Fashion Trivia: The Front-Row Slap
It involved a $1 million lawsuit and the phrase, "Don't f—k with French people."
Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Artwork: Angela Wei/Fashionista
Test your fashion-industry knowledge with our new-old weekly series, Fashion Trivia! There’s no prize (yet) for having the right answer, but you get theoretical bonus points for not using Google.
Q: Whose Spring 2013 runway show was the backdrop for a seating snafu that resulted in a PR executive getting slapped in the face, then filing a $1 million lawsuit against a French magazine publisher and her editor daughters? (Yes, this really happened.)
Scroll down for the answer...
A: Zac Posen.
The designer's debuts were usually civilized affairs, but this one, in September of 2012, got off to a rough start. Before the show, New York fire marshals removed 60 seats from the venue, Avery Fisher Hall, for safety, leaving some attendees without seats and adding more stress to what's already often a hurried, pressured environment.
One French team was apparently extra stressed by the situation: Marie-José Susskind-Jalou, president of Jalou publishing house, and her daughters, Jennifer Eymere and Vanessa Bellugeon, then editors at Jalouse and L’Officiel magazines, respectively. Lynn Tesoro, a founding partner of PR firm HL Group, who handled the show, caught the brunt of their frustration — literally: Per WWD's report, all three of them were seen yelling loudly at Tesoro, until one of them went ahead and slapped her in the face. Rather than hide from the incident, Eymere opted to recount it for WWD shortly thereafter, telling the paper, "I just said at the end, 'Now you know you don't f–k with French people.'"
While it sadly wasn't caught on camera, the altercation(and that quote) went the 2012 version of viral, which is to say it dominated New York fashion headlines.
Susskind-Jalou was determined to be the physical aggressor of the situation, but all three women were named in the $1 million lawsuit Tesoro subsequently filed, alleging libel, assault and slander charges; Susskind-Jalou also faced a battery charge. Ultimately, per WWD, the lawsuit was settled out of court, and Tesoro reportedly received an apology.
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