Tales from the Back Row (23 page)

I asked how the group show came to be.

“Well, we all work really closely with People's Revolution, and so that's how it came about,” Whitney said sassily. She talked a little bit about how she was stressed out by the whole process but claimed her line was doing well.

Kelly, again, like I was unfairly leading the witness, inserted herself into the conversation: “We just started [the line]. This is like her debut and launch of the collection.”

Because I
had to,
and also because I felt a bit bad for the other designers getting no press from the
People
s and
InTouch
es in the crowd, I briefly questioned Nicole Kunz, who had just presented her line, Nicholas K. She had showed alongside Mara Hoffman last season. “We know the routine, and Whitney came aboard, so
we were happy to help her out with the whole process,” she claimed as even more attention piled on Whitney in the form of more cameras and more tape recorders and more gossip reporters who couldn't give a flying eff that this had been a fashion show. All it really served as was access to a reality television star who happened to have stitched her name into some sparkly short shorts.

Eventually, the gossip reporters encroaching upon the area like a bad rash became so bothersome that the non–Whitney Port designers fled the scene, hopefully to a Starbucks or street corner where they'd be perhaps even less recognizable but probably more cared about. Whitney was clearly self-conscious about getting all the attention, which is probably why she was so testy (either that, or she just hated me; who can say?), but she eventually accepted that this was going to be Her Moment and deigned to answer my questions. She told me the collection was “
Alice in
Wonderland
goes to a cocktail party”–inspired.

She made it sound like she wasn't really planning to have this show—it just sort of happened the way that growing breasts just happens. “You know what? I just—it kind of came into place really, really fast within the last couple weeks when I found out, and I just pulled it together really fast,” she said. “But I didn't really think it through so much. I was just like, you know, I have this chance, this ability, and I might as well go for it.”

She said she would work “behind the scenes” at some other fashion shows. (But not really, because the cameras would probably be there. If she were really working shows because this was her Real Job, that would be the equivalent of Britney Spears performing at the Grammys and then crewing on Beyoncé's set.)

“No one was with the other designers?” I overheard Cutrone
saying to her staff, presumably the kind who weren't there to be on camera. One of them said something about how something had come up: “Oops!”

Before I could exit the room, a production assistant wearing a headset stuck a clipboard with a release form in my face: “Can you sign this? You were in one of the background shots.”

Gladly! Anything to see myself on TV. Because, the media has taught me, I work in fashion, and television—where everyone can see what my fashion industry life is sort of like—is where I belong.

• • •

The
City
didn't last very long on MTV. Cutrone went on to have a show on Bravo, but that didn't last very long either. I imagine its cancellation stemmed from how hard it was to pull compelling story lines out of footage of people with small, messy desks in an office where everyone snaps at one another and is stressed out over things like parties and stylists borrowing pants.

Whitney Port is also off a regular series, though she's retained enough residual fame to end up in the British tabloid
Daily Mail
from time to time. I don't remember anything very interesting being written about her of late, but I do know her legs always look nice in paparazzi photos.

As for me, you'll be glad to know I have not signed a deal to star in my own reality show because no one cares about me. However, I did get on
The City
. It was only a second or so of my face on the screen, but it was still long enough for a couple of my friends to text me and be like “omg is that YOU on
The City
?!?!” Fame. It really can strike anyone.

Some people I know who once were invisible people and be
came fashion people and remain very fashion-famous claim to have grown tired of all the attention. Their stars were born on the sidewalks outside fashion shows, where they posed for street photographers.

Famous fashion blogger Susie Bubble, who moves through Fashion Week with a trail of photographers on her heels at all times and has been blogging since 2006, has an incredibly unique sense of style. She now sits front row just about everywhere, and told me her aspirations aren't about remaining in the public eye or bolstering her image as a celebrity, but she would like to work more behind-the-scenes in fashion, perhaps in manufacturing. “I really am wary of overstepping beyond your capacity. Because you've got to remember the industry is full of really talented photographers, stylists, art directors, and again, we're in this kind of new territory where bloggers are kind of doing anything and everything.” She added, “I wouldn't want to disrespect anyone who has worked really hard in the industry, slogged their guts out interning for everyone.”

