John Fairchild, the witty and irascible publisher and editor who transformed his family’s fusty trade publication, Women’s Wear Daily, into the lively bible of the fashion industry, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
For more than three decades, from 1960 to 1997, Mr. Fairchild was one of the most powerful, and mercurial, people in the fashion business. From his perch atop Women’s Wear Daily — and later at W magazine, which he founded — he helped make kings out of designers like Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent and Bill Blass and whacked down those who did not meet his exacting standards.
And before Gawker and Spy magazine and Page Six in The New York Post became must-reads, Mr. Fairchild was already encamped at the intersection of fashion, celebrity and high society, turning socialites like C. Z. Guest, Mercedes Bass and Pat Buckley into personalities, stationing photographers outside fancy restaurants as they came and went.
Everyone who crossed his path knew to beware of the newspaper’s saucy headlines and withering asides in capital letters. He even gave designer collections letter grades, as if Carolina Herrera and Donna Karan were back in high school.
“Everybody got graded,” Ms. Herrera said on Friday.
Calvin Klein, another loyal subscriber, said, “He made WWD into a paper that the media as well as socials and celebrities and everyone else read to find out what was going on.”
Not that Mr. Fairchild liked to take credit for mussing the industry’s hair and bruising feelings. “On the whole, I think the fashion press’s power — and WWD’s in particular — is greatly overrated,” he wrote in his 1989 memoir, “Chic Savages.” “We don’t make or break a designer. Any designer who is good gets ahead. We write what the buyers are saying.”
John Burr Fairchild was born in Newark on March 6, 1927, and grew up in Glen Ridge, N.J. His paternal grandfather, E. W. Fairchild, the son of a Dutch Reform minister, had begun WWD in 1910 to cover the garment business. Meticulous to a fault, it was also famously dull.
From E. W., the family business, which includes other, smaller trade publications, passed on to John’s father, Louis.
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As a teenager in the 1940s, John went to Kent, the Connecticut boarding school, and spent his vacations working in the family’s Manhattan offices as an errand boy. He went to Princeton University, married Jill Lipsky, worked briefly in retail and then moved to WWD, taking over the Paris bureau in 1955.
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Mr. Fairchild at a fashion show in an undated picture.CreditBob Peterson/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
There he made enemies by doing things like calling the designers Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy the “Dullsville Boys” in print and branding their collections “Flop art.”
At one point he was banned from Balenciaga’s shows. Undeterred, he hired a photographer to shoot a show with a Telephoto lens from a rooftop across the street. The view was perfect, until one of Balenciaga’s minions closed the blinds.
Mr. Fairchild returned to New York in 1960, took over as WWD’s publisher and set about making changes. “Fashion is a bunch of blah blah,” he liked to say. What interested him were personalities, so he replaced the coverage of hemlines and fabrics with society photos and gossip.
“The business he inherited was very dull, and he turned it all around,” said Patrick McCarthy, Mr. Fairchild’s successor at both WWD and W, which was later sold to Condé Nast. “He realized that printing cotton prices every day and which buyer was coming from Detroit to New York was not the publication he wanted to run. He was interested in the glamour and the fun and the bitchiness.”
Mr. Fairchild, as he was referred to by everyone in the newsroom — “There was no calling him John,” the writer William Norwich said on Friday — had his favorites: Mr. Saint Laurent, Mr. Blass, Mr. de la Renta, the society hostesses Ms. Buckley and Ms. Guest, and also Jacqueline Kennedy, whom Mr. Fairchild called “Her Elegance.”
Those who fell off his list really fell off. “He was a very creative journalist and publisher, and he was ruthless,” said Bob Colacello, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair who profiled him in the early 1990s in an article titled “Dr. Fair and Mr. Child.”
Kenneth Jay Lane, the jewelry designer, said, “I always avoided becoming too friendly with him because people who did, he would turn against.”
So did the designer Valentino and his partner at the time, Giancarlo Giammetti. In the 1970s they came to New York on a trip, where they were trailed by a WWD reporter, Rosemary Kent. When they barred her from following them on a subsequent vacation, Valentino went from being the “sheikh of chic” to persona non grata.
“For months, Fairchild would run photos of Valentino and Giancarlo at parties with their faces airbrushed out,” Mr. Colacello said. “Their faces would be a gray circle, and beside them would be a caption that said ‘Nan Kempner, Pat Buckley, with Italian Designer.’ ”
“That was typical,” said James Fallon, WWD’s current editor.
Geoffrey Beene and Mr. Fairchild got into a feud in the early 1980s. According to Fairchild loyalists, Mr. Beene became incensed when WWD decided to send a young, unseasoned reporter to cover his collection. According to Beene loyalists, Mr. Fairchild was retaliating against Mr. Beene for giving an exclusive on one of his houses to Architectural Digest. Fifteen years later, the bitterness remained. By then, as Mr. Fairchild told The New York Observer, “I don’t even know what it is about anymore.”
As a journalist Mr. Fairchild had a keen eye for talent. Among those who worked for him early in their careers were the photographers Steven Meisel and The New York Times’s Bill Cunningham; the Times theater critic Ben Brantley; the Times fashion critic Amy M. Spindler (who died in 2004); and the editors André Leon Talley and Bonnie Fuller.
