NEW YORK — Bernadine Morris said she has no use for what she calls “destructive journalism.”
Although the New York Times fashion reporter, who will receive The Fashion Group International’s Superstar award Thursday night, has written a negative word here and there, that’s not the main point of her job.
“My reader is the lady in Larchmont, for example, who’s drinking her coffee. She’s going to think what I write about is ridiculous no matter what, so my job is to explain why it is important,” she said.
Morris, who’s been doing her thing at the Times since 1963, said she saves her unfavorable words for special occasions.
“If a collection comes over from Europe, and it’s very pretentious and costs millions of dollars to show, and there’s no point to it, then I can be mean,” she said. “But if a little man in a showroom shows me 10 dresses and there’s something wrong with two or three of them, well, I’m not going to give that a bad review. An editor once said to me that if someone has been in business for a long time, they probably have a customer that likes them. So I try to look at them as if I am that customer.”
And while she often refers to Europe and European designers in conversation, her starting point, she said, is American sportswear. Gesturing to her own simple, yellow silk pantsuit and white cotton T-shirt, she said, “I don’t think clothes should be too elaborate or fussy.”
But she’s not against fashion that makes a bold statement, either. In fact, one of her current concerns is a lack of fashion leadership in the industry.
“Fashion, at this point, is very difficult to do,” she said. “It’s going in so many directions. There’s no one or two leaders. This splintering is evident in stores, in magazines and from designers.
“For one example, there’s the whole area of athletic clothes being used for sportswear. I think Donna Karan did that very well in her DKNY line, although it’s gone far beyond that.
“Then there’s The Gap and Banana Republic, which I think are great, but that’s another direction. And the stores aren’t providing direction in the way they used to. It used to be that if you were kind of funky and fashionable, you went to Bloomingdale’s; if you were ultrachic and a size six, you went to Bendel’s. I have lots of friends who aren’t in the fashion industry. They care about how they look, but they haven’t a clue about how to do it. And I think magazines are more fun to look at now than they have ever been, but they are no help.
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“One problem is there is so little direction for the typical woman. There’s so little history. That’s why, I think, she likes a Chanel or an Armani suit; she knows it’s OK.
“In earlier times, rules were clearer. For example, during the Sixties, there was Courrèges, which was basically a sleeveless shift dress with a coat or a jacket over it. Now, people were really happy with those clothes. That was a stable thing when fashion was falling apart in the Sixties and early Seventies.”
Morris refers to the Seventies as “a sort of yuck time for fashion,” which, she said, thankfully came to a close with Yves Saint Laurent’s “Rich Russian” show in 1976. Morris’s review of that show ended up on the front page of the Times and brought her considerable attention.
“I wrote a rather long story, because I felt the collection merited a long story, and sent it off,” she said. “Then I went out to dinner and saw some friends, and got back to the office around midnight. I got a call from the editor saying it was going on page one. That got a lot of notice.
“At that time, couture was very intimidated by ready-to-wear, and the couture shows had a sort of leftover look. Then Saint Laurent came along with this collection, which was very rich and luxurious and had been meticulously researched and beautifully put together. I wrote about it not so much because I felt that fashion had been forgotten, but because it had been a long time since a designer had paid so much attention to fashion.
“In the Eighties, Karl went to Chanel, and there was this young boy named Christian Lacroix at Patou. And Versace came up from Italy. These things gave a whole new energy to the couture, and a new reason to pay attention.
“Couture was once the whole story; the guy down the hall copied what happened in couture,” said Morris. “Look at the Lacroix pouf; it influenced everyone. Now there’s no direction. This period is like the Sixties; how it will work out, no one knows.”
But Morris will be there to write about it, at least for a while longer. Even though writing about fashion wasn’t her first career choice, it has been her only career since she graduated from Hunter College with a degree in journalism and economics. She thought, she said, she might be a foreign correspondent.
“Which I became, of a sort,” she admitted.
Her first post, albeit brief, set the course for the rest of her career. Despite a total ignorance of the subject, she bluffed her way into a job writing about millinery for a weekly trade paper, which lasted a little over a month. That job led to WWD, where she covered ready-to-wear, millinery, shoes and corsets, as well as writing fashion features.
When Carrie Donovan moved over to Vogue in 1963, Morris took over her spot at the paper. At first, she said, she was covering all aspects of what was called women’s news — “fashion, food, furniture and family, as it was then called,” she said.
Eventually, Morris began to write exclusively about fashion, traveling to Europe four times a year to cover the couture and ready-to-wear shows as well as the American designer scene. It wasn’t exactly the journalism she’d trained for, but gradually she developed a news style for fashion coverage.
“I looked back to my journalism training, which was to lead with the most important thing,” she said. “It could be short full skirts, so you lead with the person who is doing it the best, and then fit in as much as you can.”
Morris said she reads art history criticism and sports writing to keep her own writing in shape; the first helps her with description and the second with pacing.
“I read about the sports I’m interested in, such as tennis or basketball, and that stuff really moves. I’m amazed at how the writers find ways to put a different perspective on their stories every single day. It’s full of spice,” she said.