Tales from the Back Row (2 page)

Aside from team
Vogue
, front-row people include editors from other magazines (though I never notice as many as
Vogue
's lineup), top buyers from important stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys and Saks, critics from places like the
New
York
Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
, and celebrities. You know a celebrity is entering the
venue not because you can see them from your z-row seat, oh no, but because celebrities, especially really, really famous ones, enter last, surrounded by approximately 112 people who form at once a devotional and protective circle around said celebrity, with a uniform density that is maintained as the celebrity traverses the couple dozen yards between her car and her seat. It's as though the celebrity has just had spinal surgery and is walking for the first time down the hospital corridor with the help of a well-dressed, especially hulking physical therapist on each arm. I have seen Beyoncé move around fashion shows in this very way, which has the effect of making her high heels look really, truly, just that dangerous.

People in the front row dress spectacularly in clothes that cost more than most mortgages. They text regularly with celebrities, whether or not they are one. Front-row people have photographers orbiting them like their own moons.

No one orbits me (see: aforementioned unfashionable wardrobe), but I
was
almost run over in the middle of Fifth Avenue this one time because someone wanted to take a picture of me holding a borrowed Chanel bag. The rest of the time I slip amid the crowd unseen. But that's just what life is like when your seat is somewhere near Canada, in the back row. You're allowed in; you're just not on the inside.

• • •

This book is about the people who power this industry—the bloggers, trendsetters, designers, celebrities, editors, and models. It's about what it's like to begin a career in the world populated by these very people, with whom I thought I had little in common but an innate attraction to sparkly shoes.

This is an unpretentious look (real talk) at a world that befuddles onlookers, a world of exclusivity, shameless self-promotion, and extreme ideals of what is and isn't beautiful. The tales that follow are neither mockery nor outright tell-all—I enjoy fashion too much to write it off as one never-ending
Zoolander
movie, though I wouldn't say that film's depiction of male models and fashion generally is
entirely
inaccurate. But I also never happened to witness anyone snorting cocaine off hand mirrors backstage.

This industry runs itself in such a way as to make consumers, particularly women, feel bad about themselves—for being too poor, too fat, too unattractive, too tasteless, too conventional. I am not immune to this. It's part of what drew me to this business in the first place. The fashion industry, in many ways, is a study in how deeply we long to stand out in order to fit in. A shrink once told me that we spend our energy trying to “fit in” with those around us up until around college, when we try to make ourselves stand out. Really, this is just another version of fitting in, because everyone's doing it. The fashion industry bears just about zero resemblance to college, except perhaps for this and how easy it is to get drunk every night if that's what you feel like doing. At Fashion Week, that desire is so pronounced that it's no big deal to see grown women with glittery pineapples protruding from their heads. (These head ornaments are called fascinators, and they are most commonly seen on British royals and socialites at horse races, but some fashion people can really pull them off.)

• • •

I'm not part of the in-crowd. If I were, I don't think I'd be able to write about it any differently than the pages of
Vogue
(not real talk),
which serves primarily as a purveyor of the illusion of fashion, rather than a decoder of it. What magazines like
Vogue
forget or simply can't tell you is that
there is nothing normal about this business
. Crocodile backpacks that cost $50,000 and come with a designer label aren't just something you mix into your Hamptons wardrobe, and not just because you don't have a Hamptons wardrobe but because they're bizarre, and the people who become attached to these things are sometimes equally unusual. Somewhere along the way, expressing just that became a big no-no for those who wanted to remain on the inside.

And so the fashion world consists of these people, like those two at that Alexander Wang show, who loved that pair of ripped tights and that leather vest, who exalt the disco pineapple fascinator, and who never seem to question the source of their feelings for these items of clothing or challenge the context in which these feelings arise. That can be a scary job, and I'm not afraid to do it.

I did end up purchasing a vest from that Wang collection at a sale some months afterward. But if I showed up anywhere wearing it with a pair of ripped tights and asked someone what they think of me, I'm pretty sure they'd just say, “Less.”

1

Bloggers

mastering the lame flamingo

L
anding a job as a full-time fashion writer was a glamorous dream I never expected to fulfill. Especially after I got fired from my first job. I was an editorial assistant at Jewcy, a website about Jewish stuff that was supposed to reach cool young people but ended up not reaching a large audience at all and shut down before being relaunched by people who could find an actual audience for the thing. My job involved sitting in a cramped office, filing invoices, and assisting someone who was sort of weird and not particularly warm. This was New Media 101, and I got the $400-a-week paycheck, benefits not included, to show for it. I'm pretty sure that even though this was the kind of real, high-value work college is supposed to groom you for, I made less than I did at my high school hostess job at a Tex-Mex chain.
Vogue
editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who was fired from
Harper's Bazaar
, once said everyone should get fired once because “it's a great learning experience.” I agree: you should get fired once because it
is
a great learning experience. For
instance, if you didn't grow up buying full-price Pucci like a socialite, you might have to learn how to live on the same amount of money your employed friends spend on lattes.

