W: The Designing Life
By the staff of W
Edited by Lois Perschetz
Fairchild Publictions/Clarkson Potter, 224 pages, 1987
If one were to take episodes of the old television series, Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous, mix it with a dash of those Habits of Highly Successful People books and make it all about fashion, you would have W: The Designing Life.
W magazine in the 1980s was not the perfectly bound consumer glossy we know today. It was the slightly flashier cousin of the trade publication Women’s Wear Daily (WWD). It was oversize, printed on a coloured newsprint with a glossy coating. It was like a broadsheet newspaper, folded horizontally, the headlines above the fold.
It was a strange hybrid of trade and consumer magazine — not quite insidery enough to be trade (and you wouldn’t find articles about industry-only interests like textile mills and profiles of big behind-the-fashion-scene players), and a little too cliquey to be a strictly consumer publication. It was, however, perfect for fashion-obsessed readers like me, for whom no little bite of minutiae was ever too small. It gave readers a sense of being in the know, even when they were thousands of miles from any true fashion capital.
The Designing Life captures much of that feeling of W’s early days. It’s packed with carefully chosen colour runway, look book and editorial photos that give readers an authentic look at each featured designer’s work in the decade leading up to the book’s publication in 1987. Profiles accompany the sections, and strive to give insight into both the work process and often lavish lifestyle of the leaders of the ’80s fashion pack.
There’s Valentino on his yacht and Oscar de la Renta and his stable of horses. There’s Yves Saint Laurent’s Marrakech and Karl Lagerfeld at home in his fancy pajamas. It’s all — in a word (well, two) — pretty fabulous. And who would want or expect anything less?
The Designing Life is dated, for sure, but not in such a bad way. It brings back the flashy ’80s and offers glimpses into fashion’s rarefied, jet-set world that many of us remember aspiring to and admiring all those years ago, when designers seemed untouchable and celebrity in almost all cases required actual talent.
