Tales from the Back Row (13 page)

“I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. S-f-o —” she began, referring to Sfoglia, a fancy Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side.

Then the conversation turned to Fashion Week. She was too busy to go to anything but this Ralph Lauren show. Besides, “There's so much scrutiny now,” she said, referring to how the media picks apart everything about every celebrity. “People are so cruel, so I go to as few things as possible.”

After eight minutes of thrilling conversation, another surefire
SATC
fanatic pulled my new best friend away from me, which created that awkward situation where I was forced to converse solo with her significant other, Matthew Broderick. Again, stuck with a dad.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” I asked. If his wife was so glee
ful about talking to me, he should be, too. But, alas, he let out his sass.

“What did you think of the show?” I asked as a soft opener.

“I don't know anything about this stuff,” he said, like he was
so over
the situation. Like he had been
dragged
there to this
girly
event and, oh God,
why
wasn't there a TV playing football, and would it have been
so much to ask
for the tuna tartar spoons to be sliders? You would think a theater actor would be right at home at a fashion show that resembled, well, theater, but no.

“What was the last show you went to?” I asked. If you're dating the world's premiere fashion icon, you have to have been to some of the best fashion events of all time.

Sure enough, he had been.

“I went to the big Valentino show in Rome.”

“Oh! His retirement extravaganza.” (You can watch footage of legendary designer Valentino Garavani's final show in the biopic about him, in which waiters wearing white gloves serve guests everything from foie gras terrine to, like, Triscuits.) “And how did that compare to this?”

“That was by the Coliseum,” he said. “This is in Central Park.”

I thanked him for his sassiness and then left to see people I have physical rather than imaginary friendships with at a normal bar.

Nothing ups your party game like an exchange with a celebrity. No conversation with a friend could be anywhere near as awkward. The downside is you naturally fall into interview mode and start talking to everyone as though everything about them could be a story. Fortunately, most of these people are flattered to know you think they're fabulous and actually care about where they bought their outfits.

5

Editors

the time i refrained from barfing on my idol, anna wintour

O
ne hot summer afternoon the year following sweatpantsgate, I had prostrated myself on my sundeck for my annual two-month project of trying to turn my skin from translucent to a darker-than-white shade of opaque. Fortunately, I had not smoked any pot when my cell phone rang. “It's Mark Holgate,” said a British-­accented voice on the other end of the line belonging to a top-level editor at
Vogue
who had recently been promoted. “Would you be interested in interviewing for a fashion writer position at
Vogue
?”

Why, I—are cupcakes overrated? Are pandas the best kind of bear?

“
Yes
,” I said into the phone. “Twist my arm.”

“Great,” Holgate said. “Can you send me your résumé and five clips? And contact HR so we can find a time for you to come in and meet Anna.”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “My life shall go on hold until these tasks are complete.”

Vogue
is seen as the bible of fashion magazines. Anna Wintour, its editor in chief, is therefore like the Creator of fashion. She is unquestionably the most influential and powerful person in the fashion industry. Working at
Vogue
meant you were, therefore,
also
one of the most influential and important people in the industry. It was a validation of one's own self-importance, and validating one's self-importance is, in many respects, the reason fashion exists in the first place.

Working at
Vogue
meant living a glamorous life not unlike that represented in
The Devil
Wears Prada,
where you fly business class to Paris for Fashion Week, constantly attend private dinners with celebrities and famous designers, and get so many free and discounted designer clothes and spa treatments and gym memberships that you may as well be a B-list celebrity. The life of
Vogue
, it seems, is a never-ending whirlwind of wearing Manolo Blahnik pumps, elegant tablescapes, being thin, and being envied by everyone else in the industry. Naturally, rather than admit that
I
was jealous of the people who worked at
Vogue
, I would pretend like I was deeply turned off by their backward, stuffy ways. Since everyone is jealous of
Vogue
people but doesn't want to admit it, you can often find people to pretend they agree with you.

Naturally, as soon as they
call
you and dangle the opportunity in front of your face, you cease the shit talking and revert, teenager-­like, to
Vogue
idol worship.