It also, theoretically, teaches you how not to get fired again.

There's a good chance that getting fired will be the best thing that ever happened to you. No matter how excited I've been to quit a job and move on to the next, I've always been terrified to quit. When I hostessed at that local Tex-Mex joint, the restaurant manager knew I would quit when I left for college, yet still I was nervous to tell him I was leaving. Having the unpleasant “I quit” conversation feels like telling someone, “No one likes you.” So a boss asking you to leave a job—and it's probably one you hate; most people who get fired don't love the thing they're getting fired from (How could you? They're firing you!)—only saves you the extreme awkwardness of actually quitting. It also forces you to find something better as quickly as possible, instead of pussyfooting around about your job search because you've settled into a routine of G-chatting for six hours a day and doing work for just two, while making enough money to afford Bravo, possibly also HBO.

I was pretty lucky because after I got fired from Jewcy, I assisted, reported, and wrote five-sentence-long magazine articles as a freelancer for several months, and then
New
York
magazine hired me to start its fashion blog, the Cut. This was the terrifying beginning of my career as a fashion journalist.

I should say this job didn't just fall from the sky and into my lap. That's just not how opportunities work, unless you are Paris Hilton in 2005 (which is not an advisable situation anyway, since you'd have to go everywhere wearing a neon loincloth and clear stilettos). I had been running around Manhattan asking celebrities awkward questions at cocktail parties as a freelance party reporter for
New
York
magazine. Picture a girl in T. J. Maxx trying to interrupt Elle Macpherson's conversation in the middle of the private lounge of a $500-a-night hotel. (Macpherson must have sensed my deep longing to interview her about summer flings, the subject of the film we were feting, because as soon as she finished with her conversation, she turned and fled.) I had been doing this for nearly a year, so
New
York
magazine had a sense of my skills. Also, I had a competing offer to run another fashion blog, which I told them about in hopes they'd offer me a full-time job. Voilà. As soon as someone
else
wanted me, they decided to consider me for their top-secret fashion blogger position. Pro tip: the best way to make someone want you is to make someone else want you more.

Just hours after I told my party-reporting editor about the competing offer, the editor of
NYmag.com
called me and said something like, “We want to start a fashion blog. Do you want to try out to be our fashion blogger?” He may as well have asked me if, moving forward, I'd like to get around town exclusively by unicorn.
Oh! Oh!
Yes, I do! I do I do!!!
I could not believe that I had been offered a full-time job at
NYmag.com
, a highly respected publication. I was so afraid of becoming a failure that to have any work, much less an absolute dream writing job at the only magazine I was dying to work for, felt unreal. Even if I would be blogging about fashion.

“I would be interested in that, yes,” I said into the phone using my spa voice. I happened to be rushing through SoHo to crash a friend's midmorning kickboxing class with an expired guest pass. I felt like one of those highly enviable ladies who run around wearing yoga outfits in the middle of the day because instead of office work, they take barre class and buy kale at Whole Foods. But now, with an audition to become
New
York
magazine's first fashion blog
ger, I turned right around and climbed back up the six flights of stairs to my apartment to hunker down with my cat and
The
View
(poor man's barre class) to start working.

• • •

At this point in my career, I felt fairly confident in my fashion knowledge because I had interviewed Tim Gunn a few times and had seen every episode of
Project Runway
. This—along with searching “fashion” in Google News—surely gave me the credentials I needed to complete the writing samples I had to turn in as my tryout for the role. I would later learn I knew absolutely nothing about fashion. Or blogging. But somehow, I faked my way through the interview process well enough to get a job offer. I tried to be all calm and cool about it when I got the call.

“Oh, thanks so much,” I said, reverting to spa voice. “Can I think it over and call you back?”

Then I called my parents to shout, “OH MY GOD I GOT IT! THE JOB EVERY GIRL WOULD KILL FOR! [INSERT MORE
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
REFERENCES]!!!!” This was a dream. The royal wedding of jobs. All those awkward celebrity encounters had finally gotten me somewhere! And also: fuck that dickhead who fired me!

Something like three minutes later, I just couldn't take it any longer and lunged toward the phone. I had this odd feeling that if I didn't say yes it might go away. “I accept!!!” I told my future editor, now on the edge of hysteria. I've since learned that job offers ­aren't like people you've slept with or cupcakes—they do not just disappear. I couldn't wait to tell the people I was working with at
Condé Nast Traveler
, where I had recently accepted a freelance three-
day-a-week job assisting the sole web editor, that I had to quit to go become
NYmag.com
's first fashion blogger. The vocally fashion-­obsessed editorial assistant who sat behind me and acted like I didn't exist would be shocked. The glee this filled me with was almost enough to counteract the nervousness I had about my writing abilities: how was I ever going to be as good or funny every single day as the existing and enormously talented
NYmag.com
blogging team?

I started my coveted fashion blogging job at
NYmag.com
in February 2008, right before Fall Fashion Week. “What an exciting time to start!” everyone said. Well, no—what a terrifying time to start. I had
two
days to learn everything about fashion, and blogging. I can't even memorize a Britney Spears song in two days.

