Tales from the Back Row (15 page)

At 8:00 p.m., I made it back to my apartment where I spent the night studying as many issues of
Vogue
as I could. There was no point in trying to get sleep because sleeping the night before your job interview with Anna Wintour would be about as likely as sleeping on a
Deadliest Catch
boat. It just wasn't happening. When I finally laid down to rest, I repeated my to-do list over and over in my head. I would change into the Michael Kors and Crangi in the closet as soon as Eve got back from a hair appointment in the afternoon, mere hours before I had to be interviewed by the Supreme Ruler. I would spend the day sitting in front of my computer acting like everything is normal and secretly Googling
Vogue
things. I would maybe complete 40 percent of the work I would normally get done.
I can get this job
, I thought as I rested upon my pillow,
mentally reviewing the notes I had made when flipping through all those issues earlier that night. What I did not consider as I obsessed over the timing of my costume change and remembering the names of as many
Vogue
writers as possible was whether or not I actually
wanted
the job. Of course, I wanted it because I was
supposed
to want it. Everyone working in fashion is
supposed
to want to work at
Vogue.
When I was in high school and college and following Anna Wintour obsessively, I decided it's she who I would become. And if I wanted to become her, I'd have to work at
Vogue
. As much as I wanted the gig in the days leading up to the interview, I had neglected to consider the many meaningful ways the job would affect my life. There were several things that I refused to acknowledge as I psyched myself up for the next day:

1. Working at
Vogue
would mean I could not make sarcastic remarks about the fashion industry, as I saw it, with any regularity. I felt humor was a way to lay bare the seemingly antifeminist constructs of the fashion and media industries that drew me to it in the first place. People pay attention to humor. And I wanted people to pay attention to fashion not only for the escapism everyone wants from their everyday lives, but also because it has a lot to do with why women feel insecure about themselves. Fashion and the media that cover it often feel designed to make us all feel fat, poor, ugly, and tasteless. And I wanted women to see that the industry is great fun but in many ways also ridiculous, and, therefore, should not make us feel this way about ourselves. Writing this book as a
Vogue
staffer would be about as likely as the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue featuring only one-pieces and banning body paint.

2. Getting dressed for work every day would be absolute torture. Also, I'd have to do that gross thing where you get Botox in
jected into the bottoms of your feet to make high heels tolerable, because I'd have to wear those every day. I'd also have to take out a massive post-student loan to afford these heels and other acceptable work wear, because Michael Kors and Philip Crangi aren't exactly stocked in my household with the same regularity as spiced tortilla chips.

3. I'd written a LOT about
Vogue
and Anna Wintour on the Cut, and not all of it was exactly what you'd call “favorable.” But once you're called upon to dine with the cool girls in the cafeteria, it's awfully easy to stop talking about them behind their backs, because the recognition—the will to fit in—is at least temporarily more important than the LOL of it all. To this end, a mentor, an editor far wiser than me with boatloads more experience, suggested I ask Anna why she even bothered to interview me. I can scarcely look at a cat without giggling, to say nothing of fashion shows, and I knew she would sometimes call upon six staffers to consider, in all seriousness, how to shoot the clothes in
one
runway collection. How would I do a 180 in attitude and begin to take fashion so seriously
as a career?
Dazzled by the
Vogue
disco ball, I was blinded to the things that interested me most: humor writing and social issues shaping the lives of women. But having spent a couple years on the outside of this world with just a toe on the inside, it was hard not to long to be completely in that world.
Vogue
was the Inside. Once you're on the Inside, it becomes impossible to question it.

And now, as I prepared to try out officially to be a part of that world, the massive amounts of exorbitantly priced stuff the magazine endorsed became a sheer thrill to me.
Yay—STUFF! Eye candy! Pretty!
The models wore designer apparel with such grace.
Skinny! YAY AGAIN!
The celebrities were so delightfully inoffensive and tal
ented at wearing ball gowns on expansive Sicilian patios.
Photoshop! Puff pieces! More skinny! ANNIE LEIBOVITZ IS A GREAT ARTISTE OF OUR TIME!

