A Grande Dame Departs

The world of high fashion has been hit hard by recession and changing lifestyles, and nowhere harder than at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, the glossy magazines that glorify it. Advertising pages this year are down alarmingly from 1970 in both--24% at Vogue, 26.5% at Bazaar. Clothes no longer necessarily make the woman, and the era of grande dame editors as arbiters of fashion has ended. It closed last week with the resignation of Nancy White as editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar after 14 years of trying to shape tastes for the with-it and the well-to-do.

The wife of former FORTUNE Publisher Ralph D. Paine Jr., Nancy White, 55, leaves Bazaar six months after her longtime rival Diana Vreeland, 71, stepped down as editor of Vogue. More significantly, her resignation came less than four months after James Brady, 43, former publisher of the gossipy, irreverent Women's Wear Daily, moved in as Bazaar's publisher and editorial director. Intense and facile, Brady brought some of the high-pressure salesmanship of Seventh Avenue to the magazine's more leisurely East Side establishment and. in the words of one Bazaar staffer, "gave everyone an instant identity crisis."

New Soul. Not even Nancy White was immune, for Brady, as her boss, took an active, daily interest in Bazaar. Nonetheless, both insisted last week that the parting was genuinely sorrowful. "I think he's nifty," said Nancy of Brady, who returned the compliment in a memo to the staff: "She's been the soul and sinew of Bazaar." From now on, though, the soul will be solely Brady's.

Under Miss White, Bazaar emphasized the practical and the relevant, while Vogue was more fanciful and futuristic. Bazaar was first to give its cachet to such formerly far-out items as bikinis and boots for women. It shattered taboos with taste, for example running a full-page picture of a female nude in 1962--Richard Avedon's portrait of Socialite-Model Christina Paolozzi. But Brady intends to take Bazaar a lot further. "I have one mandate: to make the magazine more exciting," he says. "It's been essentially dull for the last several years. All our covers looked alike. They were pictures of pretty girls saying nothing." November's cover, which he chose, was Raquel Welch ("At least she's alive and well and known," says Brady), while January's will feature a college girl in blue jeans wearing a political campaign button.

Like all others in the future, the January issue will have a central theme --in this case, politics--within an editorial mix of about fifty-fifty fashion and non-fashion. There will be contributions from Spiro Agnew, George Wallace, Edmund Muskie, George Mc-Govern and Ted Kennedy, among others. Fashions will be displayed against political backdrops. In February, the background will be Manhattan and the issue theme "In Defense of New York," highlighting an interview with John Lindsay on what he doesn't like about the New York Times.

Buyable Stuff. Bazaar's future fashion coverage will be photographed against action backgrounds rather than white studio walls because Brady feels that clothes should be shown in settings where they are likely to be worn. Three-quarters of the fashion space will be devoted to what Brady calls "wearable, buyable stuff," and the rest to fashions of the future, "imaginative and creative, something you ought to trip on and think about." Fiction and poetry are being dropped.

Brady, perhaps reflecting his nearly 18 years with Women's Wear Daily, wants the new Bazaar to contain a little bit of gossip. "People want to read about people," he says. "Not pillow talk or backbiting, but what's going on. A little elegant muckraking is a good thing. In the '70s, there ought to be a different way to do a fashion magazine."

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