Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron Page A

one recent tribute to Yves SaintLaurent); offhand irreverence (“ ‘KISS ME, FOOL,’ CRIED WILLFUL LITTLE HYDRANGEA AS HER SENSUOUS FINGERS TOYED NERVOUSLY WITH THE WRITHING TENDRILS OF HER NEW WHITE BACK-TO-SCHOOL DRESS BY X BOWAGE INC.,” read a headline for a children’s dress sketch); and incidental information on a dandy place to go to avoid the overcrowded French Riviera (Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia), what to bring to Russia (your own hairdresser), and how to keep up with the Winston Guests (Cee Zee’s beige mastiff has his hair done).
    Although fewer than one-sixth of
Women’s Wear
subscribers are consumers, they are unquestionably the most consuming consumers of fashion in the country. Jacqueline Kennedy once declared indignantly that it was impossible for her to spend thirty thousand dollars a year on clothes (she would have had to buy sable underwear, she said), but experts estimate that it costs each of The Ladies well over that figure to dress the way she does. Small wonder that
Women’s Wear
delights in aiming masses of information at them. Mrs. Charles Revson of lipsticks, Barbra Streisand of records, Charlotte Ford Niarchos of automobiles, Mrs. William (Babe) Paley of broadcasting, and the Duchess of Windsor of abdications all subscribe. So do Mrs. Ronald Reagan of California, Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas; also Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, several Italian
principessas
with backgrounds too confusing to go into, and George Hamilton’s mother. Gloria Guinness, who is married to the banking Guinness, has two subscriptions—one for her Palm Beach home, the other for Paris. Mary Lou Whitney of the horse-racing Whitneys says that when she is summering in the Adirondacks,
Women’s Wear
is the onlypublication that arrives on time; she may not be up-to-date on what is happening in the world, but she knows what everyone wore when it happened.
    The group that
Women’s Wear
calls The Ladies began to read
WW
in 1960, when John Fairchild returned from Paris and began to write about them. The Ladies are those socially registered women who summer in Southampton, winter in duplexes on Park or Fifth Avenue, and make a career out of looking beautiful and having lunch—a full-time job, requiring an early rise and a packed day. One must plan one’s dinner parties, go to one’s sinister Hungarian skin doctor, have one’s biweekly massage at Elizabeth Arden and one’s triweekly combout or set at Kenneth’s, lunch at one of five recognized places for The Ladies to lunch (as of now: The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle, LaFayette, Le Pavillon). One must exercise at Kounovsky’s, discuss one’s charities, shop for one’s perfect dress with the perfect label and status shoes (by Fiorentina), stockings (opaque), belt (gold chain from Saint Laurent), bag (Gucci), face (Estée Lauder), false eyelashes (Bendel’s), and return home in time to greet one’s hobby (the husband, who, more often than not, is an investment banker or stockbroker, and the children).
    The Ladies, unlike the fashion industry, learned to love
Women’s Wear
, and with good reason: before
Women’s Wear
became the swinging newspaper it is today, it was not really chic to be a Lady. There was something a little embarrassing about just doing nothing and having lunch in between. Oh, there were the charities and the children to be sure, but The Ladies occasionally sensed there might be Something More. Then, with their glorification in
Women’s Wear Daily
, their elevation to a pantheon of heroines built somewhere in John Fairchild’s noggin, and their constant pursuit by
Women’sWear
photographers, The Ladies suddenly relaxed and became quite content.
Women’s Wear
had created a profession: It was
enough
just to have found that divine little pendant made from a Coca-Cola bottletop;
enough
to have thought of using one of those wide French neckties on one’s skinny