Tales from the Back Row (8 page)

• • •

Rick and I made up. Many outfits later, we got engaged and married. Rick tells me he knows better now than to comment on my clothes. I have learned to take his feedback on my apparel into consideration when we have to penetrate his world deeply or go to a bagel brunch with his family. Now that I've gotten my youthful, impulsive sweatpants-buying out of my system, I concentrate more on accruing clothes that are fun but perhaps slightly easier for peo
ple who have never been to Fashion Week to understand. Fortunately, the two weeks out of the year that Fashion Week occurs allow me to wear all the ridiculous outfits I'd want to wear in a year anyway. The beauty of the fashion industry is that while everyone in it judges everyone, in a way, they also judge no one.

The sweatpants and I are still together, but only on days when I'm lounging around my apartment and it's cold outside, because they have a little bleach stain on the front now. I don't know how it got there but somehow that made them seem unfit for nice dinners. Besides, the sweatpants that are now in style have a much slimmer fit. And no one wants to be off-trend in
old
sweats.

Now that Rick and I live together, every time I wear the pants I'm all, “Remember
these
pants? [
*wink wink*
]”

He'll sort of grin and we'll have a laugh over the whole thing. I even joke about it with his dad now.

However, I did learn a valuable lesson from the whole experience: don't ever go shopping high. Drunk shopping is fine. Stoned shopping will never end well.

3

Designers

when rachel zoe sent me a tree

A
couple years into my job at
New
York
mag, I was just minding my own business, doing the usual—sitting at my desk, staring at my screen—when the phone rang.

“This is Amy,” I said. I expected to be greeted by a publicist asking if I read her press release about this one tank top Kate Bos­worth wore when she was walking to her car.

Instead: “I have Carrie for you,” said the unmistakably scared voice of someone who makes a living by dialing phones for someone who is more powerful. Now I was getting scared. I felt like I was about to have the post-Pap-smear conversation no woman wants to have with her gynecologist. (I have checked with my friends in the business, and they have confirmed that they, too, view many publicists with the same affection as those who probe our vaginas with cold metal instruments.)

Carrie?
I thought.
Do I know a Carrie?
Truthfully, the only “Carrie” ringing bells upstairs was the fictional character with the last
name “Bradshaw.” Was this a magical daydream where she materializes as a real person to rescue me from my cubicle and take me on a walk around the West Village while we wear belts under our boobs and tutus on our heads?

No.

“Amy. It's Carrie.” I couldn't help but wonder:
Do I know a Carrie who is important enough to employ an assistant who shoulders the extreme burden of pressing buttons on a phone?
And more importantly:
How do I get one so I can screen calls like this and generally avoid doing things for myself ?

It is a universal truth of working in fashion/glossy media that everyone wants an assistant. Assistants are status symbols, like Chanel bags. Could you get by without one? In many cases, yes. But why would you if you could afford it? Assistants, like the Right Purses, automatically make a person seem four times as important and powerful as they are. But most importantly, assistants allow their bosses to avoid interactions with people. Assistants act as a buffer between you and your phone calls, you and your email, you and your nearest Starbucks, all of which can be filled with mightily unpleasant things like incompetency and waiting. And, worst of all, people you don't want to talk to.

“Are you writing a story about Rachel Zoe?” Carrie demanded. I felt like I had done something very, very wrong. She sounded as though she had just found out that I had slept with her husband.

“So-and-so from Bloomingdale's said you're writing a story about Rachel. Are you writing a story about Rachel?”

Ohhhh,
so this Carrie was Rachel's
publicist
. I started to get this feeling I had in grade school after I got in trouble for telling another girl in the periphery of my social circle the ghost story about Bloody Mary. I obviously
had
to tell this girl, Colleen, because this
was third grade, and if you weren't “in the know” about the ghost story going viral across campus, you were obviously setting yourself up to be some kind of loser. Anyway, I related that if she turned off the lights and performed some kind of ritual, like saying “Bloody Mary” a few times while turning around or something, she'd be faced with a lady named “Mary” covered in blood in the mirror. Well, Colleen took the tale a little too seriously, and one day her mom accosted me in the middle of an assembly wanting to know why I made her daughter afraid to go to the bathroom, as though
this had been my plan all along
. I wanted to say, “Your daughter is a moron for being afraid of using the toilet because of
ghosts
.” But I couldn't say that because I was the child and the mom was a
mom
—the
adult
—which made me the Lesser Person in the situation, unable to explain that I was actually doing poor Colleen a favor. I have precisely that feeling just about every time I talk to publicists. Even if they're just saying “Hello!” I automatically feel like I need an excuse for my existence.

