When it comes to Oscar de la Renta and Cathy Horyn's recent incident, there's that thing about beating a dead horse — but with Lady Gaga's recent participation in the whole ordeal, we'd like to lay it out, explain the verbiage, and close the book on this entire meat product misunderstanding. Beat the dead hot dog, if you will.
To catch any of you lucky enough to have missed this very important news event up, Cathy Horyn, in reviewing the Oscar de la Renta spring '13 show, stated:
"Mr. de la Renta is far more a hot dog than an éminence grise of American fashion. […] It was wonderfully cantankerous, a good bit of window-dressing for the gooey stuff that followed."
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According to Mr. Merriam-Webster, éminence grise is defined as "a respected authority." A hot dog, on the other hand, is "one that hotdogs, a show-off." In context, surrounded by the other congratulatory language in the review, it's hard to see Cathy as meaning anything but praise in her usage. Later, she explained in the NYT blog to editor Margaret Sullivan that she meant for "hot dog" to convey the fact that Oscar is "a cool guy who's showing off his tricks," and not commenting on any sort of resemblance between the designer and nuclear orange-hued, tubed meat, which — sort of hilariously — lots of people (including Oscar Mayer de la Renta himself) took it to mean.
In haste, Oscar took a (probably very expensive) full-page ad out in WWD to publish an open letter to Cathy and flung a meat insult in her direction: "If you have the right to call me a hot dog why do I not have the right to call you a stale 3-day old hamburger? My advice to you is to abstain from personal criticism. Professionals criticize the clothes, not the people."
Anyway, the whole outcome was that Oscar probably realized his misinterpretation and publicly stated he wouldn't ban her from future shows, Cathy called the ad "over the top," and we're still waiting for that press photo of the two of them enjoying a Nathan's hot dog or something. That would only be fair.
End of story? Not quite. Yesterday, Lady Gaga took to Twitter to defend Oscar, tweeting, "@OscarPRGirl Bravo Oscar. Only you would be so chic as to purchase an entire page in WWD, making statements like a good fashion citizen" [now deleted]. So, as a public service announcement to all hot-dog enthusiasts and ODLR fans, please familiarize yourself with the aforementioned terms and definitions. You don't want to pull a Lady Gaga and seem like a chicken nugget or something. (WWD)
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