The Press: Out on a Limb with the Midi

FOR clothes-conscious American women, the summer of discontent is over; this week the autumn of decision begins. Home from vacation, they face the most difficult fall shopping dilemma in decades: whether to go for the midi. Not since Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look has a descending hemline raised such a furor. Men denounce the midi as a threat to the golden days of mini ogling; women insist that it will make them look old, or ugly, or dumpy, or sawed-off—or all of these; and the fashion industry has been deeply split by its advent.

The battle rages in millions of American homes, from the White House to the Chicago split-level whose car boasts a bumper sticker that proclaims: “Mini yes, Midi no!” “I feel this is a graceful length for me,” says Pat Nixon. Says her daughter, Julie Eisenhower: “I think most midis are ugly, dowdy.” Bill Fine, president of Bonwit Teller, thinks—one might say hopes—that “the longer lengths have manners, more style. Perhaps it has something to do with moral awareness.” A protest signed by 335 customers of the Sanger-Harris store in Dallas reads: “We object strongly to being suppressed into buying the midi exclusively. We like looking feminine and intend staying that way, even if it means shopping elsewhere.”

Ordinarily, fashion designers are at the center of arguments over new styles. In the case of the midi, however, the dominant force is a publisher, the press lord of a tiny trade-journal fiefdom that churns out eight publications that few Americans have ever heard of—except for one. He is John Burr Fairchild, 43, the head of Fairchild Publications and the boss of Women’s Wear Daily, the terror tabloid of the fashion world. Fairchild is a puzzling study of opposites. Though the columns of WWD are filled with the social doings of what he calls the “Beautiful People,” he resolutely shuns their company and their entertainments. Though he makes his living following fashion, he insists that it cannot be taken seriously. “Fashion is like food,” he says, “good to taste, good to feel, good to see. Nothing more.” At the same time, Fairchild is obviously a man who savors power. And this year he is putting his power to the test. He did not guess that hems would dive this year; he decided. He has decreed 1970 the year of the midi.

What’s Up and What’s In

The weapon he is using to enforce his decree is Women’s Wear Daily, and it is a weapon of extraordinary strength. Once a strictly trade journal unknown outside the industry, it has been converted under Fairchild’s guidance into a lively, gossipy and bitchy newspaper of manners, trends and scandal. Though its circulation of 85,000 is far below that of Vogue (450,000) and Harper’s Bazaar (440,000), it is clearly the most powerful and influential fashion journal in the U.S. It has become must reading for anyone connected with the fashion business, for journalists in search of story tips, and for members of the social set who want to know what’s Up and what’s In.

“Women’s Wear Daily is a force,” says Muriel Sinclair, fashion director for Joseph Magnin in San Francisco. “To ignore it, you’d have to be able to ignore what’s going on in fashion around the world.” Georgia Young, manager of Erlebacher in Washington, admits that “we’re scared not to read Women’s Wear. We are influenced by it—everybody in fashion is.” So are some 10,000 other readers outside the industry, who are fascinated by WWD’s piquant brew of gossip, profiles, trendy tips and incisive reviews. Eleanor Lambert, fashion’s foremost publicist, is no particular fan of Women’s Wear, and vice versa. Still, she feels that the paper “has the same impact as Walter Winchell once did. Winchell humanized the theater and let people see glimpses of human foible behind the scenes. Women’s Wear has done the same to fashion. The press and society have been titillated by its gossip, and its power has snowballed.”

This growing power has made Fairchild the most feared and disliked man in the fashion-publishing field. Despite his wide blue eyes and guileless countenance, he and his No. 1 hatchet man, WWD Publisher James Brady, have chalked up—and delighted in—a long string of personality assassinations, cutting insults and crushing putdowns. They have distorted news stories to back their hunches, ridiculed prominent women with consummate cattiness and indulged their personal likes and dislikes in puffs and snubs. But no Women’s Wear vendetta, however vicious, has ever raised a controversy that can compare with Fairchild’s and WWD’s fervent espousal of the midi.

