By 1960, I knew the millinery business was finished as a fashion force. I still could make a living with the older women who wore hats, but I felt that was no life for my ambitious spirit. Besides, the matrons and I were in constant conflict—they wanted dull, uninteresting hats, and I was continually creating new shapes. We were like fire and water.
Selling fashion with flair and excitement to women in the east had just about worn out my resistance. I was fighting for something much deeper than original design. You’d be ashamed at how much of this high-fashion business revolves around “looking like this or that,” especially in café society life, where everyone is desperately climbing. Sometimes all the anti-Semitic talk that filled my salon made me wonder if another Hitler could rise. Since my earliest days in fashion, all this damned side-of-the-mouth talk has made me ashamed of what high fashion is used for. Poor fashion is the innocent victim of deep-rooted hatreds. My shop was always open to everyone. Jet and Ebony, in particular, were so generous to my work, turning over lots of valuable space. For many years, I gave hat shows in Harlem, and they were some of the most exciting ever given; the audience truly appreciated creative ideas. If I were to open a shop again, I’d sure as hell consider Harlem. Those ladies know how to wear a hat like you’ve never seen, and the more exciting it is, the better they appreciate it. I guess the café society crowd are just envious and jealous of the great wealth amassed by the newly rich Seventh Avenue community. Of course, the most aggressive social climbers often appear to be the wives of the newly rich, who often wear the most original fashions. At any rate, it’s a hot subject and has plagued the high-fashion salons, and I think it’s about time women stopped all this ridiculous nonsense and wore their clothes for the sheer pleasure that they receive from something beautiful.
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I CLOSED THE DOORS of William J., and it was really quite sad, all rather like a divorce. My childhood love affair didn’t die, it just vanished. Women had stopped wearing hats.
Fashion Punch
While I was closing my shop, a call came from a fashion editor of Women’s Wear Daily. She invited me to lunch to meet her boss, John Fairchild Jr. In the last three years, he had taken over this excellent but dull to read fashion trade paper and turned it into the most controversial publication in the field. It used to be called “the bible of the trade”; now it was being renamed “the New Testament.”
First thing each day, buyers and designers would grab the paper to see who was being scrapped and who the new stars of the day were. John had done a fabulous job, and I was aware of every detail of his revolution. When I was asked to join them at lunch, I immediately said no, as I could read between the lines and didn’t want to be maneuvered—Mr. Fairchild was tossing designers around to suit the mood of his front page. The editor said I was being ridiculous and that I would enjoy meeting him. We had the luncheon, and of course I was full of the same revolutionary spirit as he. I had forgotten about all the unfair things I had recently read in his paper. On the spot, he asked me to write a column. I said definitely not—“I’m no writer and can hardly spell my own name.” During luncheon, I told him about a party I had observed the night before, and how vivid I had felt was the revolution taking place in fashion. John got so excited he called the paper and canceled the existing front page, and right there in the Oak Room of the St. Regis I wrote my first story and made funny little drawings of the women I was describing, which a Women’s Wear artist then turned into ravishing sketches. I went back to the paper’s office after lunch, where the fashion editors were a little bit mad and asked why I had opened my big mouth. The art department was also little put out, and I got a couple of dirty glances. By the end of an hour spent in the office, I felt like a culprit—although, the people in the office weren’t really mad at me, they were exasperated with John. He would very often come back from his luncheon date with some exciting fashion personality and then order his office to ditch the front page that everyone had been working on. The staff would have to stay late, developing another idea. Of course, this was the very thing that made the new Women’s Wear the brilliant success it is today. John’s mind was completely open to new thoughts, and there’s no question that he was one of the great individual publishers of our day.
After closing the shop, I took a two-month Greyhound bus trip all over America, stopping at every city just to observe and see how people really lived. It was a great experience, and a very sobering one, as I had never traveled around America before. The trip was a revelation. The Deep South, the Southwest, the West Coast, and the great wheat fields of the Midwest. I began to realize I had stayed too long hidden behind the potted palms of New York’s Plaza Hotel. Very few women live that kind of la-di-da life, where they get all dressed up like the slick fashion magazines advise.
Whether I was in Kansas City, New Orleans, or Cheyenne, women just didn’t seem to have that burning interest in fashion. A new house, a sleek car, or a fabulous interior design were much more realistic and exciting to the average woman. All the conquering fashion climbing is done in Paris, New York, London, and Rome. Of course, I saw nicely dressed women at luncheons and dinners, but there was never that obvious hysterical fashion climbing that I frankly enjoyed. At all the exquisite small specialty stores where top designers’ clothes were sold, I got the same answer: women do buy the exciting clothes, but they seem to take them on trips to New York and Paris to wear them. This strikes a very interesting note on American society. Why is everyone afraid to be themselves in their home cities? It’s always the visitors in New York who strut around in daring clothes. They don’t seem to feel secure in their own city. The same could be said for the New Yorkers. Customers were always telling me they’d wear my wild hats in Europe, but not in New York. It seems to me American women are suffering from a bad case of “what will the neighbors say?” Or is it just that getting to a strange place where no one knows who you really are gives you that feeling of liberation?
