Low-key editor is a force in fashion

With reviews and provocative columns, Bridget Foley, the executive editor of Women's Wear Daily, reports from fashion's front lines. Her pronouncements carry the sort of weight that makes WWD a must-read among both industry leaders and fashion hopefuls.

But Ms. Foley wears her authority lightly, having mostly deflected the kind of attention that comes with the turf. She keeps her personal life private, and is perhaps the most powerful voice in fashion without a public face.

"Powerful? I'm not sure I think in those terms," Ms. Foley mused. "I'm writing about an industry. It's about fashion. It's not about me."

Ms. Foley arrived at WWD in the mid-1980s when she was in her 20s. The office environment was at once intimidating and intoxicating. She kept her head down, but made the most of her position as junior market editor to champion emerging talent, designers like Helmut Lang and Marc Jacobs.

Ms. Foley has also closely chronicled the career of Michael Kors. "She is one of but a handful of writers who has watched my career from its infancy," Mr. Kors said. Her support, he added, "let retailers know about me before I had fashion shows."

Ms. Foley nurtured a love of fashion from the time she was in elementary school in Troy, in upstate New York.

Ms. Foley thinks of herself as a kind of fashion cheerleader. "What designers do is so hard," she said. "Fashion is the only discipline where there is no creative down time."

Touches of the spiky and contrarian are detectable in her columns. In January, she castigated Michelle Obama for behaving like a red-carpet prima donna, keeping her public and more than a dozen designers in suspense about what she would wear to the inauguration.

"Mrs. Obama isn't an indulged starlet primping for the Oscars," Ms. Foley chided, "nor should she behave like one."

Critics say Ms. Foley can be obstinate. But her supporters say her ideas are conditioned by an ingrained sense of fairness.

"She has a very strong moral compass," said Gina Sanders, the chief executive of Fairchild Fashion Media, which publishes Women's Wear Daily.

Divorced in the early 1990s, Ms. Foley has never remarried, raising her daughter, Grainne, now 27, on her own. Grainne is an assistant store manager for Mr. Jacobs, and some in the business have suggested that Ms. Foley has been unduly influenced by her longtime friendship with the designer.

Any given day might find Ms. Foley selecting page-one images in daily meetings with her fashion staff, interviewing the likes of Karl Lagerfeld and Mr. Jacobs at industry summits, or courting sources over late-night dinners.

"For a designer who wants to be taken seriously," said Adrien Field, who presented his debut collection in New York in February, "a review from WWD is a stamp of accreditation that you can take with you into sales meetings and investor pitches."

Yet insiders lament that Ms. Foley's voice (and by extension that of WWD itself) often lacks bite. Today, consumer opinion is driven by a cacophony of voices on blogs and Web sites, on television shows and in the fashion glossies - a far cry from the time when WWD was the dominant force in the industry.

Ms. Foley is, in Mr. Field's view, that rare fashion editor who remains above the fray, credible, knowledgeable and untainted by commercial interests.

Ms. Foley might blush at that assessment. She herself sums up her merits in a tidy phrase.

"I get things done," she said.

The New York Times