Was that low-key look a choice? Eyeing her front-row peers, some wildly flamboyant by contrast, Ms. Foley waved off the question. “I don’t want to be quoted in this context,” she said.
Apart from the fashion reviews and provocative columns she writes for Women’s Wear Daily, where she has been executive editor for nearly a decade, Ms. Foley rarely comments in any context. She doesn’t trade snarky quips with her colleagues, shies away from the ubiquitous cameras, and her expression, as the first models saunter down the runway, is as hard to decode as a tablet of runes.
Yet her opinions and those of her editors are scrutinized intently. Ms. Foley’s reports from fashion’s front lines, her coverage of major collections in New York and abroad, and, perhaps even more, her pronouncements on the state of the industry carry the sort of weight that makes WWD a must-read among both industry heavyweights and fashion strivers. At a moment when any fashion-fixated high school sophomore with an iPad may feel compelled to weigh in on the state of the industry, WWD, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2010, has hung on to its niche as the organ that is to fashion what Variety is to entertainment or Billboard is to the music world — the garment trade’s paper of record.
It is “the go-to source,” said Robert Burke, a former executive at Bergdorf Goodman and now a consultant on luxury brands, “one that today can still make an enormous impact, positively or negatively, in its coverage.”
Yet Ms. Foley, who arrived at the paper in the mid-1980s, when she was in her early 20s, wears her authority lightly, having over the years mostly deflected the kind of attention that comes with the turf. In a climate that rewards ambition and strenuous self-promotion, she chooses, perversely, to keep her personal life under wraps, remaining to all but a handful of insiders elusive, eccentric, even mysterious — perhaps the most powerful voice in fashion without a public face.
“Powerful? I’m not sure I think in those terms,” Ms. Foley mused the other day between sips of iced tea at Patroon, a clubby Midtown steakhouse just a skip from her office. Leaning forward for emphasis, she conceded, at last, that the power to praise or to hurt a subject is a weighty responsibility. “I’m writing about an industry,” she said, ignoring her salad in her urgency to make her point. “It’s about fashion. It’s not about me.”
Even her look is self-effacing. For the interview, Ms. Foley wore a charcoal-tinted Lanvin coat with a Dries Van Noten skirt, each obviously costly yet so subdued as to recede into the inky leather of the banquette where she sat.
“Bridget is not someone who needs to be in the limelight,” said Mr. Burke, who got to know Ms. Foley during his tenure in the 2000s as Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion director. “She isn’t in the front row to be seen. She’s there to see what she can see. For her, it’s about getting the story.”
Ms. Foley would not have it any other way, and probably could not even if she wanted to. She has been schooled, after all, in the world of John Fairchild, the genteel tyrant who presided over WWD until his retirement in 1997 at age 70. She arrived as a rookie reporter from California Apparel News, where she covered the West Coast garment trade, when WWD was at the apex of its influence. In those heady days, a raised eyebrow from Mr. Fairchild could prove the making, or undoing, of a designer and the socially prominent women that designer dressed.
To commit a breach of loyalty was to risk exile to fashion Siberia, as a roster that included Geoffrey Beene, Pauline Trigère and the society belle Nan Kempner could attest. The same unwavering allegiance was expected from reporters, over whom Mr. Fairchild hovered from time to time as they clacked on their manual typewriters, straining to channel their boss’s thoughts and whims.
“A culture like that was not self-promotional,” said Ed Nardoza, who became WWD’s editor in chief in 1991 and to whom Ms. Foley reports. “We were very much old-school in that regard.” Editors and reporters, Mr. Nardoza recalled, learned quickly that their opinions were of little consequence against those of John Fairchild and the paper he ran. (In fact, all reviews, including those written by Ms. Foley, carry no bylines, as if to reinforce the institutional power of the mother ship.)
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/fashion/bridget-foley-lives-in-the-seat-of-power.html?partner=rss&emc=rss