Wallflower at the Orgy (9 page)

John Fairchild, current head (and grandson of the founder) of the publishing empire that owns
Women’s Wear
, is the man credited with
WW
’s immense notoriety and growing success. Fairchild is not surprised by the controversy created by his publication. “When anybody writes the inside story about fashion, he’s bound to be unpopular,” says the publisher.

The animosity that Fairchild and his opinionated journal have stirred up in the fashion world is an indication of, as well as a result of, the immense power that
Women’s Wear
wields, a power far out of proportion to the paper’s actual circulation. For one thing,
Women’s Wear
is without competition in the trade; for another, because it is a daily, its news is six to eight weeks ahead of the monthly fashion magazine. A tabloid newspaper with a readership of over sixty-five thousand (who pay twenty dollars a year to subscribe),
Women’s Wear
is
the
major fashion influence in the United States today, the oracle that states whether women will be wearing sackcloth, ashes, buttons, bows, buckles, chains, vinyl, or nothing at all from the waist up next year.

“We use
Women’s Wear
as an extra pair of legs and eyes,” says Henri Bendel’s young president, Geraldine Stutz. “If it reports a collection is worthwhile, we will look at it. If it damns with faint or no praise, we will look at it last, if at all.”

When
Women’s Wear
chose the delicate French word
“sportif”
to describe certain country clothes that were being shown one season, Seventh Avenue designers were so impressed by the term that they charged off and began making ensembles guaranteed to make any American woman look as if she were auditioning to become Rex Harrison. Then, by the time the
sportive
look was ready to gallop into stores, complete with jodhpurs for ladies who did not ride and walking sticks for ladies who did not limp,
Women’s Wear
abandoned the concept and announced that it was moving on to something called “the era of the gentlewoman.”

Just what happened to the era of the gentlewoman is not clear, nor is anyone certain what will happen to other recent
Women’s Wear
catchphrases like Prettygirl, Lankygirl, and
Realgirl. The
Raffinée
Look, coined for the refined clothes of some season or other, was dumped when
Women’s Wear
publisher James Brady spotted something called the
Raffinée
Housedress selling for $2.95 in a Thirty-fourth Street bargain basement. “I came back to the office and announced that
Raffinée
was out,” said Brady.

That its concepts arrive so quickly in the cemetery of old fads does not bother anyone at
Women’s Wear
. “Fashion
is
change,” says John Fairchild. And
Women’s Wear
considers part of its function to nudge that change, spot the trends, push the merchandise. That
WW
has been wildly successful in performing this function has as much to do with its superb instincts as with the nature of the fashion itself.

“Elizabeth Hawes (one of the first great American
couturières
) once said that fashion is spinach, and no one has ever put it more accurately,” said Leonard Hankin, vice-president of Bergdorf-Goodman. “The essence of what makes fashion news and excitement is hardly as clear as the science of building a skyscraper. You’re not working with scientifically provable facts—we don’t merely clothe the body, we clothe the spirit; we’re enhancing the way a woman thinks about herself. As a result, if the average department-store buyer reads in
Women’s Wear
that a certain collection is hot, he’ll rush out to buy it. If, on the other hand, he buys what turns out to be a clinker, he can always remind the merchandise manager that he got the information from the ‘Bible.’ ”

Designers are swept up in
Women’s Wear
’s enthusiasms, too. “Look how few really creative designers and firms there are,” says Deanna Littell, one of Seventh Avenue’s most dynamic young talents, “just a handful. The rest of the industry cribs and copies any way possible. If
Women’s Wear
tells
them to go see
Bonnie and Clyde
, there are some groovy clothes in it, they’ll all go see it and start making Bonnie and Clyde clothes. I’m convinced the paper started a lot of things itself: They gave tremendous impetus to the Zhivago look, the Russian bit, and my God,
sportif
—that was John Fairchild’s biggest joke on the industry.”

