Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn scolds the fashion industry for not participating in the digital age (and, to my pleasant surprise, she quotes me):
But the real reason for the growing sense of boredom is that the fashion world is not participating in the technology revolution. It is outside the medium rather than inside it. The discouraging thing about watching models flip down the runway is that it doesn’t allow you to look at and think about fashion in a new way. It’s the same aesthetic trip, and the Web has widened our emotional and aesthetic expectations….
The Web is actually proof of just how out of touch most designers are. Tom Ford, who was considered a great communicator at Gucci and is now attempting to make movies and get back into fashion, does not even have a Web site. A blog? A podcast? I can’t think of a designer who has one.
She then starts a riff suggesting that Ford should make fashionable porn…. Even when I worked at Conde, I didn’t really understand fashion.