People who wrote for the internet, referred to broadly at the time as “bloggers,” were just beginning to earn legitimacy in the fashion world. On January 31, 2008, the
New
York Times
published a story about the rise of beauty bloggers, boldly stating, “the cosmetics industry has stopped seeing bloggers as bottom feeders.” (Of course, this feels hilarious now that beauty vloggers are millionaires . . . )

The same was true for some fashion bloggers. The term can apply to all kinds of different people, many of whose worth was debated intensely. Fashion bloggers are like the global warming of the fashion industry—their impact only selectively acknowledged despite their undeniable existence. At this time, a debate was raging in the fashion industry about a blogger's place in the industry. Did they deserve the front-row seats they had started getting? Most famously, Bryanboy sat front row at a Dolce & Gabbana show with a laptop, which really sent people into a frenzy. But not long after that, when then thirteen-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson
sat front row at the Dior Couture show (wearing a gigantic, ­view-­obstructing bow on her head, no less), the raised eyebrows turned to outright vitriol. Industry lifers couldn't understand how a teenager could burst onto the scene with a website, a dream, and a cute outfit and be awarded status they believed it should take decades to earn. Yet, you can see how easy it is to get confused about bloggers, firstly because it's confusing that taking photos of oneself wearing clothes now translates to, for a very lucky few, a lucrative career path. But this is only one kind of fashion blogger, for a few varieties exist:

1.
Journalists who happen to write for blogs.
This is my category. I'm a journalist whose medium happens to be the internet—a “blog,” or “vertical” (fancy name for “section of a website that probably has its own tab at the top”).

2.
Personal-style bloggers.
The people who post to the internet photos of themselves wearing clothes. The most fully formed ­personal-style blogs also treat viewers to a broader look at their subjects' lives. Think: photos of the inside of a hotel room, closet porn, this vintage store I went to this one time, cupcakes I thought were really pretty. These bloggers are bang-up stylists, own the best clothes, and eat the best baked goods, and I am jealous of all of them.

3.
Fashion fans who chronicle their fandom online.
Due to the independent nature of their sites, bloggers can create their own journalistic standards. Whereas many news outlets have rules about not accepting expensive gifts or free trips, independent bloggers can accept as many free gifts and trips as they want (if a blogger reviews a product they receive for free, FTC regulations require that the blogger disclose the product was a gift). The more gifts they
get, the better off they are, because who running an indie website really has the money to fly to São Paolo Fashion Week? And if you're in the business of sharing photos of yourself wearing clothes and aren't independently wealthy, where would you be without free or heavily discounted clothes with which to continually update your look? For this type of blogger, the consequence of receiving so much free stuff is that you pretty much have to cover all of it favorably or only feature stuff you truly love. So you end up with a fan site. I don't see this as much different from fashion magazines like
Vogue
or
Harper
's Bazaar
that primarily promote the goods of their advertisers and cover things they love in the most—if at times, painfully—positive fashion. These sites are often very personality driven, even if they're not solely about how a certain person dresses.

4.
Instagram “celebs.”
People with half a million followers, who are known better for that than anything else. They might have a blog, too, but their agents (because fashion blogging has become so weirdly lucrative and fame making, it now requires agents) tout their impressively robust Instagram followings as chief among their talents.

5.
Street-style photographers.
The most famous street-style photographers, like Phil Oh, Scott “the Sartorialist” Schuman, and Tommy Ton, got their start by posting to their own sites photos they took of people wearing outfits. Though photographers of their caliber now get a lot of high-paying commercial work, they're still called bloggers because they still update their websites—the main reason they came to be known in the first place. But they're really not bloggers in my mind so much as photojournalists. And they've become remarkably powerful—they sit front row at shows and get paid tens of thousands of dollars and up to shoot major ad cam
paigns. What's more, getting photographed by one of them has become a true accomplishment. Wearing an oversized angora coat and man loafers to a fashion show, catching the eye of the Sartorialist, getting photographed by him, and then seeing your photo land on his site is the street-style version of admission to Harvard. An irrefutable nod to your utmost talent in dressing yourself.

The distinction between bloggers (the lesser) and other print media people (more legitimate, allegedly) is not only disappearing but actually reversing. Whereas they used to begrudgingly award bloggers and vloggers standing tickets and didn't care about that thing called Instagram, now brands practically beg internet stars to show up to events and fashion shows and Instagram something—anything! If a PR person overhears you saying “That tiny coffee cup is cute; we should Instagram that!” they will come running up to you and ask if a waiter can bring one over on a private tray with its own thumbnail-sized coordinating donut. Practically every professional writer and photographer in the world now works on something that could qualify as a blog and, therefore, could be categorized as a blogger. It's impossible to work in media in any form now and not put your work on the internet in some way. Yet at the same time, putting myself and the Blonde Salad (yes, that's a real personal-style blogger) and Phil Oh in the same category is like seeing dolphins and whales and mermaids jumping around in the ocean and calling them all “fish.”