January Juggernaut

Designers, manufacturers and retailers are caught in a dilemma as fierce as that of the nation’s women: between minis that may be out of date and midis that may not sell. The squeeze hurts, and those who are not directly in John Fairchild’s line of fire are not afraid to yell. S. Irene Johns, president of the Association of Buying Offices, an organization that represents 25,500 stores and specialty shops across the country, insists that “by starting to push the midi last winter, Women’s Wear killed not only the fall season for manufacturers but the spring season too.” And Mildred Sullivan, director of the New York Couture Business Council, adds: “I don’t hesitate to point the finger directly at Women’s Wear for the outrageous situation. They have consumers believing the Longuette is the only style they should wear.”

The Longuette? Although the term midi has now come to mean anything from below the knee to the ankle, it still meant mid-calf at the beginning of 1970. So Fairchild coined the word Longuette to launch his midi juggernaut last January. The paper’s Paris bureau complained that there was no such word, but Fairchild knew better. He mailed them a page from his Cassell’s French-English dictionary, where he had found it. WWD’s front-page kickoff story began: “The word longuette means, in French, ‘longish, somewhat long, pretty long, too long.’ That just about sums up the Paris scene today”

From then on, WWD relentlessly pushed the midi. In stories, gossip items and pictures, it pounded the theme: “The whole look of American women will now change, and die-hard miniskirt adherents are going to be out in the fashion cold.” In Rome, Fairchild photographers found “Longuette Thoroughbreds” at a horse show. In London, they spotted “Longuette Birds” and “Sportive Longuettes.” Back in the U.S., the paper claimed that executives along Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, the central nervous system of the U.S. fashion industry, were “backing the Longuette completely for fall.”

“Completely” is too strong by far, but many in the fashion trade have indeed placed huge stakes on Fairchild’s gamble. Because of the recession and the mini-midi hesitation of American women, fabric mills have slowed down, clothing manufacturers have gone out of business or “into suspension,” and retailers are hurting. If hemlines go down far enough, women will have to buy complete new wardrobes; midi dresses, skirts, coats; belts and bags; higher-heeled shoes and boots. That could mean millions of dollars in sales, and security for thousands of jobs. Katherine Murphy, a fashion coordinator for Manhattan’s Bloomingdale’s, puts it cold turkey: “Look, this isn’t fun and games. We have a multimillion-dollar business to run, and we’re not laughing all the way to the bank. Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.” Bloomingdale’s, obviously, is leaning Fairchild’s way; so, for example, are Stanley Korshak in Chicago, Sakowitz in Houston, Erlebacher in Washington. The midi predominates in high-fashion stores, but there are alternatives: pantsuits particularly, plus a few minis.

Is anyone buying? Despite the Longuette pictures that WWD crams into its pages nearly every day, midi purchases are still pretty much limited to the fringe crowd—women who want to be first with anything new, no matter what; women who need to hide atrocious legs; women who do things just to be different. Manhattanites who might run into Fairchild at Restaurant X, Y or Z (see glossary) probably own at least one midi; eager candidates for a mention in a WWD gossip column certainly own two.

In Washington, where the social set runs a bit longer in the tooth than in New York, a few senior wives have gratefully followed Mrs. Nixon’s return to the midi as a way of dealing with the ravages of time. Film stars present a mixed pattern; those whose bodies are their fortune are not about to conceal firm thighs, golden with sun. Those who fancy themselves trendsetters (Raquel Welch is one) have been wearing midis since last spring. And rebels like Jane Fonda, who have been wearing long skirts for more than a year, will probably be perversely prompted to go back to minis, or at least pants.

Still, fashion is nothing if not change. And change in 1970, if there is to be any, must mean a lowered hemline—it can’t go any higher. But is it time for a change? And if so, how drastic? Even back in 1947, women picketed against the New Look; since then, they have become more and more accustomed to dressing to suit themselves rather than some arbitrary fashion standard. Today’s increasingly liberated woman is less inclined than ever to accept the authority of some dictator at the top of the fashion industry.