Susie said she has no idea how she gained her following but thinks her success has something to do with being one of the first bloggers to gain attention for her site. “I work hard, but I would say I'm really, really lucky. I'm fully, fully, fully aware that all of it can just disappear in a flash as well. And if it did, I wouldn't be so cut up about it because you always knew that things can go up and down.”

Phil Oh, one of the more famous street-style photographers who started around the time that Susie did and came up after the Sartorialist, described the fallout from the fame factory the fashion business has become. “This one editor was always so gracious to all the photographers. Street style helped her career—and she's really
talented and had a great eye, so it's not like she wouldn't have been recognized sooner or later—but this sort of expedited it,” he said. “People would call her a street-style star, as if that was the only thing she did, which does her and a lot of the subjects of the photos a great disservice. This [past] season she's been rushing out of shows quickly or hiding in a group. I think with an increase in photographers, people get mobbed and people get jealous.”

I do not get mobbed. I get my moments in the spotlight here and there, and for the sake of profession advancement, I try to be as much of a personality as seems beneficial. I'll take any scrap of press that comes my way. Like when online store Net-A-Porter's discount site the Outnet wanted to feature me in a newsletter and a video on their site right before I left the Cut. Of course, I said yes—Fun! Photo shoot! Attention!—expecting it to be kind of nothing, but then it turned out to be the most fun shoot I'd ever been on. It didn't hurt that they had a catering table where all the food was tiny and colorful and served exclusively on small square plates.

I got to try on a bunch of designer clothes and tell them how I wanted my hair and makeup done. When I said I wanted my hair blown totally straight and slicked back, they congratulated me on my choice. “Everyone's been asking for voluminous, wavy hair!” the stylist said, making me feel legitimately good for spicing up her routine with a request for a flatiron and some gel.

When I was sitting in the chair, someone came over and offered me champagne, which I accepted. After a red lipstick was applied, a straw was brought over on a tray so I could sip it without ruining my lip look. I would later figure out that they were trying to get me a little drunk so that I'd be less awkward in my shoot.
If only they had lubricated my posing abilities with alcohol when they did that
Elle
shoot all that time ago
, I thought. Fortunately, though I still felt like I looked stupid most of the time, I now felt I had enough experience getting my picture taken to know not to wear underwear I should have thrown out three weeks ago on photo-shoot day. And that if I looked dumb, the person who got photographed before me looked, well, equally so.

And it was a
serious
shoot, so I was feeling more nervous about it than usual. There were probably around ten people there, not to mention a dense semicircle of equipment clustered before the all-white backdrop. If they were shooting a TV segment on this for
Access Hollywood
, you'd expect to see J. Lo on the set.

When it came time to choose footwear for my first look, the fringed Sergio Rossi booties I wanted to wear were a size too small.

“Maybe you can squeeze into them,” one of the stylists told me.

An assistant rushed over with those little panty hose foot coverings they give you when you try on shoes at Nine West, aka foot lube.

“I'll hold the shoe, you push,” she said. I stood up, and with one person holding my arm and her holding the shoe I crammed my foot into it. Once I had them both on, I scooted onto the set for the first shot. I was all dressed up with nowhere to go and had to expose my extreme lack of modeling talents to a room full of total strangers gazing at me like a sleeping zoo animal they just knew would awaken from behind its bale of hay and start exhibiting interesting, performance-like behaviors. Sensing my stiffness, the people working on the shoot demonstrated some sample poses for me from behind the cameras.

Once they got that shot, I changed into another dress and strappy sandals. My large feet were now red from forcing them into the Sergio Rossis.

“Oh, shoot, her feet are discolored,” a shoot producer said. “Stay there, don't move. Patrick!” she cried to the makeup artist. “See her feet there? The red? Can we fix that?”

