'It's Ridiculous'

If there is anything calculated to make a good reporter's blood boil, it is that growing journalistic bugbear, the hold-for-release story. Although there is a legitimate use for the hold-for-release, as with, for example, advance copies of speeches, more often it is a device used by pressagent types anxious for simultaneous nationwide news splashes. Government agencies are prime offenders, and the automobile industry has virtually canonized the hold-for-release. But now and again, some brave journalistic spirit dares defy the restrictions--as last week did the New York Times and its Women's Page Editor Elizabeth Penrose Howkins.

Since 1943, the New York Couture Group Inc., a promotion outfit for 36 top U.S. women's wear manufacturers, has operated under a system of releasing the news of women's fashions to the entire press at the same time--a procedure that protects out-of-town newspapers against premature release of fashion stories by papers in New York, where the big fashion shows are held. Every summer the group conducts a "press week," with showings of the next fall and winter fashions; again, in the winter, the styles for the following spring and summer are trotted out. It is against the rules for anyone to preview the fashions before the press-week release dates.

In 1955, the Herald Tribune's Women's Feature Editor Eugenia Sheppard sparked a short-lived rebellion by breaking a fashion story before press week. An emergency luncheon meeting of fashion editors and Couture Group representatives was held at "21," and the revolt ended after what Columnist Sheppard still recalls as "the time I was served up on toast at 21.'"

This year the Times decided it had had enough: it ran a story about this fall's fashions long before the press-week release date. Pink with rage, the Couture Group sent "pledge cards" to editors, asking them to observe the release rules. When the Times refused to sign, it was barred from the group's style shows. Unperturbed, Elizabeth Howkins tapped private sources, last week ran a story about next spring's styles (heavy on geometric designs, skirts like "deflated melons"). "It's ridiculous," said Editor Howkins, "to observe such release rules." To that, newsmen in other fields could only say amen.

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