Pushcart Peddler

In many ways, Fairchild seems to agree with the anti-midi movement when he talks about the changing influence of fashion. “No one can dictate fashion,” he says. “It is like telling someone what they must eat.” He also stresses the growing influence of youth: “Paris still gives fashion authority. But today, fashion is born on the world’s streets, in the East Village, and on the Left Bank, on King’s Road and the Corso in Rome.” He would be the first to agree that the traditional fashion industry is being challenged by the small boutiques and the creative individuals who run them. But that does not deter him from his old-fashioned power play with the midi.

A lot of John Fairchild’s uncles and cousins are shocked at his arrogance, but in some trade-journal heaven his grandfather Edmund must be bursting with pride. A Chicago pushcart peddler, Edmund bought an interest in a men’s-wear trade paper in 1890 and began distributing it as he made his rounds. That was the beginning of a staid, relatively prosperous family publishing empire that now includes Daily News Record (which covers the men’s clothing industry), Electronic News, Footwear News, Home Furnishings Daily, Metalworking News, Supermarket News, Men’s Wear magazine and a book division. The total circulation of the eight journals is nearly 400,000.

College Dropout

Born in 1927, John attended Kent prep school in Connecticut and started at Princeton in 1946. Fairchild recalls that he had ideas then about becoming a physician or scientist, but “I was just simply hopeless in math, simply gross with figures.” He dropped out of college after his freshman year and joined the Army, serving in the Pentagon as a speechwriter and an occasional model for recruiting posters.

By then his father had become president of Fairchild, and John no longer had even vague doubts that his future lay with the family venture. He went back to Princeton for a bachelor’s degree in general humanities and back to WWD for summer jobs. Between his junior and senior years, he was sent to help out in Fairchild Publications’ Paris bureau. That summer, he also met Jill Lipsky, the soft-spoken daughter of a Russian father and English mother, whom he married a year later, after his graduation from Princeton and hers from Vassar.

Shortly after that, Fairchild took his first full-time job with WWD as a reporter covering the New York retail field. His aggressive, damn-the-consequences (and sometimes damn-the-advertiser) approach to news quickly stamped him as more than a boss’s son out for an easy ride up the corporate ladder. “I found I really got a terrific kick out of getting things first, scoops on things like Ohrbach’s moving farther uptown, and prying out things you weren’t supposed to know, like stores’ profit figures.” “From the moment he started,” his father says, “he stirred things up.”

In 1954, his father put him in charge of the Paris bureau, and things really began stirring. Covering his first fashion shows in Paris, Fairchild found himself seated at the back of the room and generally ignored in favor of the ladies from Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times. “I vowed then,” he recalls, “to change that, to make them all sit up and take notice of me and Women’s Wear Daily.”

Sit up they did. Fairchild began panning collections unmercifully, breaking release dates on sketches of clothes, cultivating couturiers’ underlings as tipsters, and reporting in juicy (though often unchecked) detail the gossip of buyers overheard in the bar of the Ritz Hotel. In other fields of journalism, even old-fashioned police reporting, such antics might result in a punch on the nose or at least ostracism. But in the bitchy, fearful world of fashion, where a snub is worse than a club and a puffy paragraph is worth its weight in gold brocade, Fairchild thrived. In 1957, weeks before it was shown to the buyers, he managed to get hold of a sketch of Givenchy’s precedent-shattering shift, later to be called “the sack,” and ran it on WWD’s front page. In 1960, he got advance word of Yves St. Laurent’s distinctive new silhouette for the House of Dior, which he maliciously described as looking like “a toothpaste tube on top of a brioche.” Soon Fairchild was not only sitting in the front row for new collections, but mixing socially with top designers and buyers as well.

