The Press: The Stylocrats

The headily perfumed world of fashion, whose journals are both arbiters and court reporters, has its own definition of news: the New Look. This time, for a change, it was really new, from round shoulders to sucked-in (or laced-in) waist to long skirt (see NATIONAL AFFAIR).

Last week, after prophesying the most drastic style changes in a decade, the fashion magazines swept on to the crucial task of their year: rushing the news, sketches and pictures from the Paris and New York openings into print for their big fall numbers. Queenly Edna Woolman Chase, 70-year-old editor-in-chief of Vogue, bustled home from a quick inspection of her revived British and French editions. Pert Carmel Snow, 56, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, was doing front-line duty in Paris. Both were ecstatic about derrieres, guepieres (little waist corsets), and a French designer of “magnificent courage” named Christian Dior (the man who, abetted by some Americans, first dared to lower skirts after the death of L-85, the Wartime material-hoarding order).

Diamond Dust. Fashion Is Spinach, wrote Designer Elizabeth Hawes (in 1938) in a maverick mood. But to the fashion magazines the sand in he spinach is diamond dust. Last year, Vogue and Harper’s made more money than ever (for Conde Nast Publications and Hearst, respectively). Their circulations (Harper’s, 225,000, plus 39,000 British; Vogue, 304,000, plus 100,700 British and 12,000 French) are at an alltime peak. Recent issues have been skinnier than last year’s ad-fat ones, and to cut costs Vogue recently cut its output from 24 issues a year to 20, boosting its price from 35¢ to match Harper’s (50¢ a month).

As leaders in a hotly competitive field, both magazines cover fashions at their source, report on what they like, and often like the same things. Both are read as much for their ads as for anything else. Both employ squads of bright, elegantly turned-out young fashion scouts, and both try to vary their pictures of blankly beautiful models with portraits of society women. Both are fawned over by publicity-hungry manufacturers. But they resent being taken for twins. Their differences are largely those that set apart two strong-minded women of ruthless, sometimes reckless taste.

Brown-eyed Edna Chase, mother of Actress-Author (In Bed We Cry) Ilka, has edited Vogue ever since 1914, five years after the late Conde Nast bought it. In & out of her chartreuse-and-beige office, she is a hard-to-please autocrat (“my wastebasket is my strongest ally”). Her philosophy is frankly snobbish: “We are reflecting the way of life of people with wealth and taste and social position.” To help catch the reflections, Vogue has introduced to fashion coveys of high-priced painters (Christian Berard, Edouard Benito) and photographers (Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, Anton Bruehl). Its fine arts man is puttery Frank Crowninshield, 75, famed editor of famed Vanity Fair until Vogue gobbled it. Mrs. Chase and courtly Iva Sergei Voidato (“Pat”) Patcevitch, successor to Nast, have admitted articles to their pages, but no fiction. “It shows a lack of sustained thinking,” Pat thinks, “to run fiction in a fashion magazine . . . it is distracting.”

It is the kind of distraction in which merry-eyed Carmel Snow and her Harper’s Bazaar delight. Dublin-born Mrs. Snow was editor of the American Vogue when Richard Berlin, boss of Hearst magazines, lured her away in 1932. (Today Harper’s, like Town & Country, gets only the gentlest Hearstian supervision.) She and her fiction editors have bought and plugged such bylines as Virginia Woolf, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Christopher Isherwood, Anna Kavan and Colette.

A gentler boss than the rival who trained her, Carmel Snow shrewdly feeds her staffers’ egos. She is proud to see her alumni (Models Anita Colby and Lauren Bacall, Fashion Editor Louise Macy Hopkins) get on in the world.

Whether these stylocrats and their emulators really make fashions, or merely make people like them, is a delicate question. Last week in Paris, Mrs. Snow made a stab at answering it: “The editors must recognize fashions while they are still a thing of the future. The dressmakers create them, but without these magazines, the fashions would never be established or accepted.”