DNR (Daily News Record) - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

Both descriptions the directory kept - the working trade paper and the post-2008 record of its absorption into WWD - are set out on this single page below. There is no official site or shop box for a closed publication; menswear trade coverage continues at WWD.

The history begins in 1890, when Edmund Fairchild used the wealth he had accumulated selling soap to purchase the Chicago Herald Gazette, a newspaper which focused on the men's clothing business. Along with his brother Luis, Fairchild published a mimeographed paper which they called the Daily Trade Record and distributed at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair; the paper was so successful that the pair decided to continue publication even after the fair finished. It acquired its later name - Daily News Record - some time afterwards, and included a small feature about women's wear. That feature carries the story's most consequential date, told in the next section: in July 1910 it was split from the paper and given its own publication, which is today Women's Wear Daily.

From DNR to WWD, and the 2008 Folding

The relationship matters to how this directory files both papers: WWD, the fashion industry's best-known trade publication, began as a feature inside the men's paper, and the W filing in this directory carries WWD's own profile, cross-linked from this page. DNR continued as the men's counterpart for nearly another century. The ownership line as recorded: in 1993 the parent company of the Daily News Record, Fairchild Publications, Inc., was acquired by Condé Nast Publications after briefly being owned by The Walt Disney Company, which had acquired it when it purchased Capital Cities Communications. The menswear paper thus passed, with its famous younger sibling, through the same corporate hands.

The ending is dated to a meeting: the staff was told of DNR's folding at an afternoon meeting on November 20, 2008, by editor in chief John Birmingham. Its men's fashion coverage was absorbed into Women's Wear Daily and is featured every week. There is a practical consequence for readers: the link to the Daily News Record and DNR now goes to the WWD website. This page is therefore a historical profile of a closed publication - the directory's standard treatment for a defunct but significant name - and it invents no afterlife for the title. A trade paper that began at a world's fair in 1893 and documented the men's clothing business for 115 years earns its filing on the record alone.