BP at Play

Anyone who thought that this treatment might flatter him into flattery got a rude shock. He enlarged the Paris bureau staff and expanded his domain to include the Italian and Spanish collections. He sent his reporters to nightclubs, theaters, chic restaurants and chichi resorts to note not only what jet-setters were wearing but what they were doing while wearing it. A letter to his father explained his aims: “WWD must be alive in this alive business, WWD must be controversial in this controversial business, WWD must be smart and snobby in this smart and snobbish business.” In late 1960, John returned to New York to become publisher of WWD.

Fairchild arrived in New York with an audacious plan: to attempt a madcap, Tom Jones-style conquest of the fashion industry by wrapping Seventh Avenue, high fashion and the Beautiful People into one publication. Run-of-the-mill reporters for WWD continued to trudge up and down Seventh Avenue, feeding needle-and-thread stories to rewrite men and women back on Twelfth Street. But, with his pack in full cry, Fairchild rode off in hot pursuit of scoops, gossip and scandal.

For openers, just after he got back to New York, he won worldwide attention when his report that Jackie and Rose Kennedy had spent $30,000 on a Paris shopping spree became an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign. (Jackie pouted: “I’m sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon.”) He mixed fashion scoops with big names: Princess Margaret’s wedding dress, Lady Bird Johnson’s Inaugural wardrobe, Happy Rockefeller’s trousseau, Jackie’s leopard coat (when she first emerged from mourning), Lynda Bird’s wedding dress. Under Fairchild’s prodding, WWD began building up jet-setters like Gloria Guinness, Isabel Eberstadt, Amanda Burden and Baby Jane Holzer (what ever became of Baby Jane?) into the equivalent of 1930s Hollywood stars.

With a report on twist fashions at the Peppermint Lounge and another on Small’s Paradise in Harlem, the paper launched a series of features on Beautiful People at play. The late Carol Bjorkman, a onetime Saks buyer and jet-setter, began a knowing gossip column called “Carol Says,” then moved on to interviews with the likes of Vice President Johnson and a new quarterback named Joe Namath. Reviews, always glib and sometimes perceptive, criticized books, plays, movies, TV shows, restaurants and (lately) Sunday church services. “Eye” and “Eye Too,” gossip columns on the snide side, became must reading on the East Side and elsewhere. Pages were regularly filled with features and with candid-camera shots of BPs going in and out of smart restaurants.

As the paper’s content got livelier, it also got meaner and more autocratic. The wives of political figures became favorite targets. A photograph of Mrs. Hubert Humphrey was captioned “That little old dressmaker is at it again.” A simple dress and jacket worn by Mrs. Stuart Symington became “another one of those ‘dumb’ costumes.” Society and show business regularly get theirs in WWD too. Just last week, Fairchild ordered up a layout on women who “become walking billboards for all the latest status symbols” and “allow fashion to wear them.” He even gave them their own initials, FV (Fashion Victims). The caption for FV Barbra Streisand, shown in the transparent Scaasi costume that she wore to receive her Oscar, was taken from her latest movie: “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Coming up soon: a list of SMs (Social Moths).

Cause and Effect

Above all, perhaps, WWD under Fairchild has shown a taste for vendettas against designers. Norman Norell, Mainbocher, Pauline Trigère and Mollie Parnis have all had their work pointedly ignored in its pages. Often, it seems, for the pettiest of reasons. Miss Trigère was honest enough to deride the clearly pretentious term Longuette on a David Susskind television show last March. Her work has not been covered by WWD since. Cause and effect? Not at all, says Publisher Brady, who adds with a stamp of his tongue: “I think Madame Trigère has no influence on American fashion.” Mollie Parnis lost favor a few years ago after she refused to give WWD some advance sketches of clothes she was designing for Lady Bird Johnson. WWD has not seen fit to cover Parnis’ work since.