Women’s Wear’s
writing style meshes perfectly with its messages: It is catty, breathless, loaded with shorthand expressions and non sequiturs. SENTENCES ARE CAPITALIZED FOR NO APPARENT REASON AND SEEM TO SNAP AND CRACKLE RIGHT OUT OF THE PAGE. French expressions punctuate the prose, no doubt sending many Seventh Avenue manufacturers thumbing through French-English dictionaries. “Annie is not going to become
brisée
by success,”
WW
wrote of one unbroken French starlet who had made it big.
“Les hotsies”
and “
Les locomotives”
they christened two groups of fashion-conscious young women who scamper through the paper regularly and whose every activity, no matter how trivial, is detailed.
“Je m’en fous,”
said an apparently blasé French actress in a recent interview, to which
Women’s Wear
retorted: “IF SHE DOESN’T CARE, WHY DOES SHE BITE HER NAILS?”

Mixed in with this grab bag of French and frenzy is a range of news catering to both the paper’s private readers (most of them upper-class WASPS) and industry sellers (mostly middle-class Jews). For Seventh Avenue manufacturers, for example,
WW
prints lists of buyers in town, statistics on “pantihose” sales, or the latest word on fashions for infants and children—sometimes described in such cozy Yiddishisms as
boyela
and
boytshikleks
. For Fifth Avenue ladies, there are pop-art headlines (“Pow, Zowie, Zap, Wap, Zonk” ran one recent tribute to Yves Saint
Laurent); offhand irreverence (“ ‘KISS ME, FOOL,’ CRIED WILLFUL LITTLE HYDRANGEA AS HER SENSUOUS FINGERS TOYED NERVOUSLY WITH THE WRITHING TENDRILS OF HER NEW WHITE BACK-TO-SCHOOL DRESS BY X BOWAGE INC.,” read a headline for a children’s dress sketch); and incidental information on a dandy place to go to avoid the overcrowded French Riviera (Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia), what to bring to Russia (your own hairdresser), and how to keep up with the Winston Guests (Cee Zee’s beige mastiff has his hair done).

Although fewer than one-sixth of
Women’s Wear
subscribers are consumers, they are unquestionably the most consuming consumers of fashion in the country. Jacqueline Kennedy once declared indignantly that it was impossible for her to spend thirty thousand dollars a year on clothes (she would have had to buy sable underwear, she said), but experts estimate that it costs each of The Ladies well over that figure to dress the way she does. Small wonder that
Women’s Wear
delights in aiming masses of information at them. Mrs. Charles Revson of lipsticks, Barbra Streisand of records, Charlotte Ford Niarchos of automobiles, Mrs. William (Babe) Paley of broadcasting, and the Duchess of Windsor of abdications all subscribe. So do Mrs. Ronald Reagan of California, Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas; also Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, several Italian
principessas
with backgrounds too confusing to go into, and George Hamilton’s mother. Gloria Guinness, who is married to the banking Guinness, has two subscriptions—one for her Palm Beach home, the other for Paris. Mary Lou Whitney of the horse-racing Whitneys says that when she is summering in the Adirondacks,
Women’s Wear
is the only
publication that arrives on time; she may not be up-to-date on what is happening in the world, but she knows what everyone wore when it happened.

The group that
Women’s Wear
calls The Ladies began to read
WW
in 1960, when John Fairchild returned from Paris and began to write about them. The Ladies are those socially registered women who summer in Southampton, winter in duplexes on Park or Fifth Avenue, and make a career out of looking beautiful and having lunch—a full-time job, requiring an early rise and a packed day. One must plan one’s dinner parties, go to one’s sinister Hungarian skin doctor, have one’s biweekly massage at Elizabeth Arden and one’s triweekly combout or set at Kenneth’s, lunch at one of five recognized places for The Ladies to lunch (as of now: The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle, LaFayette, Le Pavillon). One must exercise at Kounovsky’s, discuss one’s charities, shop for one’s perfect dress with the perfect label and status shoes (by Fiorentina), stockings (opaque), belt (gold chain from Saint Laurent), bag (Gucci), face (Estée Lauder), false eyelashes (Bendel’s), and return home in time to greet one’s hobby (the husband, who, more often than not, is an investment banker or stockbroker, and the children).

