Monday’s Saint Laurent Paris show marked creative director Hedi Slimane’s second outing for the legendary French brand. His first collection, shown in September as a modern homage to Yves Saint Laurent’s trailblazing designs from the 1970s, was met with tepid reviews and a much controversy when the New York Times’s Cathy Horyn blasted Slimane for not accommodating press and presenting unimaginative designs. Slimane retorted by tweeting out an ‘open letter’ that criticized Horyn for her journalistic bias, creating an explosive feud.
The scene at Monday’s show was “roughly the same, perhaps a bit friendlier and inclusive of more editors, but not all of them” wrote Horyn’s Times colleague Eric Wilson. But the friendlier atmosphere didn’t stop a portion of the fashion Twitter-sphere from speaking their mind on Slimane’s take on the 90s. Many noted that his collection, which will inevitably sell at incredibly high prices, looked less than luxurious. “Am I watching Saint Laurent or TopShop?” the Los Angeles Times’s fashion critic Booth Moore, tweeted mid-show. Others were perplexed by the collection’s lack of correlation to the house of YSL’s strong heritage. And the whole, the formal reviews that followed were no less forgiving. See the six funniest thing said about Slimane’s collection below.
The New York Times’s Eric Wilson: “Here are some of the things overheard on my way out of the Saint Laurent show Monday night at the Grand Palais…’I suddenly feel very old,’ one editor from an American fashion magazine said… ‘I feel like he’s playing a huge joke on the entire fashion industry,’ one more said.” [NYT]
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The Los Angeles Times's Booth Moore: “Today, fast-fashion brands like H&M, which showed here earlier last week, Topshop and Zara have made big businesses out of bringing the street to the store instantly, with new deliveries arriving on a weekly basis. These retro 1990s Saint Laurent clothes didn't look much different from what's already available from those brands for a fraction of the price.” [The Los Angeles Times]
The Financial Times’s Vanessa Friedman: “What happens when someone – a big, important, global, heritage brand – sends a major “up yours” to fashion?... On Monday night in Paris, Saint Laurent’s creative director Hedi Slimane found out.” [FT]