“If you are ignored by WWD, you’re in trouble,” says Designer Anne Klein. Her collections get coverage, but she complains that WWD favors male designers, such as Oscar de La Renta, Adolfo, Bill Blass (though he was snubbed for a time), Geoffrey Beene and Yves St. Laurent. Adds Miss Klein: “If St. Laurent showed barrels with two holes cut out, I guarantee that Women’s Wear would brand it the coming look. It would also note that the stays were made of teak, the nails were of the purest brass and the holes were structurally cut.”

Can anybody be that loyal? Certainly not John Fairchild, says Designer Jacques Tiffeau. In his own special franglais, Tiffeau laments: “One day he love you and the next day he hate you.” Tiffeau offers his analysis of WWD’s success: “They survive because they are alone in a business and because we are at a time when people are demanding a dirty newspaper like Screw or Rat, and they are the Seventh Avenue equivalent of those magazines. They are not putting a nude picture on the front page but they should, and that’s where they don’t go far enough.” For good measure, Tiffeau adds that Fairchild has “the power of the devil.”

The devil? John Fairchild? A man with a cherubic face and dimple in his chin? It seems unbelievable. But it is true that his power scares the hades out of many fashion figures who are not as outspoken as Tiffeau. When interviewed by TIME reporters, several designers said nice things about Fairchild on the record and then nasty things off. For attribution, one said: “Fairchild is a genius.” Not for attribution, he added: “His type of journalism is despicable. He is the Mafia godfather of the industry.”

It is not just designers who are afraid to talk publicly about Fairchild. A retailer in Chicago explained his silence simply: “Fairchild would crucify you if you said anything against the paper or the Longuette. Something nasty would appear in the ‘Eye’ column and there would be the implication that your store was completely out of it. No woman of fashion would ever want to shop there again. This is why people are so scared of Fairchild. He has enormous influence and he can really get you.”

Some of those who hate Fairchild spread rumors that he is a homosexual. He is supposed to have had an affair with a noted French designer during his Paris days, they say, and heaven knows what he is up to now. Fairchild dismisses the rumors with a laugh. “I’ve only been propositioned once in my life by a male designer,” he says, “so I must not be very attractive to them. All you have to do is take a look at ——; he looks like a little spoiled girl. He isn’t even sexy. Surely I could do better than that.”

More seriously, he adds: “There is always this kind of rumor in this business. It’s a very bitchy business. It’s true that we launched——, and because of that people say that Fairchild must have had an affair with him. It’s ridiculous. You know, there used to be talk in Paris that I was having orgies with animals. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess I am really just an old, tired square.”

Forgivable Habits

As a description of his own lifestyle, Fairchild’s comment is not far from the mark. Although he regularly joins the lunch bunch at the Frog Pond and Restaurants X, Y and Z, he does it more as an observer and story spotter than a participant. (Fairchild often puts in a phone call to bring a WWD photographer hurrying to the scene.) Evenings, he shuns discothèques, parties and radical chic; instead, he takes the subway and bus home to his eight-room East Side apartment, dines with Jill and their four children, and listens to Shostakovich on the stereo.

Fairchild not only avoids the Beautiful People that his paper talks about; he abhors them. The clearest illustration of this is probably a terrible novel he wrote in 1967, The Moonflower Couple. On the surface, the book seems to be a fascinated and empathetic look at the lives of a beautiful couple, but, says Fairchild, “anyone who thinks that doesn’t understand the novel. It is a story about how a woman is destroyed by her husband’s ambition and the Beautiful People scene. It shows the vacuousness of the Beautiful People.” Then he adds with some heat: “Those people are a joke, wasteful and unimportant. To be living like that in this day and age is unforgivable.”

