Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron

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, andRealgirl. 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
tellsthem 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