Word: fairchild
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...than a club and a puffy paragraph is worth its weight in gold brocade, Fairchild thrived. In 1957, weeks before it was shown to the buyers, he managed to get hold of a sketch of Givenchy's precedent-shattering shift, later to be called "the sack," and ran it on WWD's front page. In 1960, he got advance word of Yves St. Laurent's distinctive new silhouette for the House of Dior, which he maliciously described as looking like "a toothpaste tube on top of a brioche." Soon Fairchild was not only sitting in the front...
...Fairchild arrived in New York with an audacious plan: to attempt a madcap, Tom Jones-style conquest of the fashion industry by wrapping Seventh Avenue, high fashion and the Beautiful People into one publication. Run-of-the-mill reporters for WWD continued to trudge up and down Seventh Avenue, feeding needle-and-thread stories to rewrite men and women back on Twelfth Street. But, with his pack in full cry, Fairchild rode off in hot pursuit of scoops, gossip and scandal...
...Jackie pouted: "I'm sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon.") He mixed fashion scoops with big names: Princess Margaret's wedding dress, Lady Bird Johnson's Inaugural wardrobe, Happy Rockefeller's trousseau, Jackie's leopard coat (when she first emerged from mourning), Lynda Bird's wedding dress. Under Fairchild's prodding, WWD began building up jet-setters like Gloria Guinness, Isabel Eberstadt, Amanda Burden and Baby Jane Holzer (what ever became of Baby Jane?) into the equivalent of 1930s Hollywood stars...
...became favorite targets. A photograph of Mrs. Hubert Humphrey was captioned "That little old dressmaker is at it again." A simple dress and jacket worn by Mrs. Stuart Symington became "another one of those 'dumb' costumes." Society and show business regularly get theirs in WWD too. Just last week, Fairchild ordered up a layout on women who "become walking billboards for all the latest status symbols" and "allow fashion to wear them." He even gave them their own initials, FV (Fashion Victims). The caption for FV Barbra Streisand, shown in the transparent Scaasi costume that she wore to receive...
Above all, perhaps, WWD under Fairchild has shown a taste for vendettas against designers. Norman Norell, Mainbocher, Pauline Trigère and Mollie Parnis have all had their work pointedly ignored in its pages. Often, it seems, for the pettiest of reasons. Miss Trigère was honest enough to deride the clearly pretentious term Longuette on a David Susskind television show last March. Her work has not been covered by WWD since. Cause and effect? Not at all, says Publisher Brady, who adds with a stamp of his tongue: "I think Madame Trigère has no influence on American fashion." Mollie...