By such standards, Fairchild’s habits are entirely forgivable. He does not smoke, has never tried pot, rarely watches television. He does drink wine, but is hardly an oenophile. At Restaurant Z, he switches from sweet vermouth to dry by telling the waiter: “Bring me some of the white kind.” His passion is movies, any movies, and he often steals away from his office to catch an afternoon show. (One result is that WWD is hip on movies, and often spots fashion trends in them.) Fairchild’s one great luxury is a pleasant $200,000 bungalow in Bermuda. This year Jill and the children are spending the summer there, and Fairchild flies down almost every weekend to loll in a hammock, barbecue steaks on the outdoor fireplace and splash gingerly in the gentle surf.

Fairchild saves his energy for his only genuine indulgence—running Women’s Wear. He was full of ideas when he first returned to New York City from France: he wanted to print the paper in several cities to speed distribution; he wanted to switch from the company’s muddy old flatbed presses to cleaner offset printing; he wanted to use more color illustration. The family blocked the way. “They kept treating me like a snotty little brat who was running around with wild ideas that were going to ruin the business,” he says. But after his father’s retirement, John took over the company presidency in 1967, and a year later negotiated a merger with Capital Cities Broadcasting Corp. that neatly removed him from the Fairchild family’s veto. It was no letdown financially, either. He now owns about 45,000 shares of Capital Cities stock, last week worth a total of $1,250,000, and draws an annual salary of $90,000.

His obstacles thus cleared away, Fairchild is moving ahead, still bursting with ideas. The latest is for a new weekly magazine to be called W (“For the Woman Who Is First”) that would cost 50¢, have a press run of 225,000 and be, in effect, an expanded WWD without all the trade stories. But the general economic climate has postponed the birth of W, and revenue slippage at Fairchild Publications (down from last year’s record $33 million gross and $5.5 million profit) threatens the continued publication of Home Furnishings Daily and Metalworking News.

Meanwhile, Fairchild has plenty to occupy him in just churning out Women’s Wear and battling for the midi. Field headquarters for the fray is Fairchild Publishing’s grubby third-floor editorial room, a noisy, bare-floored relic straight out of Front Page, where editors shout and ink-stained copy boys scurry. A few feet away from Fairchild’s scarred, wooden desk sits Publisher Brady, who starts the day at WWD by calling the top editors together for a brutal analysis of that morning’s issue. “That sketch on Page One today is grotesque,” he snapped at a recent session. “The girl looks bizarre.” Like Fairchild, Brady often fathers items in “Eye” and “Eye Too.” He recently aimed a backhand at Abercrombie & Fitch because they did not stock tennis shorts in his waist size (32 in.). He picks up gossip by mixing with the Beautiful People at night and attending the parties that Fairchild shuns. In fact, the entire staff of WWD is expected to keep a lookout for potential “Eye” specks, whether they regularly cover the BP scene or a trade beat like “intimate apparel” (known in the pre-Fairchild era as “girdles and bras”).

WWD has a staff of 59, of whom 20 cover fashion—sometimes in a peculiarly Fairchild way. At last month’s opening of the Givenchy Boutique at Bergdorf Goodman’s in Manhattan, four front-row seats were reserved for WWD. They remained empty until five minutes before the showing ended. Then a peasant-skirted, elaborately coifed young girl skittered in, occupied one of the four seats, took a note or two, and left. A few sketches of the boutique ran in “Eye” the next day without any comment on the collection. Givenchy, it turns out, will not release sketches to WWD before his shows.

In the midi campaign, Fairchild’s principal strategists are Brady and June Weir, WWD’s fashion editor, whom Fairchild made a vice president in a recent shakeup (and whom Jacques Tiffeau calls “a nun with a knife in both pockets”). Fairchild and Brady have been close friends ever since 1953, when John was covering the retail stores and Brady was working in Macy’s advertising department. Weir came to WWD in 1954, also from Macy’s, where she had been an assistant buyer. Fairchild first got the midi notion in 1966, says Weir, when he saw Zhivago-inspired coats in Paris. By the following spring, the look was beginning to show up in ready-to-wear collections, and Weir coined the word midi to describe it.

