Women's Wear Daily (
WWD) is a
fashion-industry
trade journal sometimes called "the
bible of fashion."
[Horyn, Cathy. . New York Times (August 20, 1999).] It is the flagship journal of
Fairchild Publications, Inc.[Rothenberg, Randall. . New York Times (August 17, 1988).] WWD's
publisher is
Ralph Erardy, Sr., and its
editor-in-chief is
Edward Nardoza.
As of
March 6, 2000, WWD's
circulation was 30,000 copies.
[Kuczynski, Alex. . New York Times (March 6, 2000).]The journal was founded by
Edmund Fairchild on July 13, 1910, as an outgrowth of the
menswear journal
Daily News Record.
[Trager, James. The New York Chronology: A Compendium of Events, People, and Anecdotes from the Dutch to the Present. HarperCollins (2003), . ISBN 0060740620.]Though WWD's reporters were assigned to the last row of the 1955
couture shows—a sign of the newspaper's low stature—the paper rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s.
, who became the European bureau chief of Fairchild Publications in 1955 and the publisher of WWD in 1960, improved WWD's standing by focusing on the human side of fashion.
He turned his newspaper's attention to the social scene of
fashion designers and their clients, and helped manufacture a "cult of celebrity" around designers.
Fairchild also played hardball to help his circulation. After two couturiers forbade press coverage until one month after buyers had seen their clothes, Fairchild published photos and sketches anyway.
[Fairchild, John. The Fashionable Savages. Doubleday (1965). (Cited in Gross, Michael. . New York Times (May 8, 1987).)] He even sent reporters to fashion houses disguised as messengers, or had them observe designers' new styles from windows of buildings opposite fashion houses.
"I have learned in fashion to be a little savage," he wrote in his memoir.
John Fairchild was publisher of the magazine from 1960 to 1996.
Under Fairchild, the company's feuds were also legendary.
When a designer's statements or work offended Fairchild, he would retaliate, sometimes banning any reference to them in his newspaper for years at a stretch.
The newspaper famously sparred with
Hubert de Givenchy,
,
[Gross, Michael. . New York Times (May 8, 1987).] John Weitz,
,
,
,
,
,
Bill Blass,
(
twice- the first over
Lynda Bird Johnson's White House wedding dress design, which Geoffrey promised to keep secret until the wedding day, and later over a WWD reporter Geoffrey did not like),
,
,
,
and
Norman Norell (who was demoted from "Fashion Great" to "Old Master" in the journal's pages),
among others. In response, some designers forbade their representatives from speaking to WWD reporters or disinvited WWD reporters from their
fashion shows.
In general, though, those excluded "kept their mouths shut and [took] it on the chin." When designer
Pauline Trigere, who had been excluded from the paper for three years, took out a full-page advertisement protesting the ban in the fashion section of a 1988
New York Times Magazine, it was believed to be the first widely distributed counterattack on Fairchild's policy.
In 1999, Fairchild Publications was sold by the
Walt Disney Company to
Advance Publications, the
parent company of
Condé Nast Publications. Now Fairchild Publications is a unit of Condé Nast,
[Hoover's In-Depth Company Records. "Fairchild Publications, Inc." March 21, 2007.] though WWD is technically operated separately from Condé Nast's consumer publications such as
Vogue and
Glamour.
[MacIntosh, Jeane. "Will WWD Play It Straight for SI?" N.Y. Post (Feb. 7, 2000).]
