The Press: Out on a Limb with the Midi

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"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.