March 31, 2012 |
John Fairchild was one of the godfathers of fashion reporting and, like many of the characters in Coppola’s 1972 film, a ruthless man. But that was how he was able to take a distinctly colourless trade publication called Women’s Wear Daily, give it a shot of adrenalin and make it into the daily bulletin of the international fashion world (although with a heavy slant towards 7th Avenue) that is now the trade bible and “must read” for every professional in the rag trade, from CEOs and designers to press and manufacturers.
It really is that authoritative and its position is entirely the work of Fairchild – with a little help from his dedicated staff, who go out and get the scoops, hear first about the trends and break the business and financial news. It has long been the flagship publication of the Fairchild publishing company, even though it was merely an offshoot of the menswear newspaper Daily News Record, in 1910, when it was founded by Fairchild’s grandfather, Edmund Fairchild. For most of its history, it was that much-maligned thing, a trade publication read by shopkeepers and investors. Totally lacking glamour and style – the prerequisites of anything to do with fashion (as opposed to mere clothes – although WWD took them very seriously – and still does) – its representatives at the international fashion shows were normally seated in the last two rows. In brief, it had no clout.
When he was made European bureau chief of Fairchild Publications in 1955, John Fairchild set out to change all of this. Although only a tiro in publishing, he knew exactly what he wanted to do – as he probably had since he was a toddler. And he did it by looking at the “glossy” magazines and realising that most of their appeal at that time was to snobbery. As always, with fashion magazines, the clothes speak to very few readers, but the lives of the rich and famous are of endless fascination. And he was lucky. He took over WWD just as the social life of the heiresses such as Mona Bismarck and “Babe” Paley were beginning to be edged out of magazines by the new icons from the worlds of film and music, finally to disappear.
Fairchild’s WWD gave them a home and prolonged their lives as women who other women were interested in. What were later to be called by Truman Capote “The Swans” would, thanks to Fairchild, who coined the expression, become the “ladies who lunch” in the 1980s. But, before that, there were other things occupying Fairchild’s fertile mind. Knowing that the appeal of the rich is much greater than that of the clothes as far as the average woman is concerned, he added a new dimension to WWD and made it a social record of the high society life of New York City, The Hamptons, Sag Harbor and all those ancestral enclaves tucked away in upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, which were laid-back but where the women (and men) were every bit as conscious of their appearance as in the city. But the great thing was that this was not a world Fairchild came to as an outsider. He was of the world of the Kennedys, debutantes, hunt balls and horse breeding – even if he rarely joined with any of them. And he knew the power of their attraction for other Americans without their advantages. He made society a celebrity affair that soon encompassed designers and their lifestyles – an approach copied by fashion magazines and newspapers everywhere. Designers in the kitchen, offering their favourite recipes; in their gardens; on their boats; taking us around their perfectly decorated homes. In short, he had the essential gene for a journalist: he understood the curiosity of the masses but, even more, was well aware how much the gilded ones enjoyed the adulation.
WWD was not only highly informative. It was stylish. And in no area more than in its coverage of fashion shows. Fairchild amassed a posse of fashion illustrators whose elegant stylish work – in New York or Paris – romanticised and glamorised the clothes of the great couturiers, which ensured that WWD would never be put in the back row ever again. The stars were Kenneth Paul Block, Steven Stipelman and, later, Steven Miesel. There was a distinct WWD style of drawing that was instantly recognisable. So, it came as a shock when this mercurial, dictatorial man, who held almost total sway over WWD, decided that drawings were old-fashioned and closed down the studios overnight – incidentally, throwing out of work men who had been instrumental in creating the image of WWD. They were all sacked in one day.
But Fairchild was right. Times had changed and photography was king as far as reportage of fashion and society was concerned. But he didn’t always get it right. Especially in his relations with fashion designers. Arrogant and determined, he loved a fight. And he was fearless. As he said, “I have learned in fashion to be a little savage.” This not only covered the comments he published in WWD – most of the really nasty ones almost certainly written by himself – but also in the stratagems he used to get what mattered to him most: his own way. If his reporters were forbidden by a fashion house to enter its premises, he sent them in, disguised as messengers, or set them up with binoculars and a camera in buildings with a view of the ateliers. It was all a bit of a schoolboy game, but one waged with deadly seriousness. WWD had to win.
One of his first skirmishes came early in his career at WWD. In the 1950s, Cristobal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy became tired of copyists reproducing their designs before they could be delivered to the customer (this was in the days of couture and to make the clothes took anything up to three months), thus destroying the exclusivity for which they paid so much. Their solution was to refuse to allow publications to see the clothes or even photographs of them until at least one month after the show. But Fairchild managed to get the clothes sketched and published them. By doing so, he broke what he saw as the tyranny of Paris. Whether he damaged Balenciaga and Givenchy is hard to assess, but his action certainly helped to modernise ideas in couture that hadn’t changed for decades. It was a feud that fizzled into a damp squib, although it did change the goalposts.
Other feuds were more damaging to individual designers, and in some cases seriously affected their businesses. There were degrees of revenge, and some banished from the pages of WWD stayed in the cold for years. The classic example is Fairchild’s treatment of Geoffrey Beene, considered by both Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs as America’s greatest designer and the only one who could stand tall against the French. Beene was banned four times by WWD, but the most political was as a result of the wedding dress for Lynda Bird Johnson (daughter of the president), designed by Beene, who promised the president, Lyndon Johnson, that no sketches or details would be released until the day of the wedding. Fairchild was furious: Beene intransigent. His punishment was absolutely no mention of his collections, or the society clients who wore his clothes, from then on in WWD.
Alaïa, Saint Laurent, Armani, Bill Blass, James Galanos – the list of spats that Fairchild embarked upon is long, but the only one with the courage to publicly take him on was Pauline Trigère, infuriated by being ignored by WWD for three years. And she won him over by her courage and the humour of the advertisement she put in the The New York Times chiding Fairchild for his neglect.
So, how to sum up this extraordinarily contradictory man, brilliant as a journalist but petty as a man? At heart, he was an anti-elitist and popularist who opened the previously exclusive world to his readers. He took on the glossies with his own super-glossy publication, W. And his book Chic Savages, published in the 1970s, is still not only an entertaining read but also a strong critique and explanation of how the fashion system works, for fashion insiders or even the man (or woman) on the street. John Fairchild, for all his character faults, was an important catalyst for change in fashion and has left a valuable legacy in his publications, especially WWF. He is now retired, Women’s Wear Daily now being part of Condé Nast Publications. The journal celebrated its 100th birthday in November 2010.
by Colin McDowell
