Born to Be Brad (13 page)

That is what I wanted. Los Angeles could be a lonely place, and I counted on Gary for all of my entertainment, which put a strain on the still-new relationship. He was happy for us to have the time together. But he was adamant that I have my own experiences. For a relationship to work, he said, two people need to learn from each other. And he was right. He wanted me to blaze my own trail. When you are lost, it is too easy to give yourself up to somebody else. He wanted me to find what I was looking for. To survive, he said, I’d need to create a life for myself. The thought resonated. One of the tenets of AA is that to propel yourself forward, you need to stop taking from other people. On so many levels I had to create something for myself.

“For a relationship to work, he said, two people need to learn from each other.”

And so, just as suddenly, I was a twenty-four-year-old freshman at Santa Monica College, hoping to earn enough credits to transfer to USC. I was waiting for a sign, waiting to figure out what was next for me. Until then, I would drive myself to school at five thirty in the morning, because I preferred to go to the cafeteria and get work done than sit in rush-hour traffic. I was enrolled in general education classes, taking the lowest level of math. I took yoga classes and art history classes and journalism. I bought new spiral notebooks and new pens and pencils. The scene at school reminded me of
Clueless,
when Alicia Silverstone gives Brittany Murphy a tour around campus, explaining to her about the different cliques. We, too, had burnouts on the grassy knoll. We also had kids who hoped to transfer to bigger schools. We had wealthy kids in Range Rovers and head-to-toe Gucci and full makeup and blown-out hair. It was this great cross-section. I hung out with the Japanese exchange students. They have amazing style and they love fashion. They gave me exotic Japanese candies and I returned the favor by helping them with their English, and we exchanged stories of our cultures. I took French. In a prescient sign of the future to come, Guinevere van Seenus sat in front of me in class. I told her she should be a model. She smiled politely. When I went home and googled her, I found out she’d been on the cover of Italian
Vogue
at least twice. Uh-oh.

Here I am posing with model Amber Valletta at a benefit for the Friendly House in Los Angeles. This photo has surfaced before, and people often use it as a chance to say, “Brad Goreski wasn’t always so stylish!” But I disagree. This hat? It’s leather and it’s Tom Ford for Gucci. And it’s amazing. And it hides the fact that I had a blow-out for this party.

The joke of being a twenty-four-year-old college freshman was not lost on me. But I refused to take this lightly. I felt I had been given a second chance at life, and I didn’t want to waste it. And for the first time in my life my eyes were wide open. I vowed to learn the importance of looking at one’s surroundings. Of taking notes. Of observing. But what was I going to do with my life? Where was I going?

Gary and I were sitting on the couch one afternoon, and I was flipping through
V
magazine, talking about the photo shoots I loved and why the styling was so perfect. “You’re always talking about clothes and reading fashion magazines and looking at what people are wearing,” Gary said. “Why not do something in fashion?”

“I felt I had been given a second chance at life, and I didn’t want to waste it. And for the first time in my life my eyes were wide open.”

It was like the heavens parting. It’s odd that I didn’t think of fashion myself. But looking back, it just seemed too far away, too impossible. How would I get there? How would I break into one of the hardest industries in the world? How would I take the first step when I could see only how far away the goal was?

But now I knew this was what I needed to do. Looking back, my childhood was all about listening to my heart. And this is when I heard it again: the voice of Barbie calling me. I saw an eleven-year-old, overweight Brad Goreski in front of the television watching Jeanne Beker interview Marc Jacobs on Canadian TV, talking about his grunge collection for Perry Ellis.
This
was what I loved. Fashion was my calling.

“
This
was what I loved. Fashion was my calling.”

I
had opened myself up to the possibilities of a new life. This new life started with my telling anyone who would listen that I was looking for a job in fashion. I was sent an unlikely guardian angel in the form of Sara Switzer, an editor at
Vanity Fair,
who also happened to be Sandra Bernhard’s girlfriend. I was—and am still—obsessed with Sandra’s show
Without You I’m Nothing.
Gary and I were at a dinner party, and I was introduced to Sara. She was asking me all kinds of questions about what I was studying at school and what I wanted to do later. She took a vested interest in me and my future. I told her that a dream of mine was to intern at
Vogue.
Lo and behold, Michelle Sanders, the accessories editor at
Vogue,
was a good friend of hers, and Sara said she’d be happy to help me get an interview. She was simply being kind, I know that. But in her kindness was grace. I wasn’t sure if she understood the impact her introduction and faith had on my life, but it was significant, sending me off on a wild ride. I am still grateful to her for that kind gesture.

Rent This Movie!

WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING
(1990)

When I was working at Five Doors North, my coworker James lent me his VHS copy of Sandra Bernhard’s smash-hit one-woman show from 1987,
Without You I’m Nothing.
Of course I knew who she was, but I had never seen her perform. I was instantly obsessed. Sandra incorporates humor, social commentary, politics, pop culture, sexuality, fashion, pathos, and song into her performance. (Memorable quote: “My father’s a proctologist. My mother’s an abstract artist. That’s how I view the world.”) She has created her own form of theater that is completely faithful to her point of view and the way she sees the world. I’ve seen her perform many times and it is always a unique, wildly entertaining, and intelligent night. I adore her. If you have not seen her perform, do yourself a favor and go!