And then there were the “issues.”
Hillary Clinton! The
World! Fascinating!
And the personal essays:
“I once found my neighbor's 20 birds dead! It completely changed the way I thought about shoes!”
More pictures of skinny pretty people in outfits that cost twenty times as much as what I have in my savings and checking accounts right now! This was
Vogue
. And, like Anna Wintour, she was a classy broad. A classy broad whom I could then trust not to fan the fame of a Fergie or a Kardashian or an Amber Rose (though Real Housewife of Atlanta
NeNe Leakes and Kim Kardashian have since made it into the magazine—maybe I'd have a better shot of getting hired there now). I decided that a magazine that seems to have banned people who appear on magazine covers for no discernible reason (and launching a $13 perfume or having a baby at the age of fifteen is not an excuse) was just the place I should work. When one publicist suggested I try for a job at
Vogue
, I replied, “Yeah, right—I am mincemeat beneath their Manolo Blahniks.” She countered: “But it's the Bible.”

Of course, every fashion writer should work at
Vogue
—people say it's “the Bible” of fashion, which basically makes Anna the Pope of fashion and everyone who works directly for her very powerful and influential. I suppose that if you ever dreamed of dictating what skirt shape the masses should wear a particular season, working at
Vogue
is for you. (This has never been a dream of mine. Owning a miniature Pomeranian, yes; influencing what people wear, no.)

On the day of my interview, the
worst
possible thing that could have happened happened: Eve was late coming back from her hair appointment.

One minute past her proclaimed arrival time, I started emailing her with lots of harass-y punctuation. “Eve where are you????!!! I need to go put on that dress!!!!!!!!!” Eve was my only friend in the office with a key to that closet.

“Running late,” she wrote back. “Brazilian hair-straightening. Back soon.”

I was still two hours away from my scheduled departure time but felt as though the world was about to enter its next ice age, and I was stranded in a pair of flip-flops. I had a day-terror of showing up to Condé in the outfit I was wearing right then: black jeans, a T-shirt, and faux snakeskin flats. In this imagined scenario, I walk into Mark Holgate's office and burst into tears. He looks me up and down and bursts into tears also. He then sends me home to think about what I've done.

But the thing about job interviews that I'd completely forgotten in this moment but know well now that I have gone on to hire and manage teams of people is that the person you're meeting
wants you to get the job
. This is easy to forget when you're interviewing with people you see basically as celebrities whom you actually respect, but it's the most calming thing for me to remember when I'm interviewing for a job and terror strikes.

To distract my brain from the torturous thoughts of how badly Mark and Anna would judge my clothes and what would happen if I were late, I set about organizing several key items from my hideous molting patent leather purse into a black portfolio-type thing that fit my BlackBerry, MetroCard, money, ID, and résumé. There was no
way
I was bringing the bag ADR felt the need to lock behind a door next to her toilet as soon as it entered her field of vision.

Eve returned to the office twenty minutes later. I speed-walked toward her, hands aflutter. “Eve! I need to change!” I said in my best
stage whisper. (I was trying to act normal here, after all.) “Great hair. Very straight.”

“Let's go,” she said, taking me back into the closet, where I surreptitiously slipped into my “Anna Wintour, please like me” costume. The heels I planned to wear I had brought to work separately, so I put those on at the last minute before tiptoeing out the door for my “eye doctor appointment.”

Eve wished me luck, spritzed me with holy water, and waved a smoking clump of sage in front of my head, and I headed out into the world to meet the woman I pretended to be all the time.
Don't fall in the heels. Don't vomit. Don't stain the Kors.
You can do this,
I told myself as I hailed a cab. The trip to Condé Nast HQ was so quick that I ended up arriving a stupid twenty-five minutes before my interview. A conveniently situated Gap has never come in so handy. I teetered over there and tried to pretend like I was perusing the cotton shorts selection. I thought sitting down might calm my nerves but with no seating available, I ended up killing twenty minutes by roaming the store like a sleepwalking child in a horror movie, moved by something beyond the norm.