The Ladies, unlike the fashion industry, learned to love
Women’s Wear
, and with good reason: before
Women’s Wear
became the swinging newspaper it is today, it was not really chic to be a Lady. There was something a little embarrassing about just doing nothing and having lunch in between. Oh, there were the charities and the children to be sure, but The Ladies occasionally sensed there might be Something More. Then, with their glorification in
Women’s Wear Daily
, their elevation to a pantheon of heroines built somewhere in John Fairchild’s noggin, and their constant pursuit by
Women’s
Wear
photographers, The Ladies suddenly relaxed and became quite content.
Women’s Wear
had created a profession: It was
enough
just to have found that divine little pendant made from a Coca-Cola bottletop;
enough
to have thought of using one of those wide French neckties on one’s skinny shirt;
enough
to have divined that what one really needed drooping from one’s hair at Truman Capote’s gala was a single white begonia.

The Ladies subscribe to
Women’s Wear
to read about themselves, to find out what clothes they are buying and what they should buy, what designers they will patronize next, what restaurants are fashionable, where their friends are this month and whom they are in love with. But there is one more reason The Ladies read
Women’s Wear Daily:
it serves as their Surrogate Bitch. Delightful, delicious, delectable, and delirious the newspaper
is
, but it is also bitchy as can be.

Why, remember the time
WW
printed that terrible picture of Lady Bird Johnson with the ironic caption: “Welcome to the Best-Dressed List”? The Ladies had a good giggle over that. And another giggle when
WW
cited Princess Margaret for being “The individualist of 1965 … the woman who proved fashion doesn’t count.” When Mrs. Hubert Humphrey arrived at the Capitol to hear President Johnson’s State of the Union message,
Women’s Wear
commented, “That little old dressmaker is at it again.” One of The Ladies, Jean vanden Heuvel, was found wanting at the opera: “Jean vanden Heuvel,” snipped
WW
, “needs a new hairdresser.” Even Caroline Kennedy was singled out for bitchery this past summer. “THERE IS NO QUESTION,” wrote
Women’s Wear
, “THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE. Her smocked-to-the-waist
dresses, her short white socks, her semifitted velvet-collared coats all point to another era. Today, ten-year-olds wear boldly striped knits, chain belts, bright tights. Said one executive of a New York store where Caroline’s clothes are bought, ‘The surprise is that Jackie dresses her like a little girl of six or seven. Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy wants to keep Caroline a little girl so that she herself will look younger.’ ”

“Women’s Wear,”
said Marian Javits, wife of the New York Senator, “is like having a morning gossip with a pal who has taste, who’s a little bitchy, and who goes to all the parties, my dear. It never condescends, it judges all the time. It is a giggle, a bubble, fun, fun.” It is, in other words, a surrogate bitch.

The evolution of
Women’s Wear Daily
into a fashion oracle and surrogate bitch began in 1960, but its history goes back a good deal further.
Women’s Wear Daily
was founded in 1910 by E. W. Fairchild, the son of a Dutch Reform minister who in 1890 started to print a trade paper containing the business news he picked up while selling homemade yeast cakes to grocery stores. The Fairchild Publishing Company, which now publishes nine newspapers including
Home Furnishings Daily, Drug Weekly News
, and
Metalworking News
, picked up considerably with the addition of
Women’s Wear:
it was a newspaper that supplied exactly what the garment business wanted—news of latex futures, new trends in sewing machines, and indiscriminate reports on every collection from shoes to hatpins. “It was encyclopedic,” said
New York Post
fashion editor Ruth Preston. It was also dull as denim. “It sat on every merchandiser’s desk,
unread indefinitely,” said Leonard Hankin. “You got it because you were in the business but you never looked at it.”