I realized I was sweating hard. (Did
Vogue
people sweat? Probably not. Note to self: remove sweat glands before Anna interview.) It would only be a matter of time before the dye from my $25 neon Forever 21 bikini started bleeding into my precious
white House of Deréon beach towel. Every time summer rolls around, this gift reaffirms my lying-out style as the embodiment of timelessness and elegance. I peeled myself off my towel and headed down to my apartment.

In my rapid descent to my Ikea-furnished studio, I did not stop to consider the true implications of working at
Vogue
. One, I'd have to go to work every day looking like I stepped out of the magazine in head-to-toe designer clothes and with professionally-done-­looking hair and makeup, and here I already found it exhausting to get to my office in the most base-level nonpajama outfit—jeans, a Beyoncé T-shirt, flats—with my hair in a damp bun. Two, I'd have to write sunshine and daisies about everything in fashion, a far cry from my dryly humorous approach to writing about the business on the Cut. And three, I'd have to interview with Anna Wintour—my idol—with no barf bag at the ready.

Wait
, I said to myself as the magnitude of this interview process began to sink in.
If I have to interview with Anna Wintour, how will I speak actual words to her face? And what on god's/her great earth am I going to wear?

If only Tina Knowles had thrown in a skirt suit.

• • •

But of all the celebrity folk I intrepidly—and at times, ignorantly—attempted to interview on New York's endless circuit of events promoting things that no one really cares about (like celebrity perfume), Anna Wintour was one I never had the balls to approach. Anna, to me, is a great icon. The
greatest
icon. Few women command the same amount of respect, power, and influence as Anna. Whenever I have to do something scary and feel like I need
an added cloak of confidence, I just imagine I'm Anna Wintour and act as though she would. For instance, say you're asking your boss for a raise. For many women—myself included—this is a scary thing to do. But wearing my invisible Anna costume, I can easily imagine myself walking into his office, sitting down in the chair opposite his desk, leaning back as though I have this conversation and wear $3,000 skirt suits every day, and saying, “You'll find my presence here has greatly improved the overall quality and class of this organization. For my services, I think you'll find an augmentation of my salary by thirty percent not only fair but also quite necessary. You simply just don't find talent like mine walking down Fifth Avenue any day of the week. I expect this adjustment to my pay to take effect immediately.” And then I'd breeze out to Cipriani for lunch. Usually I can apply bits of this imagined reality to my life, and the resulting scene amounts to me tripping on the way into the office, developing hand tremors once I sit down, and barely making eye contact as I mumble how great I am and politely request more money. But this beats the alternative, which is not having the guts to ask for the raise at all.

So then, here's an awkward situation: how do you pretend to be the person who's interviewing you? I had no idea how I'd survive a face-to-face meeting with a woman I've looked up to my entire young adult and adult life. So, like the dutiful reporter I was, I started researching. I asked everyone I could think of in the media industry what interviewing with Anna was like. The most useful notes came in an email from an ex-
Vogue
employee who was friends with a friend. It read that I was “very far along” in the interview process if Anna Wintour herself was giving me time. My tipster also gave me four key tips. First, don't wear black because Anna is “all about color” (indeed, in a video posted to
Vogue.com
, she said
the one thing she would never wear, unlike many a fashion person actually, is “head-to-toe black”). She also advised me to “have a life” because Anna will “ask more nonprofessional qs than professional,” like what I do on the weekends. I was cautioned against claiming to be a tennis fan because Anna knows everything about it and there would be no way for me to fake it with her, which was no problem because even as much as I wanted to work at
Vogue
at that time, I'd never be able to convince anyone I was interested even remotely in any sort of sport that involves balls. Finally, she told me to mention an image or story from the magazine that I loved, and, perhaps most importantly, she cautioned me not to be thrown by Anna, who “is shy and of few words more than she's mean or anything like that. She won't bother to warm the room, usual throwaway niceties. It's just her way.”

All I really had to do was study
Vogue
, wear not-black, not expect niceties, and speak intelligently about my hobbies.
Do I have hobbies?
I reasoned it was probably best not to go in there and say, “Matter of fact, I spend my weekends drinking and dancing to house music at nightclubs. Thanks to those brunch parties, you don't even have to go home anymore!”
Note to self: get hobbies.

