On a Monday night in June, outside Lincoln Center at the annual awards ceremony of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, red-carpet photographers hoot and kvetch. Across the street, gasping amateurs snap the arrivals of the international fashion set with their phones and shoot images through the ether. Inside Alice Tully Hall, though—where signs encourage the audience to blog and tweet via Wi-Fi—Hilary Alexander is alert in her aisle seat, nervously squeezing a spiral-bound pad and eyeing her notes through narrow glasses. She has a speech to give.
Alexander, the outgoing fashion director of London’s Daily Telegraph, is here to collect an honor marking the end of a quarter century at the UK’s best-selling broadsheet. “Hilary’s retirement is definitely a sign that the great pillars of 20th-century fashion are coming down,” says Suzy Menkes, Alexander’s counterpart at the International Herald Tribune. Alexander’s hustle is legendary—Menkes and nearly everyone else I speak with mentions her sprinting to shows, weaving through crowds with sharp questions at the ready.
Alexander would prefer not to have to quit now, just as the craft of fashion criticism is picking up unprecedented digital momentum. But as required by British pension law, she is leaving her full-time job 65 years after being born in New Zealand—under the sign of Christian Dior, you might say. That same year (1946), Dior was establishing his house in Paris and daydreaming of the coming spring’s collection. The New Look, as Vogue editor Bettina Ballard wrote, was a revolution in both design and display: “The first girl came out, stepping fast, switching with a provocative swinging movement, whirling in the close-packed room, knocking over ashtrays with the strong flare of her pleated skirt.” Of course, that was an intimate affair in the designer’s showroom, and there were restrictions on the publication of journalists’ sketches. Today, with many top designers live-streaming their shows, the runway is as accessible as your smartphone, the showroom as democratic as the Web.
The prize Alexander is receiving is named for Eugenia Sheppard, the syndicated columnist, who, in Andy Warhol’s words, “invented fashion and gossip together” in the Fifties and Sixties. Formerly recognizing excellence in “fashion journalism,” it was recast this year as “the media award,” which alludes to fashion journalism’s shifting landscape, even as it raises a tricky question: Will the brave new mediaverse produce any pundits of Alexander’s stature?
A month earlier, Alexander hurries into the restaurant Pastis, in New York’s Meatpacking District, where she bumps into Dutch design duo Viktor & Rolf—whose most recent show she had described, in her characteristic tight style, as a “forbidding vision of womanhood.” Kiss, kiss; kiss, kiss. Once she takes her seat, however, she confesses to me: “I can never remember which one’s Viktor and which one’s Rolf.”
