The bulk of the fashion deputation was made up of buyers and designers. Chief among them was Carmel Snow, the Irish-born editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar and one of the two most powerful women in American fashion journalism. At fifty-two, she was a veteran of transatlantic crossings. A petite woman with an uptilted nose, her white curls tinted anything from a pale blue to a startling violet, Snow was always ready for adventure. Mercurial, charming, and tough, "Bossy," as she was known by her staff, more or less affectionately, would never let an inconvenience like a war keep her from Paris, whose couturiers she revered.
Not making the crossing was Edna Woolman Chase, the sixty-two-year- old editor in chief of Vogue. Like Snow, Chase was small, and she also went gray early. Her favorite fashion period was the late nineteenth century, and she had a way of making everything she wore vaguely reminiscent of that era's trailing draperies and general fussiness. There were many reasons Chase might not have wanted to cross the North Atlantic in January, including the war, the weather, and the sciatica in her shoulder. But what might have tipped the balance in favor of remaining in New York was the knowledge that she'd be stuck on a boat with Carmel Snow for four days. The two women couldn't abide each other. Snow had once been Vogue's fashion editor, hired in 1921 with the expectation that she would be promoted to the top job when Chase retired. But a decade after Snow joined Vogue, Chase was as firmly dug in as ever. She resented Snow's charm and popularity and found constant fault with her work. For her part, Snow felt professionally stifled and chafed at Chase's heavy-handed management style and endless sniping. By 1932, she'd had enough. Although Snow had declared that she would never defect to the competition, when William Randolph Hearst offered her a job at Harper's Bazaar that she knew would shortly lead to the magazine's editorship, she seized the opportunity.
Chase was livid when she heard of Snow's decision. The women's accounts vary, but both agree that Snow broke the news to Chase in her hospital room, where Snow was recovering from the birth of her third daughter. Chase insisted their talk was decorous; Snow described it as a harangue that involved multiple staff members ranged around her bedside, decrying her treachery. The relationship between the two magazines, which had always had a Hatfield-and-McCoy quality, sank to its nadir. Employees of Condé Nast Publications, Vogue's parent company, were instructed to never speak to Snow again, a sentiment they took to heart. In 1957, shortly before Snow's retirement and almost a quarter century after she left Vogue an editor there was asked to assess Snow's considerable contribution to fashion. Her reply was indicative of a grudge that had lost none of its freshness: "To discuss fashion in relation to Mrs. Snow is like writing the history of the United States from the viewpoint of Benedict Arnold."
Snow was right to trust her instincts. Chase did not retire from Vogue until 1952—fifty-seven years after her first day at the magazine in 1895, as an eighteen-year-old assistant in the circulation department. She became editor in chief in 1914, and by 1940 had been in her job long enough to be considered an institution. At the office, she exuded as much warmth as one; in private, she could be affectionate and spontaneous, and had a close relationship with her only child, the actress Ilka Chase. Her public persona, however, was brusque, and her editors knew her to be a master of the devastating comment.
Chase's magazine reached more subscribers than the Bazaar, as everyone called it, and boasted more ads, which was partly a function of its publication schedule—Vogue then came out every two weeks, while Bazaar was a monthly publication, supplemented with an extra issue in each of the fashion-news-heavy months of March and September. Vogue's publisher, Condé Nast, was a bon vivant who loved lavish interiors. Consequently, Vogue's editors worked in a considerably more chichi setting than Bazaar's did. The reception area was lined with faux leather-bound books and staffed by an expensively dressed young heiress who sat behind a Chinese Chippendale desk and directed visitors to wait in a glassed-in conservatory. Bazaar, Snow thought when she arrived, looked like the office of a small-town newspaper, a reflection of its publisher, William Randolph Hearst, who'd begun his career in daily journalism. When Ray Milland, one of the stars of the 1944 film Lady in the Dark, about a fashion editor undergoing psychoanalysis, stopped by to soak up the atmosphere, he thought he was in the wrong place.
But Vogue concerned itself solely with the very wealthy; it was stuck in the exclusive milieu that Diana Vreeland, who had appeared in its pages numerous times as a debutante, described in her memoir: When she was young, she said, very few people had ever even "breathed the pantry air" of the type of woman who wore dresses that appeared in Vogue. Bazaar's readership was equally well-heeled, but the magazine's editors saw to it that they were kept informed about everything from literature to public works. It was an editorial policy summed up in Snow's remark about whom she created the magazine for: well-dressed women with well-dressed minds. Even a Vogue loyalist like Bettina Wilson acknowledged that her boss's vision wasn't as adventurous as Snow's, confessing that she envied "a certain fashion conviction and personal daring in Harper's Bazaar." When Chase did manage to replicate some of Bazaar's allure, the victory could be sour. In the mid-1930s, when she lured away one of Snow's prize illustrators with an exclusive Vogue contract, Snow consoled herself by reflecting that Chase couldn't stand his work.
Between them, Chase and Snow determined what was fashionable for a considerable swath of American women. Although their magazines were mainly read by an affluent, white readership, they exerted their authority in myriad other ways. Simply by giving their approval to specific fashions, they directly influenced what was manufactured and sold. Outside of editing their magazines, they gave radio addresses and speeches to women's clubs and industry groups, further promoting their ideas about what it meant to exercise good taste. They had the ears of the couturiers, the manufacturers, and the retailers. And soon, they would liaise with government officials, too.