I knew that I'd be warming up with a woman in Condé Nast HR. After a reasonably calming few minutes telling the HR people about how much I love Annie Leibovitz, I ascended to the twelfth floor:
Vogue
's chambers
.
Its lobby was decorated in a country-chic style that seemed to mirror Anna Wintour's Long Island house, the interior of which I'd seen on the internet. Layoffs forced Condé magazines to get rid of its receptionists long ago, so there's no one sitting there to call the person you're going to see. Without a receptionist overseeing things, the lobby effectively becomes a windowless living room outfitted in overstuffed furniture, accent pillows, and—an unfortunate side effect of no sunlight entering
this enclosure—fake or dried houseplants, which everyone knows are the counterfeit handbags of the interior decorating world. As I wondered if an absence of real, fresh flowers was something Anna had just come to grudgingly accept, several skinny girls in hip-­skimming dresses, asymmetrical skirts, and stilettos teetered across the lobby, pushing cumbersome racks of clothes on and off elevators. I just thought,
Glamorous
. But looking back on it, those rack pushers should really be allowed to wear comfortable shoes.

As I waited and people-watched (it's not rude if the people dressed for it, right?), a peppy young lady was being interviewed for an internship. How cruel to interview her publicly. I couldn't imagine doing what I was about to do for an audience, even if that audience was me, the lady with the Personal Styling Disorder. Not that having one person in the room counts as “publicly,” but still—I am just made very uncomfortable by other people being able to hear my conversations, which is why I'm so embarrassed by drunk friends and loud talkers. This is only to say: I'm uptight. So
Vogue
should work out for me?

The woman interviewing this girl proceeded to explain the tasks involved in the job, and the girl explained enthusiastically how she's had lots of experience carrying clothes to and fro, and she totally knew how fashion closets work, and she was happy to sign away her social life and bunion-free feet for the chance to organize shoes and earrings while dressed in a very constricting fashion. Because I'm an asshole, all I can think is,
W
rong outfit, not going to happen
.
Vogue
is a tastemaker, and if you don't demonstrate that you have
Vogue
taste, you're not likely to get hired. This is helpful for the prospective employees in a way because if you feel a sense of doom picking out your outfit for your interview, you certainly won't be able emotionally to handle picking out your
outfit for work every day. In addition to her messy half-ponytail and ill-fitting accordion-pleated skirt, she had a big turquoise plastic suitcase, the kind that people push around upright instead of tilted. Having previously been subject to the trauma of possessing the wrong personal effects in ADR's hotel room, I wouldn't dare walk in there with a receptacle meant for holding that many of my things unless it was a Louis Vuitton trunk, and it was being carried by my own interns. This girl was probably one of those types whose parents wouldn't let her move to the city until she had a job, and she was going to get on a train and go right home to Connecticut or Jersey or whatever nearby state she came from right after this interview.

Noticing the suitcase, the interviewer asked if she lived in New York.

“I'm going to move here within the next week! I was just here looking for an apartment!” she explained, thrilled in a way no one should ever be when discussing apartment hunting in New York. It's really the most soul-sucking activity ever if you can't afford to spend $3k a month on a room that can fit a bed and also contains a sink, toilet, and shower, possibly a stove. Of course, even if this girl got the internship, she wouldn't have enough money from it alone to afford living in NYC. Entry-level Condé jobs don't pay enough for that either, which is partly why a lot of the people who end up at these magazines have parents who can afford to bankroll some of their lifestyle, or who have savings or an inheritance or can manage to work two jobs. Because you will also need some good-­looking clothes to work at Condé—if you want to work in a place that makes taste, it just seems to be understood that you'll need to exhibit some of it yourself.