Day Four of Favorite Fashion Editors: Marian Christy
One of the most significant fashion reporters of the 1960s and early 1970s was Marian Christy. She started at the Boston Globe in April 1965 and her work was later picked up by the syndicate U.P.I. Her columns then ran in 104 different newspapers. She won Penney-Missouri Awards in 1966, 1968 and 1970. That is Christy sitting in the chair below at a Penney-Missouri Award ceremony. Bobbi McCallum is the Seattle women’s page journalist standing in the lace pantsuit.
Christy took a progressive, sociological approach to fashion – rather than writing for advertisers.
For example, she described the see-through blouse from a late-1960s Saint Laurent fashion show: “Haute couture is a laboratory for new ideas. Saint Laurent was not advocating public near-nudity. It was poetic exaggeration to shock the eyes. Once you see the extreme overstatements, watered-down versions seem reasonable and palatable. This was the late sixties and Saint Laurent seemed to be suggesting that women’s bodied should be unharnessed.”
In 1979, she was basically forced out of fashion reporting because of complaints from two Boston fashion retailers. They wanted her to promote what was in the department stores that was really more about advertising. She was called into her editor’s office and told she had a choice. She could begin pandering to the stores or not be a fashion reporter anymore. She left her beat to focus on interviews with celebrities instead. That story is in her book, Invasions of Privacy
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