It happened quicker than I could have possibly imagined. There was no conference call with the human resources department at Condé Nast, the parent company of
Vogue
(and countless other luxury magazines). All it took was a phone call to the accessories editor, and after my freshman year at Santa Monica College I was on my way to New York for a summer internship at the very magazine I used to smuggle up to my bedroom.

I deplaned at JFK airport and climbed into a yellow taxicab, the Manhattan skyline once again coming into view. It appeared different this time, perhaps because I was not on vacation. This time, I would be a New Yorker. And I was instantly enlivened, as if the spirit of a Danceteria-era Madonna herself rushed through my veins. I felt this was the Manhattan of
Guys and Dolls
and
Fame
and
Annie.
This was the place where Stephen Sprouse and Keith Haring and Basquiat and Peter Lindbergh first made their marks, a place for artists and designers to come for inspiration. It all seemed so dangerous. I had dreamed of this moment for years, down to the smell of the cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery, which was just down the street from the apartment. I didn’t dream of late-night parties or the nightlife. I dreamed of something more ephemeral, of walking out my front door every day and being confronted by Manhattan. I dreamed of double-fisting Magnolia’s banana pudding and the yellow cake with the buttercream icing all at once.

“I dreamed of double-fisting Magnolia’s banana pudding and the yellow cake with the buttercream icing all at once.”

At twenty-four years of age, I was the oldest summer intern in Anna Wintour’s kingdom. And I was deadly serious about the job. I was living in a one-bedroom sublet on Charles Street; Gary’s friend James, a writer, was away in Provincetown for the summer and agreed to sublet the rent-stabilized apartment to me for the bargain-basement price of $1,200. Like all New York apartments, this one had its quirks—namely, an elderly neighbor who slammed her front door every time she came and went, so much so that the dishes and glassware in James’s apartment rattled. We came to call her “Donna Door Slammer.” But trust me, this place was a steal. Not least of all because it was in the West Village, around the corner from 66 Perry Street, an address made famous by
Sex and the City.
(While Carrie Bradshaw lived on the Upper East Side, the actual front stoop where they shot is on Perry.)

This sounds crazy in retrospect, but I can’t remember what I wore on my first day of work. But I know how I felt emerging from the elevator on the twelfth floor of the Condé Nast Building in Times Square. And what I felt in my bones was that I’d absolutely 100 percent worn the wrong thing. Over the next eight weeks of this sometimes-glamorous internship, there would be many days where I felt this way. It was too late. Like all new interns, I gave my name to the security guard in the lobby and he sent me on my way. The thought going through my head was simple: How did I get here?

In the twelfth-floor lobby I was greeted by the manager of the accessories closet—located across the hall from the fashion closet—and after the briefest of office tours I was deposited in our cramped, windowless space. There were four desks around the perimeter of the accessories closet, plus a wall of the latest handbags and Manolos kept under lock and key. But most of the action took place around a center island, a mess of drawers with tissue paper on top. This was where we stored all of the jewelry for the upcoming
Vogue
photo shoots. Millions of dollars in gold and baubles passed through that room every day. In the accessories closet, we, the overwashed masses of interns, huddled around the island and cataloged the pieces that came in, taking Polaroids of the jewels on fresh tissue paper and then immediately packing them back up so they would be ready to go out on a shoot.

No one at
Vogue
told me any of this, by the way. We were taught not to ask questions. What little I knew about my job responsibilities came from the other interns. It was a high-pressure office; that much I understood. Do you know that scene in
The Devil Wears Prada
where Meryl Streep arrives early to the office and the editors scramble around trying to put themselves together before she shows up? That really happens. I know this because one day early that summer a girl wearing denim and unimpressive heels was unexpectedly called into Anna Wintour’s office. I’ve never seen someone give themselves a makeover so quickly. In five minutes, this girl had gone into the fashion closet and changed into a dress, grabbed a pair of Manolos, and put on a full face. I thought,
Vogue
really
is
a magical place.

As an intern at
Vogue
. I worked in the accessories closet and never needed a reason to try on a Dior fur hat. There’s now a no-try-on rule for interns, and if you’re caught messing around you can be fired. Thankfully, that rule wasn’t in place in 2004.

“Vogue really
is
a magical place.”

From the outside, the environment was pretty—all fresh-cut flowers and scrubbed-clean faces. But underneath it could be a minefield. We had thirty minutes to eat, and we barely took that. You certainly didn’t bring food back up to your desk. You weren’t checking in jewelry while eating a Cobb salad. I learned very quickly that we interns had to compete among one another like the kids in
The Hunger Games
. We were all angling for the same prize: the chance to go on a real
Vogue
photo shoot. That was the golden ticket. That was our raison d’être. But how to get there? I didn’t know how to act. And so I acted like someone from the movies. I acted like I imagined someone who has an apartment in the West Village and an internship at Condé Nast should act. I was impossibly serious at all times. I was asleep by eleven. I went to Broadway shows. I went to bookstores and art galleries. I acted like my idea of a Manhattan grown-up.