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• July 10, 2008 5:58 PM
• News

Burning Bridges: Fashion Indie and Coutorture Fight an Uncivil War

By Gabriel Bell

Ask General William Tecumseh Sherman or Jakob Lodwick, and they'll tell you, "Blog war is all hell." Well steel your stomachs, because comment fueled bloodshed has crept into the usually genteel sphere of fashion blogging. Like Switzerland, today we watched with fear and awe as two regulars of the circuit, Fashion Indie and Coutorture, fixed bayonets and charged headlong into a bloody embrace.

Like most wars, this one began small. Allegedly, Sarah Conley of Coutorture, a normally pacifistic, if girlie, site crossed Daniel Saynt of the temperamental Fashion Indie by suggesting that the Saynt had gone too far in his critique of Andre Leon Talley's physique. Someone then asked in comments, "does anyone actually give a shit who you are?" A fair question for any blogger. In response to this initial barrage, by, "a doucher who didn't realize my glory," Saynt attributed the comment to Conley, "We are one of the most successful fashion blogs on the planet. More people read us than all the international Vogue's (sp) combined…Does anyone give a shit about me? Try over 500,000 readers per month and an industry that has already marked me as one of the top upcoming influencers in fashion." With that, war was on.

Conley then "dropped" Saynt from her network of associated sites (it's extensive). In a final, reciprocal scorched-earth response Saynt called on his readers to "Torture Coutorture" and posted unflattering pictures of Coutorture's founder, Julie Fredrickson (whom Saynt calls "the most loathed blogger in fashion"), and said she looked "shitty." In fashion, this is the equivalent of a nuclear strike.

If you think this seems like six tempests in a very small teapot, well, you're dead right. But in our years of reading and writing for fashion blogs, this is as mad a skirmish as we've ever seen. May there be peace in our time.

Update From The Front Lines:

Coutorture has categorically denied that the "does anyone actually give a shit" comment on the Talley post was Conley and has stated that their dropping of Saynt from their network was merely "circumstantial". They claim that Saynt, much like the Bush administration, marched to battle on faulty intelligence. Again, we are reporting from within the fog of war here.

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