Patrick grabbed his whitest concealer and foundation and lay on his stomach on the floor before my feet. He began dabbing makeup on the red spots.

“I suppose that'll do. We can fix the rest in post,” she said. “Retouching will always save you, eh!”

I felt mortified. I am not J. Lo, I don't need makeup on my feet, and I don't need someone to lie on the floor to apply it. But having gone from making restaurant reservations for someone who fired me to . . . having makeup applied to my feet while I got my picture taken proved that hard work can take you further than you ever expected. Invisibility for many in the fashion business is only temporary.

I set about prancing to and fro with my faux-surprised face again. I've never been important enough to have makeup applied to my feet ever again. But I'm sure Patrick is this close to signing a deal for his own Bravo show. He had a sparkling personality and affinity for Twitter that just gets you places.

8

You and Me

a dress to remember. (and a few margaritas to forget the rest of them.)

I
was sitting next to Joanna Coles, the
Cosmo
editor in chief, in her black chauffeured town car on a Sunday afternoon after the DKNY fashion show. It was September, and Fashion Week had struck again proceeding once more to throw the industry into its biannual period. The magazine's fashion director, Aya, sat in the front seat, and we were on our way to the restaurant Cookshop in nearby Chelsea, where we would talk about Miley Cyrus and eat salad together. I had just days prior started a new job as the editor of
Cosmopolitan.com
, tasked with turning it into the biggest, most relevant website in the world for Millennial women. This was my first season working for Hearst, one of the world's top publishing houses and the owner of
Cosmo
; my Fashion Week experience was decidedly less dumpy than recent seasons. This is the up-and-coming fashion person's equivalent of being presented at court like a Jane Austen character. You dream of it, you work for it, and one
day you realize it's here, and you're out. Just like being “out” you end up dancing awkwardly at a lot of stuffy parties. (Lots of people in fashion dance awkwardly—when people with no fat really “get down,” they can't help but look like old people shaking it after a couple appletinis.)

Before landing at
Cosmopolitan.com
, during my eighteen-month stint at online web then-start-up BuzzFeed, the site known for grainy photos strung into thematic lists with numbers in the headline for people to post on Facebook, my Fashion Week access wasn't so great. Turns out, high fashion is (shockingly) incongruous with “What 10
Arrested Development
Stars Look Like Now” and “29 People Who Shouldn't Be Allowed to Use Facebook,” so my invitations—determined by people who still fax and couldn't reconcile seeing their collection published alongside “31 Dog Reactions for Everyday Situations”—hadn't been terribly fancy or exclusive for a few seasons. And, I realized, I missed it. I missed my back-row access. I missed the community of people I had been with
in
this bizarre world, who understood that Dries Van Noten not only existed but was also important.

Joanna, who was editor in chief of
Marie Claire
before landing at
Cosmo
, needed no one to explain to her why I should go to Fashion Week. She is a sharp-witted Brit who knows as much about fashion as Anna Wintour, but, unlike Anna, possesses human qualities that allow you to actually sit down and have a conversation or lunch with her without feeling like a huge loser about to die by way of extreme outfit shaming. When I interviewed with Joanna, rather than give my clothes the up-and-down, ew-you're-not-actually-wearing-those-pumps look like Anna, she
complimented my shoes
. As soon as I walked in the door for that interview, I handed her a sample lineup of what I'd put on the site if I had the job that day,
and she looked at it and said that my first idea—why you shouldn't be nervous about heading into the world after graduation—was “fantastic.”

Joanna, a leather-pants-wearing friend of Sheryl Sandberg who knows her way around a fashion show as well as a political convention or pro-choice fund-raiser, urged me to attend “all the major shows” and made room for me on the front row right next to her when she saw me slinking to my assigned second-row spot behind her. In roughly six years, I had gone from the standing section somewhere near Canada to a front-row seat, hip to hip with one of the industry's most formidable and respected editors. The status wasn't nearly as gratifying as the realization that I had physically and symbolically worked my way up. That cliché mom advice is really true: all that hard work and dedication can pay off.

