SKIRTING THE ISSUES

The tango begins with each fashion season, in the showrooms of Seventh Avenue or SoHo. Magazine editors -- powerful tastemakers with impeccable taste -- survey the racks of samples from the designer's newest line. They make their choices -- the Calvin Kleins for the summer spread; the Gianni Versaces for the feature on The New Glamour. Then a jacket catches the editor's eye. She pulls it from the racks, fingers the rich fabric, tries it on, feels that familiar adrenaline rush.

"This is fabulous," she says. "If you like, we'll send it to you," responds the designer.

"I advise the designer not to send a bill," says publicist Kevin Krier, who has worked for some of fashion's biggest names. Sometimes, a top fashion publicist confirms, "there is an unspoken agreement that an editor will order something wholesale and then never see a bill."

A former fashion-magazine editor wistfully recalls the loot that poured into her office during the Christmas season. "We got lovely things," she says. "Lots of stuff. Leather bags, champagne, a traveling pouch, scarves, cashmere sweaters. A truck had to come to my house twice to deliver it all." This woman figures that within a month she pulled in some 200 gifts. Retail value: around $25,000.

When upstart Tse Cashmere opened a Madison Avenue boutique in November, some 250 members of the fashion press showed up to pay their respects to a prospective new advertiser. The editors gossiped, sipped their drinks and looked each other up and down in that New York fashion-business way. A good time was had by all. When they left, most of them carried a small memento from Tse: a $160 cashmere sweater, one per partygoer.

Who can say no to such offers?

No hard, cold cash changes hands in these transactions, but they are nevertheless transactions. It may be true, as fashion critic Michael Gross says, that "fashion journalism is an oxymoron.'' Still, a basic assumption is made by readers of these service magazines-namely, that the editorial judgments reflected in their pages are not made by people accustomed to receiving gratuities from designers. But here's how it really works: "It's very important to the designers to have editors wear their clothes," explains retailing consultant Vicky Ross in a classic bit of understatement. It cuts the other way too: the fashion magazines need to keep the designers happy -- which they do by featuring the designers' work in splashy editorial spreads. In a good month, the designers will reciprocate with advertising pages.

There has always been an intimacy between powerful editors and their favorite powerful designers: legendary Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland with Hubert de Givenchy and Halston, the quid with the quo. But the magazine recession of the early 1990s, which intensified the scramble for ad pages everywhere, made the cozy relationships even cozier. During that period, design companies amassed even more advertising clout. The economic pressure has eased lately-for instance, ad pages through May are up 16% for Elle and 9% for Glamour over last year. Still, the compromises remain.