The Press: Out on a Limb with the Midi

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"we're scared not to read Women's Wear. We are influenced by it—everybody in fashion is." So are some 10,000 other readers outside the industry, who are fascinated by WWD's piquant brew of gossip, profiles, trendy tips and incisive reviews. Eleanor Lambert, fashion's foremost publicist, is no particular fan of Women's Wear, and vice versa. Still, she feels that the paper "has the same impact as Walter Winchell once did. Winchell humanized the theater and let people see glimpses of human foible behind the scenes. Women's Wear has done the same to fashion. The press and society have been titillated by its gossip, and its power has snowballed."

This growing power has made Fairchild the most feared and disliked man in the fashion-publishing field. Despite his wide blue eyes and guileless countenance, he and his No. 1 hatchet man, WWD Publisher James Brady, have chalked up—and delighted in—a long string of personality assassinations, cutting insults and crushing putdowns. They have distorted news stories to back their hunches, ridiculed prominent women with consummate cattiness and indulged their personal likes and dislikes in puffs and snubs. But no Women's Wear vendetta, however vicious, has ever raised a controversy that can compare with Fairchild's and WWD's fervent espousal of the midi.

January Juggernaut

Designers, manufacturers and retailers are caught in a dilemma as fierce as that of the nation's women: between minis that may be out of date and midis that may not sell. The squeeze hurts, and those who are not directly in John Fairchild's line of fire are not afraid to yell. S. Irene Johns, president of the Association of Buying Offices, an organization that represents 25,500 stores and specialty shops across the country, insists that "by starting to push the midi last winter, Women's Wear killed not only the fall season for manufacturers but the spring season too." And Mildred Sullivan, director of the New York Couture Business Council, adds: "I don't hesitate to point the finger directly at Women's Wear for the outrageous situation. They have consumers believing the Longuette is the only style they should wear."

The Longuette? Although the term midi has now come to mean anything from below the knee to the ankle, it still meant mid-calf at the beginning of 1970. So Fairchild coined the word Longuette to launch his midi juggernaut last January. The paper's Paris bureau complained that there was no such word, but Fairchild knew better. He mailed them a page from his Cassell's French-English dictionary, where he had found it. WWD's front-page kickoff story began: "The word longuette means, in French, 'longish, somewhat long, pretty long, too long.' That just about sums up the Paris scene today"

From then on, WWD relentlessly pushed the midi. In stories, gossip items and pictures, it pounded the theme: "The whole look of American women will now change, and die-hard miniskirt adherents are going to be out in the fashion cold." In Rome, Fairchild photographers found "Longuette Thoroughbreds" at a horse show. In London, they spotted "Longuette Birds" and "Sportive Longuettes." Back in the U.S., the paper claimed that executives along Manhattan's Seventh Avenue, the central