one thing, The Ladies have begun to commit new and practically unforgivable fashion sins. “They’d rather be Socially Secure than Individual,” lamented one recent article criticizing The Ladies for not wearing dark stockings and buckled shoes. “AREN’T THEY TOO YOUNG TO BE SET IN THEIR FASHION WAYS?”
Women’s Wear
’s ambivalence toward The Ladies has been heightened recently: it ran a series of fictional adventures, written by one of their brightest young writers, Chauncey Howel, about two frigid postdebutantes named Didi Aubusson and Mimi de Nebbisch who take their decorators to lunch, shoplift at Lamston’s for kicks, and behave in several other ways that may or may not be Ladylike.
In the last year,
Women’s Wear Daily
has added fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard. And its coverage of nonfashion events has broadened considerably. It prints articles on poverty, nuns’ orders, the Vietnam black market, and dragqueen beauty contests; its art, movie, and drama critics have always been first rate—drama critic Martin Gottfried is nationally recognized. And when reading
Women’s Wear
for its criticism is a little like reading
Playboy
for its fiction, there nevertheless are indications that
WW
is making a real attempt to place fashion in a slightly larger context. Despite the improvements, however, serious members of the fashion business wish that
Women’s Wear
would concentrate more of its efforts on being at least accurate, at least ethical, at least mature, at least responsible—traits that
WW
displays only on rare occasion.
If
Women’s Wear Daily
were writing about politics, its failings would be reprehensible. As it is, they are at worst, a
scandale
. For
Women’s Wear
is, after all, only writing about fashion. AND FASHION, NO MATTER WHAT
WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY
SAYS, IS AFTER ALL, ONLY SPINACH.
Mush
“…
there may be a new trend gathering momentum. It is a return to romanticism, a yearning for years past, when life was simpler and values stronger.”
— TIME MAGAZINE
The media have been calling it a return to romance, but of course the return is only on the part of the media. The rest of the country never went away. The poems of Kahlil Gibran and books like
A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You
and
Happiness Is A Warm Puppy
have been selling hundreds of thousands of copies in recent years. Heart-shaped satin boxes of chocolate candy, single red American Beauty roses, record albums by Mantovani and the George Melachrino Strings, rhinestone hearts on silver chains—all of it sells to the multitudes out there.
What has changed, however, is that sentimentality is now being peddled by people who seem to lend it an aura of cultural respectability. Take Rod McKuen and Erich Segal. Both of them have hit the jackpot in the romance business: one is a poet, the other a professor. And each thinks of himself as much more than the mush-huckster he is. McKuen, the author of five slim volumes of sentimental poetry and countless songs, is the fastest-selling poet in America; Segal is the author of
Love Story
, which has sold almost 500,000 copies in hard cover, had the largest paperback first printing (4,350,000 copies) in history, and is on the way to being the weepiest and most successful film ever made. All of it is treacle, pure treacle, with a message that is perfect escapism to a country in the throes of future shock: the world has not changed, the old values prevail, kids are the same as ever, love is just like they told us in the movies. This optimism comes in nice small packages that allow for the slowest reader with the shortest concentration span and the smallest vocabulary.
To lump Segal and McKuen together here is not to say that they know each other—they don’t—or that their work is alike. But there are some disarming similarities. Both appeal primarily to women and teen-age girls. Both are bachelors who enjoy referring to themselves as loners. Both belong to professions that rarely lead to
Women’s Wear
’s ambivalence toward The Ladies has been heightened recently: it ran a series of fictional adventures, written by one of their brightest young writers, Chauncey Howel, about two frigid postdebutantes named Didi Aubusson and Mimi de Nebbisch who take their decorators to lunch, shoplift at Lamston’s for kicks, and behave in several other ways that may or may not be Ladylike.
In the last year,
Women’s Wear Daily
has added fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard. And its coverage of nonfashion events has broadened considerably. It prints articles on poverty, nuns’ orders, the Vietnam black market, and dragqueen beauty contests; its art, movie, and drama critics have always been first rate—drama critic Martin Gottfried is nationally recognized. And when reading
Women’s Wear
for its criticism is a little like reading
Playboy
for its fiction, there nevertheless are indications that
WW
is making a real attempt to place fashion in a slightly larger context. Despite the improvements, however, serious members of the fashion business wish that
Women’s Wear
would concentrate more of its efforts on being at least accurate, at least ethical, at least mature, at least responsible—traits that
WW
displays only on rare occasion.
If
Women’s Wear Daily
were writing about politics, its failings would be reprehensible. As it is, they are at worst, a
scandale
. For
Women’s Wear
is, after all, only writing about fashion. AND FASHION, NO MATTER WHAT
WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY
SAYS, IS AFTER ALL, ONLY SPINACH.
Mush
“…
there may be a new trend gathering momentum. It is a return to romanticism, a yearning for years past, when life was simpler and values stronger.”
— TIME MAGAZINE
The media have been calling it a return to romance, but of course the return is only on the part of the media. The rest of the country never went away. The poems of Kahlil Gibran and books like
A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You
and
Happiness Is A Warm Puppy
have been selling hundreds of thousands of copies in recent years. Heart-shaped satin boxes of chocolate candy, single red American Beauty roses, record albums by Mantovani and the George Melachrino Strings, rhinestone hearts on silver chains—all of it sells to the multitudes out there.
What has changed, however, is that sentimentality is now being peddled by people who seem to lend it an aura of cultural respectability. Take Rod McKuen and Erich Segal. Both of them have hit the jackpot in the romance business: one is a poet, the other a professor. And each thinks of himself as much more than the mush-huckster he is. McKuen, the author of five slim volumes of sentimental poetry and countless songs, is the fastest-selling poet in America; Segal is the author of
Love Story
, which has sold almost 500,000 copies in hard cover, had the largest paperback first printing (4,350,000 copies) in history, and is on the way to being the weepiest and most successful film ever made. All of it is treacle, pure treacle, with a message that is perfect escapism to a country in the throes of future shock: the world has not changed, the old values prevail, kids are the same as ever, love is just like they told us in the movies. This optimism comes in nice small packages that allow for the slowest reader with the shortest concentration span and the smallest vocabulary.
To lump Segal and McKuen together here is not to say that they know each other—they don’t—or that their work is alike. But there are some disarming similarities. Both appeal primarily to women and teen-age girls. Both are bachelors who enjoy referring to themselves as loners. Both belong to professions that rarely lead to
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