Free Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron Page B

celebrity, is window-shopping along the street when she is spotted by a
Women’s Wear Daily
photographer. He begins snapping. Garbo runs, into one shop and out of another. The photographer stays in hot pursuit. He confronts her finally; she covers her face with her newspaper; he finishes shooting a roll of film. Next day, pictures of Miss Garbo hiding her face behind a copy of
Women’s Wear Daily
run in the newspaper she has been hiding from.
    Scene: The Massachusetts plant of Priscilla of Boston, the bridal-wear firm chosen to design Luci Baines Johnson’s wedding dress. Time: July 1966, three weeks before the ceremony. A
Women’s Wear Daily
photographer and reporter steal into the plant and search for Luci’s dress. Days later
WW
’s celebrated preview sketch of Luci’s gown appears; in retaliation,
Women’s Wear Daily
is barred by the White House from the Johnson-Nugent wedding.
    Women’s Wear Daily
is—through what its publishers think of as journalistic resourcefulness and its victims think of as dirty pool—the most ubiquitous, influential, snoopy, controversial, despised and adored publication in the fashion world. Whatever else
WW
may be, it is read, from front to back, by everyone in the business and thousands out of it.
    Bill Blass, the Seventh Avenue designer for best-dressed women, who credits
Women’s Wear
with his starburst success, picks up the paper every day on his way to work. Betsey Johnson, the miniskirted whiz behind the Paraphernalia boutiques, doesn’t like
WW
at all but thumbs through it before chucking her copy into her psychedelic trash can. To Jacques Tiffeau, the widely acclaimed French-born designer,
Women’s Wear
“is a marvelous meal every day. They know what’s happening … the only newspaper in the fashion world that responds. But then, they’re the only fashion newspaper.” To Eleanor Lambert, the fashion publicist who originated the American Best-Dressed List,
Women’s Wear
is “too personal, too collegiate, too juvenile, particularly in its crushes and enthusiasms. It picks on people. It isn’t editorially sound, but it’s journalistically brilliant. Of course I read it!”
    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