brand, beyond Audrey Hepburn and the Little Black Dress, to transform it into a dominant cultural force?
It’s always been a bit of a challenge. The most important thing that Hubert de Givenchy did was tailoring. Sarah was showing me images of that 1952 debut collection, it was really exquisite. You could see the influence of Balenciaga, you can see that continuous line of ideas. I think Sarah has pretty much an open palette to work from, but starting from tailoring, which was what we saw, I think she can define her space. I was pretty impressed by what she did at her show; for a first collection, it felt like it was being done by a pro. I got text messages from girlfriends saying, ‘I want everything here!’ That said, I’d love to see things be softer. That, to me, is Givenchy. Yes, it’s tailored, but it doesn’t have quite as much padding and construction to the jacket, and maybe it’s a dress. I mean, could somebody actually make a great-looking dress that you would wear during the day that doesn’t look frou-frou and silly, or uptight? Sarah makes great dresses; she did dresses for McQueen all the time. When I was up at the Givenchy studio with Sarah, we were looking at a fabulous suit that Eva Herzigová wore in the show. Elegant, not too dressy, just fine. But I think some of that softer fit would be really great from her.

Do you think she will revive the couture immediately?
No, but the plan is she will. That’s what Sidney Toledo told me. I think she has to get the house together first, and maybe just deal with the ready-to-wear and accessories for a minute. But it would be great to see her Givenchy couture, and I think there would be demand for it. The good thing about Sarah, which gives me so much confidence, is that she knows how to build up a really good work room, and will know how to work with all those pattern makers. She’s brought at least two of her design assistants from McQueen, as well as the head pattern maker and her merchandiser. I’ve talked about this with Sarah when she was at McQueen: in the early years of the 1990s, the clothes were less built up. Partly because there wasn’t a lot of money, and they were working with really cheap fabrics, but the construction was perfect. And when you look back at that era, everything – including the shoulder line – is softer looking. And that’s what I’d love to see from Sarah today. We see oversized pretty much everywhere, and it’d be nice to see someone do a different shoulder. She actually had three or four different shoulder lines in that collection. So it’s definitely possible.

You asked, rhetorically, why is no one capable of making a beautiful modern dress without it being frou-frou? Can you answer your own question?
I just think it’s one of those things that until you see it, it’s hard to imagine it. It may be down to the limited skill set of designers today, or maybe a lack of confidence. You know, we love tailoring, but how well does it actually sell in this day and age? I think Michael Stewart does a great job with dresses at Standing Ground. And it’s interesting to see how other designers try to blend the casual with something that feels a little like high fashion. Look at Prada this season, for instance, with that more undone look that Miuccia and Raf were pursuing. One of the hot things in the Milan collections were the opening dresses at Prada; that kind of unconstructed first black dress that Julia Nobis wore. Who knew that was going to come out? I’ve talked to so many women who want that dress, or one of the opening dresses.

What’s your rapport with attending shows these days?
New York magazine allows me to pick the shows I want to see. I can’t say I go to everything but I go to all the major stuff, and I see as many young designers as I can. When you cover the shows you’re operating on adrenaline, and even if you’re tired you thrive on the pace of the day-to-day. It’s much easier to file every day than it is once a week.

Do you need to be in the room to understand and evaluate what’s going on at a show?
No, absolutely not. And there’s some pretty good people on Instagram making astute comments about collections that they’ve only watched online. It reminds me that I didn’t meet Margiela until a decade after he retired, and I went to all of his shows without ever hearing a brief or seeing a preview, so I might have been wrong about what I was seeing. Phoebe Philo’s the same way now; I sometimes have a conversation with her team if I happen to be looking at a collection that’s coming out in six months, but that’s about it. Which is fine, because the clothes kind of say everything you need to know. She did that one interview with the [New York] Times, but I think she spelled it out most articulately in the beginning through her ideas. What I love about her is that without doing a runway show or any real advertising, from day one she’s constructed a vision of how her customers should look. And to me it’s about the most modern thing out there, in terms of a brand. It’s like, here’s the tailoring, here’s something that’s casual… Her influence has been huge, whether that’s the sharp shoulders, the high collar, the cargo pants, the shoes. She does things that you can’t imitate. Of course, the mass retailers try to imitate them, but they can’t quite get there.

Let’s talk about Haider Ackermann’s debut at Tom Ford. Do you think Estée Lauder and Zegna have the appetite to develop that ready-to-wear business?
I do. It’s ultimately good for the fragrance and cosmetics business if they have a bigger presence in clothing. Haider is on the right track to doing something with that. I like what he did. I didn’t like the hair and the make-up – the beauty part of it, ironically – it was just too much, it didn’t have to be so over-the-top alien. But I thought his tailoring was good, the colours were great. I thought he imagined what Tom Ford should look like today. It felt faithful, but it was definitely his own thing. It was a template roadmap.