Bonnie and Clyde was the next step. Says Weir: “I saw Faye Dunaway in those soft sweaters and long skirts and those cunning little berets, and I thought that was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen.” Fairchild and Brady thought so too, and WWD swung into action. “We weren’t promoting the fashion,” Weir insists. “We just went around Seventh Avenue and kept asking everybody if they were doing anything with it. And then, you know, there was a sort of chain reaction and we reported what was going on.” WWD used plenty of space to report “what was going on,” but even insiders at the paper admit that the Bonnie and Clyde campaign was a flop. Somewhat defensively, Weir says: “Well, there were smart women who were aware of the look. Chessy Rayner and Gloria Cooper certainly turned up in it, at least for evening wear.”*

Wardrobe of Lengths

Two developments gave the midi something of a push. In his 1968 fall collection, Yves St. Laurent showed “city pants”—pants to wear to work, parties, restaurants and the theater. Fairchild is firmly convinced that pants on women are “gross,” but he paid attention when Designer Marc Bohan told him that they would get the women used to the notion of covering up their mini-bared legs. The second event was the 1969 movie The Damned, a period-costumed portrayal of the decadence of 1930s Nazidom. Fairchild loved the long slinky dresses so much that he gave private screenings of the film for designers, retailers and manufacturers. WWD thereupon opened the way for the midi by coining the expression “wardrobe of lengths,” meaning that any length was O.K., up to and including the micromini.

Then along came the big European shows in January of this year. Valentino presented a collection of long lengths in Rome, and Bohan did essentially the same in Paris. Most other top designers in Europe and the U.S. stayed with the “wardrobe of lengths” idea. But no matter. As Weir now recalls: “We made a decision. We decided to make a stand for the long length. We jumped right in on it with both feet.” Brady adds: “We hit the development pretty hard. We went way out on a limb, saying this was the coming fashion before there was really hard evidence that it was.”

Something Like Seduction

It is all terribly exciting—but dangerous as well. Fairchild and Women’s Wear have pinned their reputation and influence to a sudden and dramatic change in fashion, and a lot of stores have bought accordingly. “Women still follow the leader,” says Henry Clements, a dress-manufacturing consultant in New York. “When cold weather comes in, you can bet that the longer look will be universal.” Bill Fine of Bonwit’s takes a boudoir view of the midi: “My feeling is that it’s like seduction. It’s not whether a woman will go for it, but how far she’ll go.” John Fairchild’s wife Jill admits that she did not like the long skirt for the longest time. “But Johnny kept bringing me things,” she says, “indoctrinating and brainwashing, and now I think it looks pretty and the short skirt just a little cheap and vulgar.”

Still, there is plenty of resistance. “These things evolve better if they are not pushed too hard,” says Vincent DePaul Draddy, president of David Crystal, Inc. “The mini crept up over a period of years. The midi should now creep down over a number of years.” It well may. Around the saltwater pool at Harbor Beach, Mich., a resort frequented by well-to-do Detroiters and St. Louisans, a group of women took a pledge this summer to use pantsuits to tide them over the midi indecision. Many women elsewhere apparently feel the same way. Across the country, pants sales are up, and midi sales have not moved much at all.

In the next few weeks, however, as the weather grows brisker, the midi’s real test of popularity will come. When it does, the midi will have to score a clean, single-season breakthrough if Fairchild is to preserve his image as the No. 1 influence in fashion. A partial victory might convince the casual onlooker of his continued primacy, but it would not fool manufacturers and retailers with storerooms full of dresses they cannot sell. Because he has gambled so heavily and because the industry stands to lose so much, Fairchild could not emerge from a defeat of the midi without suffering heavy losses himself. His response to that peril is about as close as Seventh Avenue ever comes to a beau geste: “I suppose we could have taken a much calmer approach to the Longuette, but that isn’t our style. We approach everything like a tiger, not a cat.”

* Since then, they must have done something wrong; last week Chessy and Gloria were included in WWD’s list of Fashion Victims.