CONTRIBUTORS
Aside from keeping the daily rolling, managing editor Dianne Pogoda put together the Portrait Gallery of notable quotes and interviews. “There’s such an array of personalities, it was difficult to choose who made the cut,” she said. “Of course, there is our specialty, the fashion profiles, but just when you’re amazed to see a six-page opus on Katharine Hepburn or a visit with Fiorello LaGuardia, up pops a riot from Mae West. These have really given the paper its star quality.”
“As a reporter, Seventh Avenue was my beat, and as a senior editor it continues to be my domain,” said Arthur Friedman, whose career clips include covering the 1992 Gambino trucking trial and getting the notoriously combative Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to sit for an interview. “I also happen to have a passion for history, so writing the section on the history of Seventh Avenue was a joy more than a chore.”
“I don’t even want to count the number of First Ladies whose tenures I’ve watched from this desk,” said associate fashion editor Bobbi Queen, whose close encounter with one is chronicled at left. Queen researched and wrote about WWD’s coverage of the White House through the years. “But the most fun are our search-and-destroy missions, launched to uncover the inaugural fashion after each presidential election. A sober reminder that even when it comes to politics, only fashion matters.”
“History and the past is something that everyone seems to have lost touch with,” said associate editor Lorna Koski, who went from hobble skirt to miniskirt in her look at some of fashion’s most definitive moments. “Recycling is so integral to fashion, and to some extent it’s inevitable. I don’t think we’re ever going to reach the point that designers thought we would in the Sixties, where we’re all wearing white uniforms and eating food out of tubes.”
Selecting just a few of the spectacular drawings done by legendary illustrators like Kenneth Paul Block and Steven Stipelman wasn’t easy for art director Andrew Flynn, but it was a labor of love nonetheless. Flynn managed to finish that feature while simultaneously wading through the teetering piles of flaking newspapers and crackling microfilm that researchers regularly left on his desk. “I might not say this during the final crunch,” Flynn admitted, “but I really do like these projects.”
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“I kept saying, ‘ad astra per aspera’ — to the stars and beyond!,” said Steven Torres, who cheerfully spent hours in front of a creaky microfilm machine reading hundreds of pages of early WWDs, uncovering gems like the first mention of Coco Chanel in 1913. And despite the eyestrain, Torres said he came away from the project inspired. “I discovered the true foundations of the excellence of fashion journalism.”
“Digging into volumes of fragile books and hundreds of microfilm rolls, I discovered that I’m still a little geek at heart,” said sportswear market editor Antonia Sardone, who filled dozens of manila folders with fascinating tidbits from her research into WWD’s Sixties. “What I found most fascinating about the decade was not only the inspiring fashion, but how WWD covered political and social events, like the first man on the moon.”
“Researching the Seventies, it soon became apparent that the libertinism of the decade extended to journalism in general and WWD in particular,” said market editor Peter Braunstein, who also wrote much of the copy for the Nineties. “From Mort Sheinman’s upbeat review of Deep Throat to Halston’s uncensored pronouncements, the paper was really all about pushing boundaries.”
“I went to Catholic school, so good research habits are ingrained,” said associate fashion features editor Nandini D’Souza, who researched and wrote about the early Thirties. “Between FDR, the Nazis and the Great Depression, the early Thirties is a goldmine of news, particularly because it’s not just about fashion.”
Reading through WWD’s extensive reporting from European hot spots like Berlin, Vienna and Paris during the late Thirties was “eerie,” said David Grant Caplan, who normally writes about denim and textiles. “It was like rereading the early chapters of a book where you know the ending.” Caplan also synopsized the late Sixties.