Do you think those clothes are going to sell?
It’s a question of how much of that slick glamour do you really want? As a fashion critic, I look at this shift towards everything becoming more relaxed, casual, not overdone, not overly luxurious looking, and I find it all pretty boring, because I don’t think it moves the needle of fashion. What Hermès does is a different kind of luxury, it’s about how they make things. I had a great conversation with Axel Dumas [Hermès CEO] the other day about the possibility of there being Hermès couture. They’re investigating it right now – Nadège and the creative team have been given the task – and it could launch next year. To counter that though, Axel said they’d always resisted doing couture, that they’re basically into ready-to-wear. They don’t do flou, they’re really good at leather though, so maybe there’s a [couture] space for them in that world. Then he went on to say, ‘But if I don’t like it, we’ll never launch it.’

That says everything you need to know about Hermès.
There’s no reason or obligation for them to do it. He said that they were getting the Fédération [de la Haute Couture et de la Mode] asking about it a bit, because of course, they’d love to have Hermès on the couture schedule. But I love that he said, let’s investigate it, let’s do some trials, let’s see what we come up with, and then make a decision. We’re in no hurry. There’s no timetable to do it. Hermès can do whatever they want. They can take their time. They can really question why they should be in that particular business.

What did you make of the Saint Laurent show?
Anthony Vaccarello is like a hammer to a nail, in that he takes just one or two themes from the Saint Laurent story each season. Last season it was the trouser suit, which he just repeated and repeated until he got to what I called these rather strange-looking Scheherazade dresses. Not strange-looking, I just didn’t think they were very well done, they seemed like an afterthought. And so this time, it was all about a blouse and a skirt and some dresses that were like a tunic dress, very Saint Laurent, and those great colours that we’ve been starved of. I mean, he’s done colour before at Saint Laurent, but this season felt explosive. They’re the Saint Laurent rainbow, basically. I like this collection because we had just come from Miu Miu, which was about a skirt and a top, basically, and here was Anthony giving us the same thing but à la Saint Laurent, in a dressier way. That’s the world that Anthony has embraced. It’s a dressier style.

What’s the future of Saint Laurent?
The cool thing about Saint Laurent is that it’s been redefined many times, and will continue to be redefined again in the future. Initially, like a lot of people, I didn’t like what Hedi did there. But then, after reconsidering it and thinking about the era that he’d identified as the cool years of Saint Laurent – the late 1960s – I thought, this is actually pretty smart, and it obviously had a big influence on fashion. Ultimately, there’s lots there for people to work with: for anyone who has a strong sense of construction and colour, and hopefully a sense of cool, they can do a good job there.

It helps that the brand is so anchored in Paris as well, partly because of the city’s industry dominance, but also because Paris feels cool again, more international than ever, a place that’s appealing for young people to gravitate to.
Paris has always embraced international designers, going right back to Charles Frederick Worth, and certainly in the 1920s and 1930s with Schiaparelli, and then the 1970s and 1980s with Yohji and Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake, and then the Belgians. Personally, I’m very fond of Paris, more than any other fashion city, because you have incredibly devoted people in the workrooms who really know how to make clothes. Then you think of Azzedine Alaïa coming to Paris, and the whole culture that arose around that one man. But I think you’re right, Paris feels good at the moment, because of Matthieu Blazy, because of Pieter Mulier, because of Demna.

What does this womenswear season say about women today?
Good question. I didn’t quite agree with Vanessa [Friedman] in her piece with the headline ‘The Weaponization of Femininity’, because that’s been going on for a while. We don’t even have to go back to the Gaultier or Mugler years. There have been many examples of that in the last decade. Yes, there is a lot of leather around, but I think women are already past that; I think they already accept that they have control over their lives and their bodies. That’s been Dilara [Fındıkoglu]’s message in her fashion in London. She takes a more aggressive point of view because from her perspective it’s about the oppression caused by men. It would probably have been easier to respond to your question a couple of seasons ago, when you’d see collections in New York and, to an extent, London, where you saw all this nakedness on the runway, and the New York designer Elena Velez presented a particularly interesting collection. She did a show in one of the old warehouses in Bushwick in Brooklyn, where it was a mud fight, which people got really upset about. But I liked the aggressiveness of it, and she’s good at making clothes look great on a woman’s body. But we’ve seen the whole nakedness thing spread through fashion, with things being much more flagrant than we were probably used to or expected. And maybe that’s a very strong feminist point of view. I think younger women have some amazing ideas about how they want to look and the freedom that they have. But a lot of that doesn’t necessarily translate into the bigger shifts in high fashion that I like to observe – where the direction of fashion is going. Yes, I see the smaller movements, but I’m really looking at the broader evolution of fashion, and who can make those moves.

