CHIC SAVAGES <i> by John Fairchild (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 215 pp.)</i>
One rainy Monday morning during the Reagan era, John Fairchild, publisher of Women’s Wear Daily and W, had a doleful thought: “There’s been a big change in society; today it’s all money and power and greed.” His response was typical. Having spotted a trend, he gave the Donald Trumps and their ilk a label, “Nouvelle Society,” and soon exulted: “Before we knew it, people were secretly--and not so secretly--labeling their friends. It’s moments like these that make it all worthwhile.”
“It,” for Fairchild, has been a life of hobnobbing with and reporting on the rich and famous. His grandfather founded Women’s Wear Daily, and in 1949, at age 20, Fairchild was sent to Paris to study French and fashion. It paid off. These days, when he wants to heal the lacerations of infighting with the “chic savages” of Manhattan, Milan and Tokyo, he repairs to his chalet in Switzerland or his 17th-Century villa in the south of France. He devotes a whole chapter to describing the taste and refinement of these hideaways, as if to say: The best justification, even for silliness, is living well.
In this memoir-cum-expose, Fairchild hardly bites the hand that feeds him; he gums the knuckles in what ends up as half a kiss. Breezily, he tells us how designers, from Dior and Balenciaga to Armani and Blass, have become bigger celebrities than their customers; what fashion journalists do; why Paris couture is endangered; how the Nouvelles are displacing New York’s Wobbly Wasps; how social climbing is like a child’s game of “snakes and ladders”; what the flower bill was for the wedding of financier Saul Steinberg’s daughter ($1 million); what Barbara Bush is like (nice); and a thousand other details about who’s In and Out, what things look like and what they cost.
Shallow, sure. But Fairchild braces his Italian shoes on one bedrock fact: Fashion is important. Not just because people have “a romantic idea that the rich and powerful have something special to offer,” but because the mysterious process that makes the same thing or idea in turn radically new, comfortably mainstream, hopelessly passe and, sometimes, new again fuels entire economies. Evidently a charming man, Fairchild can tell jokes at his own expense. He takes no responsibility for the coarsening of society but regrets it, if only by reflex. He tries to persuade us that, as a non-billionaire and a member of the working press, he’s just plain folks. And he worries now and then about “falling into the same pit of emptiness” as his subjects before reverting to the magazine formula: Spot trends, spot people, label them and move on.
