Cathy Horyn on Joe Eula, Fashion Writing, and Wearing Walmart to the Balenciaga Show

Joe Eula cover. Courtesy of the Harper Collins

Last Fashion Week, “I miss Cathy” was as common a phrase as “What are you wearing?” You’d hear it everywhere—in the front rows, at parties, and at least twice a day online.

The “Cathy” in question was Cathy Horyn, the former New York Times fashion critic whose bluntly beautiful reviews were read, more than once, by everyone—even (especially?) the designers who’d say “I don’t read reviews.”  Horyn also wrote larger pieces—a peek into Stella McCartney’s home life, a study of Anna Wintour’s business acumen—but it was her byte-sized blurbs for the Times fashion blog that made her not just a revered journalist, but also an internet celebrity. (Getting banned from the Armani and Saint Laurent shows for her frank observations didn’t hurt, either.)  When Horyn left her coveted post in January of this year, she had over 300,000 Twitter followers, a Facebook fan page, and even a Google search thread devoted entirely to her hair. The Barnard graduate also had a new project: A book about fashion illustrator and Halston confidante Joe Eula, which debuts this month.

We spoke with Horyn at the Marc Jacobs-owned store Bookmarc (get it?) last night. Below, our favorite bits:

Yahoo Style: How did you first meet Joe Eula?

Cathy Horyn: I met him around 2000, in the spring. I was working on the Bill Blass book, Bare Blass, and that book was a combination of memoir and oral history, so it gave me a reason—a great excuse!—to finally meet Joe. People would always talk about him—“Joe Eula! Joe Eula!”  He was an illustrator, but he had a mythic kind of presence. He had these incredible parties in the ‘70s, but those parties were well before my time in New York; they petered out when Studio 54 petered out. Once he moved into The Osbourne [a luxury co-op built in the 1800s), he couldn’t throw parties like that anymore. He didn’t have that kind of setup.

YS: So you missed the Studio 54 pre-parties.

CH: So I missed those, but I met him and I interviewed him, and he did a drawing of me right away—it’s in the book!—that took thirty seconds. And we got to be really good friends.

YS: You must have liked his portrait of you.

CH: No photograph has ever captured me the way that drawing did. I’d known him one hour. I was standing in his kitchen and he said “stop!” and he just did it. It’s still in my living room. Then he did some work for us at the Times. We did a big piece on the Belmont Races, and we did something at Walmart together.

YS: You did a story at Walmart with Joe Eula? 

CH: Yeah, we did! We went to the Walmart in Kingston, New York. I was always buying things at Walmart, and he came along and illustrated me in all of the looks.

YS: Oh, you were wearing things from Walmart? I thought you were buying, like, baking supplies.

CH: No, clothes! We were buying clothes at Walmart, but that was when Walmart actually had cute things.  Some of them were really chic, actually.

YS: I don’t remember a “chic” period…

CH: Oh yeah, in like 2001, Walmart had a real fashion department, and they made a few things a season that were actually really cool. I would wear them all the time, and Bill Blass would say to me, “That’s great, where’d you get that? Is that Marc Jacobs?” And I’d say, “No Bill, it’s Walmart.” And so we did this crazy-ass thing at the Kingston Walmart, where I modeled the looks, and Joe sketched them for a story.  It was so much fun.

YS: Did you ever wear Walmart clothes while sitting front row at a fashion show?

CH: Oh yeah. I wore a pair of shoes—like Birkenstocks, but different… you wouldn’t think they were actual Birkenstocks, but they had that vibe. And the guy who was president of Barneys at the time, Allen Questrom, he looked down and said, “Oh, are those Gucci?” And they weren’t. They were Walmart.

YS: Which show was it?

CH: The Balenciaga show. Seriously. The Balenciaga show. It was a big laugh. But they had this really cool fashion department! It was like, they knew the five runway trends they could actually do every season, and they did them.  Walmart would never admit it, but they did. Obviously they’re not like that now.

YS: Is there anywhere doing accessible fashion like that now?

CH: No, not now. Not like that. The world was a little bit different, even though it was only 15 years ago. Now, there are things at Target, like Altuzarra for Target… but not as just a regular part of a store.

YS: You told Style.com you don’t miss going to fashion shows…

CH: Well, that’s not really it. I do love the shows. I love hotel life. Traveling, going to the shows, getting in, sitting there, gossiping… I love that. What I don’t miss is pumping out stories, and the demanding presence of the web that makes you constantly feed the beast. It’s nice to have more time now.

YS: But you worked at a newspaper. Is the pace of internet writing really that much faster?

CH: Well, okay, I’m pretty fast! But it’s just—you don’t have much time to think. You become aware that you’re churning out a lot of copy in a really rapid pace. This summer, I wrote some pieces for T Magazine, and I realized, I had so much more time to do the work, and I loved it. So the writing part, I still do that; I still love it. The day-to-day grind, that’s what I don’t miss at all.

YS: Do you think the internet has ruined fashion criticism?

CH: Not at all.

YS: So there’s still good fashion writing happening today?

CH: Yeah, absolutely. But people have to remember that everything goes through phases. We’re in a very economically driven time now, and companies put so much pressure on everyone now—the designers, the publishers, everyone—and fashion is responding to that right now. But everything has its cycles, and you’ll see—it’ll change.