Among the events listed in the Fashion Calendar of March 3, 1941, are a half-dozen runway shows at now bygone department stores, and the wedding, at Hampshire House, of Gogo Schiaparelli, the daughter of the designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and Robert Lawrence Berenson, a vice president of the Grace Line shipping fleet. (The bride’s trousseau, it was noted, was being copied by the apparel manufacturer Horwitz & Duberman to be sold exclusively at Bonwit Teller.)
LITTLE RED BOOK It has kept the show dates straight for some 60 years.
Among those listed in the issue of Sept. 3, 2007, are 257 fashion shows, including one for designs inspired by Snoopy, the “Peanuts” dog, and sponsored by MetLife, the insurance company.
Times and fashions have changed. Ruth Finley, the publisher of the Fashion Calendar, has not.
She has not changed her formula of printing tightly spaced listings over dozens of pages so that the thousands of players who attend New York fashion shows know what is taking place when, and where. Or, at least, she had not changed the formula until this summer, when Ms. Finley, now 87, capitulated to the demands of industry readers and published the Fashion Calendar online.
“I was avoiding it for a while,” Ms. Finley confessed with a girlish laugh, sitting in her East 85th Street apartment, where the phone, which is connected to her office on East 87th Street, kept ringing with calls from designers wanting to know what time they could have a show.
Actually, few people are more aware of the history of New York Fashion Week than Ms. Finley, who has recorded the showings of American designers for decades: Hattie Carnegie and Norman Norell in the ’40s; Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta in the ’50s; Halston and Stephen Burrows in the ’60s; Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren in the ’70s. Pity the poor designers who do not heed Ms. Finley’s advice when choosing the time and place for their shows to avoid a conflict with someone else.
“She’s the only constant in the industry,” said Donna Karan. “God bless anyone who can keep this industry together.”
As a journalism student at Simmons College in Boston, Ms. Finley came to New York one summer to visit family friends, two fashion writers who were complaining that Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman had invited them to events at the same time.
“They were very upset,” Ms. Finley recalled. “That gave me the idea.”
She set herself up in a $55-a-month, bedbug-ridden apartment at 6 West 52nd Street (ELdorado5-3693), across the street from “21.” One of her first typists, who came every Tuesday night to compile the calendar on blue mimeograph paper, was an 18-year-old named Doris Roberts, now better known as Raymond’s mother on “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Ms. Roberts’s family had a stenography agency in Times Square and made copies for Ms. Finley.
“It was tough at the beginning,” Ms. Finley said. “Norman Norell, who used to do an evening show that was black tie — that’s before your time, wasn’t it? — he decided he didn’t have to clear it with us, and then the show ran into a very big charity event that took away all his ladies.
“After that, he called me personally every season,” she said. “He wouldn’t let his secretary call me because he realized it was too important.”
Today Ms. Finley fields an average of 50 phone calls a day from designers checking the calendar for potential conflicts. She refused to say how many people subscribe to the biweekly publication, which charges $425 a year. But the stapled calendars are a common sight in designer showrooms, recognizable by the red covers that show a sketch of a much younger Ms. Finley answering a telephone that has a cord and a rotary dial.
“We always kept the cover a bright color because people’s desks were so messy,” she said. “This way, they could find it.”
Ms. Finley, who has never really had a competitor, remains sharp as a stiletto. She said she continues to publish the calendar because it makes her feel needed. Her husband, Irving Lein, a clothing manufacturer on Seventh Avenue, died in 1959. Ms. Finley raised their three sons alone and never remarried. Her youngest, Larry Lein, is helping with the transition of the Fashion Calendar to the Web.
As the office phone rang again, and her cellphone jingled, you might think that Ms. Finley was the most connected person in the business.
“Oh, I love working with people, I really do,” she said.
In July, Ms. Finley was injured in a serious car accident, on a Friday. She was back in the office on Saturday. “I just thought it was whiplash,” she said.
Asked about retirement, she said, “I plan to keep publishing this for another 15 years.”
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