To what extent does heritage matter today?
For better or for worse, it’s huge. Look at Chanel: it’s just a great story to tell. I think the most radical or revolutionary thing that Matthieu can do is look at Coco Chanel’s designs in the 1920s and 1930s. They were in the Chanel Manifesto exhibition, the early suits that look like they’re blown on the body. They’re all made by hand, and it’s couture, but it’s not the overbuilt, over-designed shapes and styles that we’ve seen in the last 20 years, with all the camellias and the pearls. You could see a woman’s body in those early clothes that Coco Chanel designed, with her whole notion of interpreting ‘poor style’, taken from maids’ uniforms and sailors and fishermen, workers. Of course, there’s many other things Matthieu can look at, but it might be quite radical to see something like that. So in that sense, heritage definitely matters. It also matters because the likes of Dior and Chanel and Saint Laurent can tell two stories at the same time. They can mount their exhibitions about the heritage, but also have the current creative directors tell their modern-day story. They work simultaneously.

Then someone like Rick Owens has come to represent his own heritage. He’s 30 years into this, and so his evolution from LA to Paris and the world he’s created is almost self-referential.
And the Palais Galliera is about to do a big retrospective on him. Rick is one of our best examples of: have an original idea, create a distinctive look, and stick with it. Of course, he’s expanded it so much over the past 20 years since moving to Paris. Rick always says that he’d never have been able to survive had he not had the time and the patience of the press to see his work develop. I remember his early shows in Paris being not that great. He was trying to be really experimental – shifting away from his original California, LA goth thing – and it wasn’t working. He’s been very fortunate to have a manufacturing partner too, and these days he continues to amaze. I really liked his last collection. Some people found it a bit dreary, but there was so much depth in it. It was fairly bleak – maybe that’s the way he feels about the world at the moment. And then there’s Phoebe who’s already developing her own sense of heritage, as are The Row to a certain extent. I sometimes fault The Olsens for what they do, because there’s not a lot of depth, but they too have been developing their story, their sense of heritage.

The Row feels steeped in the personal heritage of these twins who were two of the most recognizable people in the USA when they were still only toddlers. Since launching their brand as young adults they seem to have bathed in their need for privacy. Everyone talks about the word ‘authenticity’ these days, which sometimes feels like a red flag for phoniness, but the luxury of privacy and discretion that The Row is anchored in couldn’t be more real for The Olsens.
I agree. That was the sense that I got from this last show, with the stocking feet and the people sitting on the floor, as if we’re in their private home. People think it’s all about being well-to-do, but it’s not. It’s about privacy. It’s about closing out the world. And the Olsens have become even more careful about that; you just don’t see them anymore. They’re in the back, but there’s no backstage access, no interviews. You can make what you want of it in terms of a marketing calculation, but I think their clothes speak exactly to what you’re describing – the luxury of a private life, which is contrary to pretty much everything else that’s out there. Being in Paris has made a huge difference. They’re clearly in the right place.

What do you want to see more of during fashion week?
This goes back to one of your earlier questions. I want to see something new. We’re hopefully going to see a really interesting transformation at Chanel, and I think Louis Vuitton is probably in need of a bit of a change. I wrote a piece for New York magazine two years ago about the downstream effect of not taking risks on the runway, and what happens to fashion when you don’t do that. People can argue that companies with multi-billion-dollar revenue aren’t in the same position that they were in at the end of the 1990s when the likes of John Galliano, McQueen and Marc Jacobs were coming into them. But I don’t think that’s true. I think the public has a real craving for fashion. We’ve seen it explode in so many ways, and it’s now so international, with brands doing shows in Shanghai and Tokyo and South America. The appetite is enormous for it. Just look at the extent to which the entire Paris Olympics had a fashion gloss to it.

What would you like to see less of?
Companies resting too much on their heritage. It’s such a solid base that they can always sell certain products over and over again. Gucci’s Bamboo bag or Jackie bag are great, but nobody wants to see that on autopilot. It doesn’t help fashion. Milan and Paris, in particular, are healthier if there is some creative competition. Right now, Milan is about Prada, but with Demna coming into Gucci, that’s going to be interesting. And I’m always amazed when people have said to me over the past year, ‘Does anyone care about Versace?’ And I’m like, they definitely care about Versace. It’s an amazing house with a great legacy and a great opportunity. Prada buying Versace is going to be very interesting.

Finally, what does success look like for a luxury fashion brand in the current climate?
Being honest, I’d just say that success is always based on profit – an 8%, 10% turnover every year in order to pay salaries, keep stores open, things like that. And I suppose that’s all wrapped into the new mathematics of fashion, which is, as we’ve discussed, the number of clicks and eyeballs you’re getting around the world; the success of local influencers who we may not know or even see, but they’re out there. To a lot of people, that is contemporary success. But I think fashion remains a fundamentally creative business. And if you don’t have that balance, then you’re not fully a success. I’ve had some really great conversations with fashion’s CEOs over the last 25 or 30 years, and they almost all say the same thing – it’s a long game. And you have to have creativity in the midst of that. Because if you lose that creative edge then you’ll have neither integrity nor the engine to carry you forward. That’s what you need to take care of. And that, I think, is the big picture.