SUPERCHIC

As easy to slip through as the BP (Brady's own coinage during his glory days at WWD) might last year's Courreges -- and as discardable. The author along with a Fairchild scion took over that family's flagship paper Women's Wear Daily back in the early '60's, changed its name to the zippier WWD and its character from the gray eminence of the soft goods trade to a paper-azzi of the rich and famous. And they did it with such panache and dinque (wackiness, another favorite house word) that the daily achieved an influence far beyond its 85,000 circulation as the editorial duo stepped up coverage of Jackie O. ""Her Elegance"" and Gloria Guinness ""Glorissima"" and all the other folk who lunch at La Grenouille (it was later to become something of a Hearst legend that Brady the year he ran Harper's Bazaar for them thought nothing of submitting $2500 expense accounts for his dejeuner). One can't help wondering what WWD's other readership thought about it all -- that gang down in the Seventh Avenue garment district who only wanted to know what domestic worsted would go for next season.