Word: midi
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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...
...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...
...news stories to back their hunches, ridiculed prominent women with consummate cattiness and indulged their personal likes and dislikes in puffs and snubs. But no Women's Wear vendetta, however vicious, has ever raised a controversy that can compare with Fairchild's and WWD's fervent espousal of the midi...
Designers, manufacturers and retailers are caught in a dilemma as fierce as that of the nation's women: between minis that may be out of date and midis that may not sell. The squeeze hurts, and those who are not directly in John Fairchild's line of fire are not afraid to yell. S. Irene Johns, president of the Association of Buying Offices, an organization that represents 25,500 stores and specialty shops across the country, insists that "by starting to push the midi last winter, Women's Wear killed not only the fall season for manufacturers but the spring...
...Longuette? Although the term midi has now come to mean anything from below the knee to the ankle, it still meant mid-calf at the beginning of 1970. So Fairchild coined the word Longuette to launch his midi juggernaut last January. The paper's Paris bureau complained that there was no such word, but Fairchild knew better. He mailed them a page from his Cassell's French-English dictionary, where he had found it. WWD's front-page kickoff story began: "The word longuette means, in French, 'longish, somewhat long, pretty long, too long.' That just about sums...