It wouldn’t have been surprising if Cathy Horyn had turned out to be one of those uber-glamazons – towering heels, designer labels, snooty “The Devil Wears Prada” attitude and all. However, despite the stereotypes, Horyn, fashion critic at The New York Times, was nothing of the sort when she came to lecture at Stanford last Wednesday as part of the Arts Critics in Residence Series. For the event put on by the Stanford Humanities Center and Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, she instead wore black wing-tip shoes, black pants and a black blouse and cardigan. Her attire, for the most part, seemed to reject fashion’s common obsession to both define and be of the moment.

Horyn pioneered fashion critique at The New York Times starting in 1999 and shortly thereafter launched “On the Runway,” the fashion blog used to discuss all the things she couldn’t fit into the newspaper. At the time, fashion was one of, if not the only, art form without an outlet for public critique, which is perplexing because fashion can be so widely interpreted.

At first, she claimed Wednesday evening, the blog was liberating: she could post her thoughts – fashion and otherwise – frequently. Yet, like the inevitable changing of the seasons, then came the addiction to instantaneousness facilitated by the World Wide Web. It was obvious in Horyn’s change of demeanor that the obsession with living on the Internet grew burdensome.

The twist came here: her disappointment with the current culture, whether fashion or in general, did not derive primarily from the fact that she now has to write almost twice as much as she used to. Rather, her disappointment developed from how instantaneousness and globalization have impacted creativity in the fashion industry. Her thoughts begged the question: do globalization and the desire for instant gratification affect fashion and the way we perceive ourselves and beauty?

In the fashion world, clothes fit for one season, with spring-summer shown during the previous fall-winter season. Burberry, Horyn said, now gives its customers the ability to purchase clothing the second it walks the runway. The problem comes when you have just bought an unnecessarily expensive light summer dress and it arrives at your door only to have it snow the next day. In response to this rapid consumerism, Horyn noted that now Burberry collections can be easily manipulated to be multi-seasonal.

As far as globalization is concerned, Horyn observed in her recent trip to China that there is an obvious cultural absence on the part of China, yet a strong American and European presence. So what? What’s wrong with American-European fashion hegemony? Well, she responded, would you like to wear a uniform everyday?

Of course this extreme “1984” scenario is highly unlikely, but Horyn argued that both phenomena are beginning to result in a decreasing supply of clothing for the individual. After all, fashion is about, as Horyn said, “performing” our identity – something that could be difficult to do with the decreasing number of opportunities to accept and express ourselves sartorially.