In the car that day, Joanna asked me about my wedding, which was then nine months away. Over the course of a few years, Rick had managed to work through all his issues about my fashion-­forward sweatpants and proposed.

“What are you going to wear?” Aya asked from the front seat.

This is one of the first questions women hear when someone finds out they're engaged. This is a question many young ladies just
talking
about weddings for no reason will ask one another. Because weddings are the only time anyone
really
cares about what you're going to wear to an event. It's also the only time anyone really cares about your outfit for a reason other than making sure what they were thinking of wearing was a suitable selection—the main reason women ask one another about their future outfits at all. A wedding is many women's one time to wear something that says, “I am the star today. Bask in my formal wear!”

I had no idea what I'd wear. “You know, so many wedding dresses scare the shit out of me,” I said. Devoted wedding dress reality show viewer that I was, I know well that many dresses make you look like you farted toilet paper into a conical pile. The sole alternative seemed to be getting encrusted with so much bad white lace that you look like a dead coral reef.

I vowed to look like neither when I got married. However, given the seemingly dire, antiquated taste level of the bridal industry at large, this felt more like a far-off dream than even a remote possibility. Imagining even what that would look like felt impossible because the wedding dresses that seem to get the most attention are the “too rich to have taste” celebrity wedding looks on the cover of
U
s
Weekly
. Brides want a dress that makes them feel and look special. Some brides achieve it by wearing the biggest, most eye-catching dress they can find. Others (me, hopefully) achieve it by finding something that's a little bit different from the bulk of what's out there.

“You know what you should do,” Joanna said, “you should call up Anne Fulenwider and ask her what you should wear.”

Anne Fulenwider had recently become the editor in chief of fellow Hearst title
Marie Claire
after many years at the helm of
Brides
. Well, this was a new experience, riding in a chauffeured vehicle with one of New York's top editors in chief, who had encouraged me to pick up my desk phone and dial the four-digit extension of one of the world's foremost wedding experts to ask her advice.
Maybe I can also ring up Kate Middleton and ask her which tiaras I should buy for my bachelorette party
, I thought.
Working at Hearst was really turning out to be the greatest. In order to get this kind of advice otherwise, I'd have to be selected to guest star on some reality show, and I'd like to think I'm a
hair
too sane for that ever to happen.

• • •

This was a truly exciting opportunity, buying a wedding dress. Because I am not a regular consumer of Real Fashion—clothes that are incredibly expensive and bear a designer label—it promised to be my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a hard-core romance with a dress I would spend a lot of money on, only to wear one day of my life, for just a matter of hours. For me, and for most women, life is not a series of
Vogue
photo spreads. Life is a series of events that sometimes require wearing a dress, sometimes require leggings and Ugg boots. The life of a celebrity or socialite or model or other regular consumer of Real Fashion is often generously seasoned with occasions where she needs a dress with a four-, if not five-, figure price tag that she will wear for only a few hours. But for the average person, the occasion to disregard costs in favor of glamour, and fuss indulgently over her outward appearance, pre­sents itself only on her wedding day.

And what a glorious time this is. Because there is nothing more arousing to many a female brain than wedding dresses. Whether it belongs to her, her best friend, her boyfriend's friend's wife, or just your standard reality television victim—all wedding dresses possess a cracklike quality that makes them interminably addictive to look at.

Wedding dresses tend to look more “normal” than your standard high-fashion dress. A nonbridal high-fashion show might include sleeves so long they drag on the floor or full face coverings that look like leggings pulled over the head with not even so much as eyeholes, while the weirdest bridal show will feature models carrying parasols. Bridal labels have their own Fashion Week. (Traditionally, wedding dresses are the finale looks in couture shows,
so you also see wedding dresses during couture week, but these tend to be weirder and just for show, as pretty much no one but Middle Eastern royalty both can afford and elect to purchase couture.) And separating bridal from the rest of fashion means everyone gets to look at more wedding dresses, totally uninterrupted, all day every day and get as tired of it as of chocolate. And everyone knows “I'm tired of chocolate” is a thing no person has ever said.