Although I did observe that the midwestern ladies, strangely enough, were the ones to buy marvelous hats, coats, and dresses simply because they loved them. In Chicago, I saw more exciting fashion than anywhere else in the country, and definitely more free-spirited fashion than you’d ever see in New York. No one in Chicago seemed to be worried about status. They didn’t stop to think whether some snooty New York society woman had recognized it.
Designers should get out of their cultivated city living every three years and just travel around the country observing.
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AFTER MY TWO-MONTH TRIP, I came back to New York and immediately started designing a collection of exotic bird masks that were used as window displays at Bonwit’s. Birds and masks allowed me the freedom to express my imagination without worrying about the needs of a customer. The seven-room Carnegie Hall studio became too expensive to run, and I didn’t need all the room, so I put an ad in the Times and rented half of it to a charming English writer, Jeanne Campbell, who I later learned was from an illustrious Scottish background. She and her new husband, Norman Mailer, moved in, and we all shared the place, until one morning when Mrs. Nielsen—who always arrived at work at eight o’clock—was helping me sew the masks for Bonwit’s. I had gone out to walk the dog, when Mr. Mailer trotted down the stairs, through the workroom, into the bathroom, wearing only his BVDs. Well, Mrs. Nielsen, who is Victorian mannered, nearly fainted. I guess she didn’t realize that Miss Campbell’s new husband was living there with us. And the funny part was, Mr. Mailer never even noticed her to say, “Excuse me.” So, to keep peace in the family, I moved into a small studio, high in the tower of Carnegie Hall, with a sensational view overlooking the Hudson, and to the north, Central Park. The studio had two walls completely covered with windows, from the floor to the sixteen-foot-tall ceilings. It was a wonderful-feeling place, rather like living in a treetop. (I must be a reincarnation of a bird, for I really felt at home in this nest.)
By the end of Septemb
er, I had a call from John Fairchild asking why I hadn’t called him. By this time I was in my blunt period, so I told him I rarely call people in New York because they immediately think you want something. He laughed and said he wanted to have lunch again. At our second meeting, I was absolutely fascinated by this man. He had the same fashion philosophy as I did. By the time lunch was over, he had convinced me to write a couple of stories and send them to the paper. That night I got cold feet, but I went to a party at the Plaza, and the minute I got involved with looking at the guests and what they were wearing, I became so excited over the clothes that I wrote three columns and sent them to him. These he immediately printed, and I was in business, at one of the best salaries in town: $275 a week for three columns. When I told other fashion editors of leading papers, they couldn’t believe it. Newspapers are notorious for paying small wages.
When my column started in Women’s Wear, I vowed to myself never to lie about or soft-soap a designer and his collection. The only inflexible rule was that I had to preserve total honesty and integrity when I was reporting. Many a night I went to bed sick from having written articles that were perhaps too blunt, and against popular opinion, but I couldn’t allow myself to sink into the phoniness that covers 90 percent of the fashion press. John began to tell me to say things a different way. To coat everything with sugar, and hide what I really meant. I felt the fashion world reporting had been sweetened with enough self-praise that it was time for down-to-earth facts. The other rule I laid down for my reporting was to talk about ladies who appeared elegantly dressed because of their true fashion, not who they were. I always picked a woman for her appearance first and then asked her name. I felt my job was fashion, not discovering someone’s background. Needless to say, within a few months I had made an army of enemies. But the column also generated an array of readers.
For a time, it seems everyone read my column. Of course, I started writing just as the New York papers were on strike, and there wasn’t much else to read but Women’s Wear. This probably accounted for the quick popularity my column achieved, as it certainly wasn’t read for its literary value—I didn’t even know what a verb was. Many of my friends were shocked by the low, common language they thought I used. This was intentional on my part. How many times had I tried to read fashion reports in the past, when I couldn’t make head nor tail of what they were saying? And businesspeople don’t have the time to open a dictionary to discover some obscure word a frustrated writer drops into a report. I felt the readers were working people, a great many schooled in the crafts of their hands, so I thought the language should be in the kitchen-table coffee-break style, where everyone could quickly grasp the full meaning of what I said. I never used a word I didn’t know myself. Often people in the office would suggest a more scholarly substitute for my plain-Jane sentences, but I felt it was better to keep to everyday language.