By the late 1980s, Mr. Fairchild began to loosen his grip. Mr. McCarthy was reconceiving W as a glossy monthly, and the personalities were changing. “Say whatever you want about women like Gloria Guinness and Babe Paley, but they were interesting,” Mr. McCarthy said, referring to two of the most prominent socialites of the postwar years. “And he realized that at a certain point they didn’t sell the clothes, and that a TV actress of no import did. He didn’t like it.”
In 1997, Mr. Fairchild announced his retirement, though he continued to hound his editors. “He was full of vim and vigor,” and he had been “talkative and had story ideas up until a few weeks ago,” Mr. Fallon said.
Mr. Fairchild is survived by his wife, Jill; his sons John, James and Stephen; his daughter, who is also named Jill; and eight grandchildren.
MILAN — For an industry in the unbreakable slipstream of fashion shows, news of John Fairchild’s death broke slowly. Mr. Fairchild died during fashion week, a fact he might have liked, or at least deemed appropriate. So while the fact was spreading on social media Friday morning New York time, it was late afternoon in Milan, and most of the editors — including Mr. Fairchild’s successors at Women’s Wear Daily — were watching Alessandra Facchinetti’s collection for Tod’s.
“I’m sorry for the news,” said Diego Della Valle, the chairman of Tod’s Group, as the gathered masses made their way out of the show. It was the first he was hearing of Mr. Fairchild’s death. “He was one of the persons that built what you see today in the world, the fashion system,” he mused.
When he met Mr. Fairchild, “I was young, I was nobody at the time,” he said. “I remember him as very kind with me.”
At the following show, Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini — née Philosophy di Alberta Ferretti, who still owns the label but has passed along the reins of design — Ms. Ferretti was shocked and overwhelmed when told of Mr. Fairchild’s death. She begged the duration of the show to compose herself.
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John Fairchild with the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland at a fashion show, in an undated photograph.CreditBob Peterson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
“It is very terrible,” she said afterward, shifting between Italian and English and speaking with the help of a translator. “Una brutta notizia. For me, he is the man who represents a real moment of quality in fashion. He was a person who dedicated his life to fashion.”
She agreed that Mr. Fairchild could be tough. “When we met in New York, I was shocked by this man who was so powerful in fashion, but then we had a beautiful relationship,” she said. “He tried to have some suggestions.” But, she added, “the right suggestions.”
Brian Atwood, the footwear designer who began his career in the studio of Gianni Versace, recalled meeting Mr. Fairchild in the late 1990s, early in his time at the house.
“I always remember, he’d come backstage and chat with Gianni,” he said. “He had such a discerning eye and input on the collection. It was great to watch.”
Asked if Mr. Fairchild ever gave Mr. Versace a hard time about the collection, Mr. Atwood said, “Oh, a little bit. You’re in that position for a reason.”
Laudomia Pucci, the interim chief executive of Emilio Pucci and Mr. Pucci’s daughter, attested to Mr. Fairchild’s particular mixture of kindness and cutting. “He was extremely, extremely nice with my father, whenever he talked to him,” she said. “But at the same time, he had that niceness and then this very dry sense of humor.”
She’d been at drinks at the Four Seasons with a friend when the news reached her. Here in Milan, it has filtered, via word of mouth in addition to published tributes, from person to person among the more senior industry figures who had known Mr. Fairchild, though for many of the younger generation who people the party circuit, he was a remoter figure, a legendary name from another time.
Rosita Missoni, the co-founder and matriarch of the Missoni line, is of the older generation, and had known him for decades. “Before our name had meaning in fashion, it was my bible,” she said of Women’s Wear Daily, speaking by phone straight off a plane from Cape Town, where she had been a guest speaker at the Design Indaba Conference, returning for the Missoni show Sunday evening. “It was the only daily paper in the world at that time — I’m speaking about the ’50s — about fashion.”
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Diego Della Valle, chairman of Tod's Group, said he recalled Mr. Fairchild's kindness.CreditAlberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse
Her stories of Mr. Fairchild hark back to a bygone era, nearly unimaginable today. She remembered Mr. Fairchild sending a Women’s Wear Daily writer and photographer to cover a Missoni family vacation on a tiny Dalmatian island in the late ’60s. During dinner, she said, “We heard them calling, ‘Missoni, Missoni!’ They came out to this little island, just this spot of fishermen. They were sent to see what kind of holiday we were having.”
Later in New York, she and her late husband, Ottavio, were almost turned away from Le Côte Basque, the tony restaurant, because Mr. Missoni was not wearing a jacket or tie. “At the next table was John Fairchild,” Mrs. Missoni said. “He said, ‘This gentleman can teach you how to dress. Please don’t dare to send him out or put on him any kind of tie.’ ”
“We think we are all eternal,” she added sadly. “When I heard that he passed away, I really regret that I lost contact with him, not going to New York frequently. I have a very, very good memory of him.”
Those who had encountered him more recently found him unchanged.
“About two years ago, I saw him at the Ritz,” Donatella Versace, Mr. Versace’s younger sister and since his death the steward of his label, said in a note. “He waved at me and invited me to join him for tea. It was like time had not gone by for him, still the same bright, fun vibrant John Fairchild I always knew. I am so glad I had this moment with him, and now I will treasure it forever.”
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