Despite my singular fear of Anna, and the possibility I didn't have any hobbies, I took some comfort in knowing that I had been edited by many high-profile magazine editors over the course of my career and had interviewed many more. But certain differences exist between editors who focus on text and editors who focus on visuals. You sort of have to look at it (and this is generalizing—many editors aren't exactly one type or the other) as the book nerds and the popular pretty kids in high school. Many editors who focus on textual storytelling won't look twice at what you wear so long as you show up wearing clothes. A fashion editor is likely to
notice everything about your appearance. When I began working in fashion, I started noticing everything everyone around me wore. It was horrible—suddenly “that girl on the corner” becomes “that girl with the questionable gladiator sandals on the corner.” Anna's background is as a fashion editor—a person who conceptualizes and styles fashion photo shoots. So I knew my outfit was absolutely key, as I have seen just how picky these editors can be. And indeed, it's an editor's job to be picky: editing is all about cutting stuff and redoing things until you end up with something perfect. Editors are constantly looking at things and trying to make them better. They are the gatekeepers between the runways and the general public, and ultimately after a runway show, the image of the clothes is in the hands of editors who choose (and are allowed) to photograph it.

My first expansive view into this world came when I had been working at the Cut for about two years and got assigned a story on Anna Dello Russo, the fashion director of Japanese
Vogue
. I interviewed her over the phone for
New
York
's spring fashion issue, and she described how she spent fifteen years working her way up from being an assistant who packs clothes for far-flung photo shoots to the spectacular fashion editor she is now. She studied fashion in university under Gianfranco Ferré and spent years toiling as an anonymous assistant and stylist before becoming internet-famous thanks to street-style photographers and her immaculate clothing collection. I admired her hard work and devotion to her job and the shameless glee with which she embraced the fame that didn't find her until middle age. Flaunting oneself becomes somehow not-obnoxious when the person doing the flaunting admits that's exactly what they're doing.

ADR is a woman who
truly
love love LOVES fashion. It's her
breakfast, lunch, and dinner—in order to help accommodate her clothing collection, she has in fact edited the kitchen out of her home. She also keeps a separate apartment next to the gold-trimmed one she inhabits in Milan just for her clothes. She called this apartment her “studio” in our interview and explained that she even keeps it at a certain temperature so that she doesn't ruin her clothes.

“Collecting clothes is complicated because the clothes need a space and the right temperature, otherwise they get—you [can] really destroy clothes,” she explained in her syrupy Italian accent. “It's dusty, it's hot—it ruins the clothes. I know very well how to store clothes, then everything is perfect. It's so freezing in my house! The clothes need to be cold.”

I have a hard time imagining needing to store clothing in a ­temperature-controlled environment. But this is the difference between a woman who has “thousands” of pairs of designer shoes and a woman whose most prized items of apparel include a Beyoncé T-shirt and who interprets seaside elegance as a House of Deréon beach towel. For ADR, fashion is an attainable aspiration. For me, it's merely an aspiration. My chief clothing storage-related concerns amount to storing and packing my $25 bikinis so that they don't bleed neon dye into my Old Navy tank tops. As ADR described the ideal temperature for storing clothes, I found myself thinking of the layout of a grocery store: you have the warm part in the middle where the cheap, boring stuff like flour is, and the absolutely freezing part off to the side where they have the pricier, more exciting items like fish and meat and fine cheese. Having not been to ADR's apartment(s), I imagine the temperature scheme to be something like that. (Grocery stores, I get. High fashion, I'm still working on. Can you guess how that
Vogue
interview turned out?)

ADR became famous when street style started blowing up on the internet. She wore full runway looks to Fashion Week, and she wasn't borrowing these clothes—she was buying them herself.
With her own money.
(She won't say how much she spends on clothes.) A lot of people going to Fashion Week now borrow clothes, the way a celebrity does before going to the Oscars, so this might have been seen as even more eccentric behavior than the fact that she wears only the world's awesomest clothes and does not dress according to the season. What's more, once she's photographed in something, she goes home and changes, so she needs multiple outfits each day she goes to shows. I asked her about the process of packing for New York Fashion Week.

“Oh! Nightmare. I know very well packing—because that was my first job when I used to be fashion editor and travel around the world. We used to carry lot of stuff,” she said. “If you arrive in Mexico, for example, and are shooting in chiffon, if you pack very well you will not iron clothes for three days. I had the best packing. I always teach my assistant how to pack the stuff the perfect way.