On my first trip to Paris for the daily papers, I had forgotten to tell my editors that my spelling was in the phonetic style. I was covering the shows for a number of papers, beyond the work I was doing for Women’s Wear Daily. I never could spell, and added to the challenges of navigating a new typewriter, which was being conquered by my two-finger system, the editors almost dropped dead when the stories started to pour in from Europe. The conservative intellectual Chicago Tribune couldn’t believe their eyes. Never in their wildest imagination had they seen such spelling. They couldn’t imagine how I’d gone so far with so little education. Another paper, the Boston Herald, never said a word, until a month later a tiny package arrived in the mail. Upon opening it, there shining in my face was the Boston Herald Gold Medallion Spelling Bee Award for the century’s worst speller. On a couple of occasions at formal parties, I have worn the ribboned medal just for kicks, and no one has ever bothered to read the inscription. They just get all impressed and think it’s some kind of royal ancestry—which is typical of New York’s social climbers.
When reporting for the newspapers, I never wrote about anything I didn’t see with my own eyes or hear with my own ears. Consequently, I had to go everywhere. It was a twenty-four-hour job, and I loved every minute of it. Some nights I’d cover as many as five parties, then write a frank article as to who was actually elegantly dressed that night in New York. Reviewing designers’ collections was the most difficult, because I had to be honest, and to my initial shock I found that 90 percent of the Seventh Avenue designers who had been passing their work off as real creations of their own personalities had in reality just taken ideas from other designers, especially those from Paris. When I reported this shameful turn of events in one of my columns, there was a lot of hell-raising, and I was thrown out of many of the shows. Top designers invite the press to review their work just so long as they will praise it, but criticism was something the darlings of Seventh Avenue hadn’t even considered accepting. Women’s Wear’s policy gave a reporter two options, either to completely ignore a bad collection or put a negative review way back in the paper where few people took the time to read it.
During my first three months at the paper, most of the famous designers’ showings had been a disappointment, as they weren’t really designing but instead editing Parisian ideas. The last artist to show his collection was Norman Norell, then America’s most important designer. When I got the invitation, I was thrilled. I had never seen a full Norell collection before.
The night of his showing arrived, and I was a nervous wreck, remembering what Givenchy had told me about Norell buying Balenciaga and Givenchy designs. I became panic-stricken that Norell’s collection might reflect Paris, and I would be forced to report in the column that everyone’s hero was just another copyist. I became so nervous that night that I walked from my Carnegie Hall studio at Fifty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue down to Norell’s on Thirty-Ninth Street, clutching my rosary beads and saying the Hail Marys and Our Fathers, praying that I wouldn’t see copies. By the time I reached Norell’s salon for the black-tie nine p.m. showing, my knees were shaking, and I thought I’d have a nervous breakdown. Finally, the first dress stepped through the perfumed salon. My whole body stopped trembling, and I smiled with relief. The dresses, coats, and suits were the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and not one of them had the faintest look of anything I had ever seen from Paris. It was a total and pure signature, that of a true artist. His color sense was extraordinary, and as I said before, his timing was unbeatable.
The following afternoon the press was to review the last American collection from California, that of Jimmy Galanos. Mr. Galanos’s talent as a true creator was recognized all over the world. He showed about three hundred designs, and I admired them very much, realizing the inventive construction and workmanship, but something seemed to be missing. I didn’t feel there was a joyful look to the clothes. The models’ faces were like a funeral parlor death march. I guess I had just never thought about those super-elegant women who never smile—they seem to take themselves too seriously. After the show I wrote my review, which I changed five times before I passed it to the paper. I understood his superb talent, yet something didn’t come across to me in the showing. How could I give it the same high praise as Norell? Yet it was far superior to any collection seen on Seventh Avenue. But I had that nagging feeling that a certain pleasure was missing, and, even worse, after reading the Norell review, everyone was waiting to see what I’d say. At first my copy had said he had “given the fashion world a golden apple.” Then I changed it to “he has not given us a golden apple.” Well, I turned that apple around in my mind for so long that I finally decided the collection was a shiny red apple, not golden. At any rate, to make a long story short, Mr. Galanos tossed me out of his future showings. His clothes take time to understand; their message is deep and much more sincere than the surface collections you see every day. I must honestly say now that his clothes were without contradiction the most creative and the most beautifully made in America for a time.
I left for Europe a few days later to see the collections there
. The paper wouldn’t send me, so I paid my own way. I sent a column back to the paper each day, always being very direct and saying just what I thought. Many of the buyers and press people told me I’d never get back in to see the collections another time if I kept up this approach. Everything went well until the day Dior opened, and I wrote a very uncomplimentary review of how the designs were mostly a rehash of past years’, and what a disappointment to find the House of Dior was not the leader it had been publicized as. At any rate, John Fairchild wouldn’t let me print the story. I was mad, and threatened to quit. I didn’t care about the story not being published; all I could think of was the total unfairness to the other designers about whom I had been given the freedom to write so openly. And here I was covering the most important house of fashion, the renowned Christian Dior, and John wouldn’t let me say what I believed. It was all right for me to discuss the other designers, but when it came to the big boys, it seems you just had to flatter their egos. To me, this was unthinkable dishonesty to all my readers, so I wrote a column for the next day, saying the previous column had been banned in Paris, and apologizing to Jimmy Galanos for the harsh review I had given his showing in New York. My column read:
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