“Like perpetually dieting designers, haute couture is definitely shrinking before our eyes. Oh, don’t be fooled by the giant lion at Chanel, which, depending on how you look at these things, is either an example of Karl Lagerfeld’s brilliant stagecraft or an advertisement for a new Disney restaurant chain. Most of the remaining half-dozen or so houses that show haute couture scaled down their presentations this week: a nip here, a tuck there and a PR man explaining in a hushed tone that the designer wanted to ‘return to couture’s roots.’... Unless you have been catching up on Gossip Girl reruns, national deficits and unemployment do not correlate with a couture dress that costs as much as a Harvard education. Couture is slipping off people’s radars faster than a U.F.O. “

- Fashion journalist Cathy Horyn pens the signs of couture’s death in The New York Times.

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