(I realize not everyone will agree with me that wedding dresses are this great and some will accuse me of dispelling a very sexist notion that women are defined by their weddings, when they're obviously defined by much more than that, like their careers. And I agree, women are more empowered than that, and I would never suggest they weren't, but I am also unafraid to profess shamelessly my love of all things wedding and bridal because that shit is pretty. And playing with clothes is fun. It's pick-up sticks for adults who have their own discretionary income. It's the NFL game for chicks who don't give a fuck about football. I don't watch sports or scripted television, so I will enjoy very much this vapid indulgence without shame.)

Having spent several years attending runway shows, poring over every high-fashion magazine, studying street-style stars, and working with amazing editors and stylists, I had finally picked up some styling tricks myself. I no longer went around in the same look I wore in middle school. I wanted my wedding dress, of all outfits, to reflect that. I wanted a dress that was elegant, probably with some sparkle, that suited our setting, my fiancé's grandparents' house on the beach. Having spent years writing about the world's premiere designer clothes, I wanted something fashionable. This would be my once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend money on a piece of Real Fashion—a delicious evening gown, with a
train!—and I was more likely to reveal my secret alter ego as Icelandic musical artist Björk than wear a dress that made me look like a Victorian-era doily.

My friend with impeccable taste, Tara, who took me shoe shopping before my interview at
Vogue
, suggested I get something like the dress Kate Moss wore for her wedding. I looked it up in
Vogue
and saw that magical photo: the bride, at the edge of the frame, and John Galliano fanning the veil out behind her. (He designed the look after getting fired from Christian Dior when his anti-Semitic outburst was exposed to the world by a British tabloid.) The world's most fashionable woman wore something relatively simple for her wedding. Her dress looked like a well-fitting boho nightie made of fine tulle and then expertly smattered with some glittery doodads. I wanted the same trying-but-also-not-trying vibe of her dress. And the reason so many fashion images seem
cool
and
sort of like something you can emulate
is because the editors and photographers behind them make them seem effortless. But: surprise! It takes a lot of trying. It took me, like, a week of trying to get my picture taken at Fashion Week in some boyfriend jeans and a white shirt.

I began my dress search by making appointments at bridal salons. In New York, booking bridal appointments gets intense. A lot of women travel great distances to shop at Kleinfeld because they've seen it on
Say
Yes to the Dress
. This means every weekend at Kleinfeld is like Bridal Black Friday. Good luck. I decided to skip Kleinfeld and lined up appointments at other places not associated with reality television shows.

(As soon as I got engaged, I looked up how to get on
Say
Yes to the Dress
but never applied because it looked harder than filling out a form to get into college.)

I was expecting the day to be like the Anne Hathaway smash hit
(read: critically panned) film and required girl viewing
Bride
Wars
, minus the wars. Champagne for showing up, empty stores except for my family and me, the general feeling that I was acting in my own real-life rom-com. I soon learned that's not what wedding dress shopping is like at all.

At the first store we went to, Gabriella in SoHo, I insisted on trying on supersimple things only.

“I want something like what Kate Moss had,” I informed the saleswoman.

She proceeded to guide me through the racks, pulling out dresses she thought might suit me, explaining that patrons were not allowed to pick things up themselves. When you're looking for a wedding dress, you're not allowed to pull things out yourself because when you walk into a wedding store, the assumption goes, grown women lose all ability to pick up clothes and hold them without soiling them, dropping them, or ripping them. And so every interaction with a wedding dress is supervised carefully, like you're picking up prescription drugs in prison. I think this is because the dresses are expensive as all hell and the stores keep only one or two in stock at a time for people to try on, so they don't want to take any chance of a brash bride staining one of them. But really, talk about a way to make grown women feel infantile. After all, anyone can walk into Saks and throw on a $2,000 Stella ­McCartney blazer hanging on the rack like it ain't no thing.