Women’s Wear Daily

Women's Wear Daily

Cover image of Women's Wear Daily, 2016
Type	Weekly print publication, online publication
Format	Magazine
Owner(s)	Penske Media Corporation
Publisher	Paul Jowdy
Editor-in-chief	Edward Nardoza
Founded	July 13, 1910
Circulation	59,189
ISSN	0043-7581
Website	wwd.com

Women's Wear Daily (WWD) is a fashion-industry trade journal sometimes called "the bible of fashion." WWD delivers information and intelligence on changing trends and breaking news in the men and women's fashion, beauty and retail industries with a readership composed largely of retailers, designers, manufacturers, marketers, financiers, media executives, advertising agencies, socialites and trend makers. It is the flagship publication of Fairchild Fashion Media, which is owned by Penske Media Corporation. The publisher of WWD is Paul Jowdy, and its editor-in-chief is Edward Nardoza. The final newsprint edition of WWD was printed on April 24, 2015, and a weekly edition was launched on April 29, 2015.

The journal was founded by Edmund Fairchild on July 13, 1910, as an outgrowth of the menswear journal Daily News Record. The publication quickly acquired a firm standing in the New York clothing industry, due to the influence of its first advertisers, including the Philadelphia and New York Wanamaker's, and an esteemed group of fashion journalists who included Edith Rosenbaum Russell, who served as Women's Wear Daily's first Paris correspondent. Apart from her work for the paper, Rosenbaum was a leading freelance fashion buyer, a pioneering celebrity stylist and a press attaché for the powerful Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture Parisienne.

Though WWD's lesser reporters were sometimes assigned to the last row of couture shows—a sign of the newspaper's highly specialized appeal within the American garment trade—the paper realized greater popular appeal by the late 1950s.John Fairchild, who became the European bureau chief of Fairchild Publications in 1955 and the publisher of WWD in 1960, improved WWD's standing by focusing on the human side of fashion. He turned his newspaper's attention to the social scene of fashion designers and their clients, and helped manufacture a "cult of celebrity" around designers. Fairchild also played hardball to help his circulation. After two couturiers forbade press coverage until one month after buyers had seen their clothes, Fairchild published photos and sketches anyway. He even sent reporters to fashion houses disguised as messengers, or had them observe designers' new styles from windows of buildings opposite fashion houses. "I have learned in fashion to be a little savage," he wrote in his memoir. John Fairchild was publisher of the magazine from 1960 to 1996.