The Press: Out on a Limb with the Midi

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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