Critics barred from fashion shows over 'trollop' comments

Pedlars of tackiness and vulgarity who make their clients look like "mafiosi" and "trollops", and refuse to give fresh talent a chance: Italy's fashion designers have been getting it in the neck from their critics this year, and the atmosphere between the two camps is turning poisonous.

At Armani's spring collection, the New York Times fashion editor, Cathy Horyn, took exception to "skirts pulled and pleated every which way" and trousers that "looked as limp and clingy as gym pants". The designer Giorgio Armani wasted no time banning her from his shows in future.

"It is unacceptable that she writes about trousers when she saw 500 skirts," he raged. "I accept criticism but not idiocy. What she published was bullshit ... She has the right to write, I have the right to leave her outside."

The next day, according to the Italian news agency, Ansa, the newspaper carried a scorching piece attacking Italian fashion in general as vulgar, saying that these days its only goal seemed to be to make women look like "trollops". The Milanese duo Dolce & Gabbana had been singled out by the American critics as leaders in a new wave of Italian trash, Ansa complained, adding that one commentator had called them "mafiosi and vulgar".

Dolce & Gabbana imposed their own ban on Ms Horyn. "Season after season," they told La Stampa, "she attacks us with destructive and slanderous criticism - she has gone so far as to describe us as peasants. What other right of reply do we have than to say, 'Stay home'?"

Italy's top fashion houses are certainly in robust financial health - D&G's worldwide sales recently topped €1bn (£679m) and Salvatore Ferragamo expects to open 15 new American boutiques over the next four years. Yet Cathy Horyn is not alone in her views. As the industry continues to swell and the product to pour out of the factory door, many others, both publicly and privately (the wrath of the designers is fearful to behold), are saying the same thing.

Italian fashion became world famous because of its raffinatezza - refinement: the cultured eye of designers produced by centuries of Italian artistic genius, yoked to the highest standards of craftsmanship in Europe.

Then, in the Sixties and Seventies, Italians discovered trash, glitter, bling and gold lamé - the whole cavalcade of explosive vulgarity. They won fans and markets all over the world and built commercial empires. Today Roberto Cavalli is designer of choice for the footballers' wives, D&G's look gets ever harsher and more exploitative.

Meanwhile the raffinatezza vanished - and somewhere along the line the fizz went out of the work, too. That's what the sharpest critical minds are detecting now: the same old flashy ideas trotted out season after season, and a dire absence of distinctive new talents coming up behind.

"They have to embrace the future," Anna Wintour, the editor of US Vogue, commented at Armani's show in Milan. "There are wonderful, talented people here, but it's always the same names. Where is the support? Where is the sponsorship? You have to embrace the future of fashion and look for the next generation."

"International retailers attending the Milan shows are thirsting for new creative blood," wrote another critic. "Milan, one of the most important fashion cities in the world, has gradually been losing its power to set the trends."