Fashionistas
Authors: Lynn Messina
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Contemporary Women, #General
Fashionistas
For Mom
Thanks to:
my father, my brothers, the Linwoods, Roell Schmidt, Elena Ro Yang, Jennifer Lewis
And:
Susan Ramer, Farrin Jacobs, Margaret Marbury
Also:
Chris Catanese—peace, love and lightbulb
My First Day of Work“V
ig, what does your roommate look like?”
“She’s tall and blond and has green eyes.”
“Does she have a boyish figure like yours?”
“Uh…”
“Is she a stick, a lollipop, a drainpipe with no dents?”
“Uh…”
“We’re talking completely flat. Not a curve to be found, even with surveying equipment and six of the Royal Cartographers Association’s best men.”
“Uh…”
“Because if she has any shape at all, it won’t do. We need flatter than the salt plains of Utah. We’d use you, but company policy prevents us from employing our own employees. I could fire you, but then I’d have to go through the hassle of finding another assistant, which is twenty minutes I just don’t have. Listen up, go down to the Ford Agency in Soho and tell them that we need a girl just like you for our story on bridesmaids with awful figures. Stress the fact that we need a model who looks real, like one of our readers but not as
dumpy. And tell them we need a large girl, too. But only a plus-size model with a pretty face. Make sure her face is pretty. We are not in the magazine business to give airtime to ugly women. Go on, what are you waiting for? Shoo. Be back in thirty minutes and don’t forget to pick up my lunch. I want tuna on toasted rye bread with one lettuce leaf on the bottom. Make sure they put it on the bottom. I can’t eat a sandwich with lettuce on the top. Order it from Mangia. Their number is in your Rolodex. All right, stop staring and go do something. This isn’t one of those jobs where you stand around the water cooler talking about must-see television. And don’t forget my coffee. I like it black.”
My 1,233rd DayT
he offices of
Fashionista
are like the streets of San Francisco, only with microscent zones instead of microclimates. Every editor in every office is always burning some kind of candle—lilacs, vanilla, cinnamon, multifragranted concoctions called Grandmother’s Kitchen—and if you don’t like the smell, all you have to do is walk a few feet to the left and breathe different air.
But things are different today. Someone is burning incense. Its scent is heavy and powerful and floats down the hallway like a thick-soled phantom, seeping under doorways. Even the bathroom’s ordinarily antiseptic aroma is undermined.
We aren’t prepared to deal with incense. It is the heavy artillery, the big guns, and we have no place to take cover. We are exposed in the center, a shantytown of cubicles, and our only recourse is to breathe the cigarette-infused air outside the revolving door on the ground floor.
“It’s frankincense and myrrh,” says Christine, popping her head over the cubicle wall.
“What?” I’m trying to write an article about celebrity-
owned restaurants, but I can’t concentrate. The smell is too distracting.
“The incense. It’s frankincense and myrrh,” she explains.
I’m surprised by her revelation and not quite sure I believe her. This is the twenty-first century, and we have all forgotten what frankincense and myrrh smell like.
“Myrrh has a bitter, pungent taste,” says Christine.
“It’s not myrrh,” I say, my eyes focused on my computer screen. “Myrrh doesn’t exist anymore.”
Christine leans against the wall and it gives slightly under her weight. “Vig, you can’t deny the existence of myrrh.”
I look at her. “I can. I deny the existence of myrrh.”
“That’s ridiculous. The wise men brought it to baby Jesus as a birthday present.”
“So?” I say with a shrug before making some comment about dodo birds. My point is only that dodo birds used to exist and now they don’t, but somehow I’ve managed to suggest that dodo birds were another gift of the magi.
Christine’s eyes widen as she misunderstands me. “The wise men didn’t bring dodo birds to Bethlehem. What a ridiculous thing to imply,” she huffs.
“How do you know?” I ask, because the vehemence in her tone is too strong. You should never be that sure about anything. “I mean, how do you know for a fact that they didn’t also bring dodo birds?”
“Because it’s not in the bible,” she says with more insistence than the topic calls for. I’m only teasing. “There’s no mention of dodo birds anywhere.”
I don’t have Christine’s religious bent—in fact, I don’t have a religion at all—and I’m amused by her vehemence. It’s not my intention to upset her. The last thing I want is for her to clutch the thin thumbtack wall with clenched fists, but I don’t apologize. It’s my belief that myrrh no longer exists and even though I don’t believe in much, I have the right to these thin convictions. I have no problem accepting the existence of frankincense, with its ugly
f
and traffic-stopping
k,
but not
myrrh, something so light and airy that it is only a soft breeze on your lips.
“Besides,” she says, “I know for a fact that myrrh still exists. We had some in my cooking class.”
Christine is trying to get out of
Fashionista
and the route she has taken is aspiring food critic. She harbors dreams of being a food writer. She wants to be one of those people who is paid to detect the impertinent flavor of cumin in a spring roll. She wants to go to James Beard foundation dinners and sit next to Julia Child. She wants to work at a magazine that has a little more substance than seeping incense.
FashionistaF
ashionista
is a magazine about nothing. It’s aggressively hip and overwhelmingly current and every glossy page drips with beauty, but the nuggets of wisdom it dispenses are gold for fools. Despite what they say, you can’t steal Gwyneth’s arched brow or Nicole’s flowing tresses.
But stealing things from the rich and famous is central to
Fashionista
’s raison d’être. The magazine devotes itself completely to the tireless pursuit of all things celebrity, especially those aspects most basic for survival—food, clothing, shelter. Fame is the planet around which everything orbits. This is Jennifer Aniston’s plunger. This is where you can get it.
It’s not a new concept—ever since Mary Pickford stepped onto the red carpet batting her Max Factor eyelashes, the press has been foisting these images of glamour onto the public. But this is the magazine I work for and it makes me cringe. I cringe because insider’s tidbits that have been spoonfed to us by self-aggrandizing prophets are presented as news.
Fashionista
is a shrine to celebrity, and publicists carefully place their idols in the center of the altar for maximum exposure.
In the five years that I’ve been working here, we’ve never run a story that doesn’t name-drop at least one celebrity. The closest we came was an article I wrote three months ago about the preservation and presentation of teeth (the new braces, the new bleaches, the new bonds). For the most part, it was a full-service piece, the sort you’d find in any other women’s magazine, the useful kind that actually lists names of dentists that ordinary people go to. However, this much-needed information ran alongside a list of the top five sets of teeth in Hollywood. The practical sidebar on gum disease—what to look for, how to prevent it—was quickly axed. At
Fashionista,
we don’t mention a disease unless a celebrity is trying to cure it.
I spend most of my time on the phone, charting trends and inventing cultural drifts. It’s exhausting business finding out who’s going where and who’s using what and who’s wearing who, and I impatiently wait for spa directors and salon owners and store managers to return my calls. The information always trickles in and it’s never as pat as it should be. A trend needs three examples to be declared—two might be a coincidence—and I frequently have to dig deep to find the third. This is why you often see the picture of an unknown actress with a humiliating ID tag under her name next to a silhouette of Julia Roberts.
Despite
Fashionista
’s huge readership and record-breaking ad revenues, it’s a magazine about nothing. Regardless of what our press releases say, we aren’t the epicenter of hip. This empty stillness you feel is not the calm at the eye of a hurricane.