“Yes, I just interviewed so-and-so from Bloomingdale's yesterday,” I began. “See, I'm writing a story about Rachel's new clothing line. I thought it was just
incredible
that she's launched her first collection in
so many stores
. And I'm working on a story about how unusual and
fabulous
that is.”

“Is this going to be a snarky, nasty story?”

How is she inside my brain?
I tended to approach stories from a cynical point of view at this point in my career, but that's because I was writing on the internet when “bloggers” were all known for being snarky and “blogging” was still like this nouveau thing that people like my dad didn't really believe was an actual job.

I got in trouble for being “mean” from time to time at the Cut. I only had to apologize for it once, and that was when I wrote
about the phenomenon that is haul vlogging. Haul vlogging, for those of you blessedly unfamiliar, is when you go shopping, come home, sit down in front of your web cam, and make a video of yourself talking about the things you bought. Let me tell you, more thrilling developments have not been made in the world of YouTube entertainment, no they have not. People haul vlog everything from Claire's jewelry to—and quite famously—Yankee Candles. I decided to do a post on haul vlogging one day, so I found what I thought was a particularly vapid example for a post. I combined it with a paragraph of text about what haul vlogging is, adding that people who haul vlog need lives and possibly cats. (I can defend the latter comment by affirming that I believe every person in the world needs a cat. Cats are the whipped cream and cherry of home life. They just are. I love them.)

Unbeknownst to me, this person had a huge following online, which quickly rallied behind her. They left hundreds of comments in support of her under my post. They called me a bitch. They called me fat. They called me ugly.

They attacked me on Twitter, too, which only served to increase my following, which meant that my self-esteem netted neither gain nor loss when the whole thing ended. However, the serious downside was that all the comments from this vlogger's followers shot the post to the top of the most-commented-on and most-viewed lists on the site, which everyone saw as soon as they landed on the homepage. These were usually an indicator of which bloggers won the website that day. However, in this instance, it meant that I had lost the website hard enough for my boss to call me on a weekend and tell me that I had to write an apology post. I wrote the apology post the next day. The comments from our regular Cut readers said things like, “Oh, Amy, you caved.” Even
though I had expressed a commonly held opinion about a ridiculous activity, I had made the mistake of coming out and expressing that opinion much too bluntly. But would I have told this girl to her face that she needed a life and a cat? No, which is why it was a mistake to put it in writing.

I quickly learned that fashion bloggers have to be really careful not to offend people. If you say something like, “[Insert Italian designer here] resembled orange Fanta in his swim trunks as the yacht pulled into port under a searing Mediterranean sun,” and that Italian designer gets really upset at having just been likened to orange soda by some rando sitting in a cubicle halfway around the world, his label might very well threaten to pull ads. Then you'll get into trouble. And you can forget owning your own yacht (
obviously
an attainable dream on a blogger's salary) because that Italian designer, Fanta colored or not, is funding your paycheck. It is thanks to that designer, that orange yacht owner with all the money, that you get the opportunity to sit in that cubicle and make jokes about ironic T-shirts. I also figured out that I couldn't randomly skewer a lot of the people involved in the industry without reason because I might want to interview them one day.

You know, like Rachel Zoe.

“
Nooooo
. No, not at
all
,” I reassured Carrie. “Everyone's talking about how Rachel's line is so amazing, and everyone wants to wear it, and how she has
such
a strong vision.” This wasn't a lie—Zoe had just launched a clothing line that had been picked up by Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom, among others. For a first-time designer (meaning, if you don't count her QVC collections), this was an undeniably unbelievable debut.

“And you weren't even going to
tell
Rachel you were doing this story?”

Writers don't
have
to tell designers they're writing about them. If they did, blogs wouldn't exist.

But if you want the designer's involvement with something, you have to go to their protectors eventually to get them to talk to you. I assumed Rachel wouldn't talk to me anyway since I tended to treat her with the same amount of skepticism on the blog as I did Miss Universe evening wear. Though I planned to ask her for comment after I figured out whether or not retailers were actually into her clothes or just viewed carrying them like going to other people's weddings—an obligation.

“I was going to
tell
Rachel, yes,” I said to Carrie. “I was just doing some initial reporting and hadn't gotten around to reaching out to you guys yet! You were next on my list. For
sure
.”

“All right,” she said, sounding a lot less like she wanted to punch me in the face. “I'll see if Rachel can talk to you.”

“Thank you! This story will be
so
great”—and the phone clicked.

• • •

For magazines like
Vogue
, access to famous designers is probably pretty easy most of the time.
Vogue
hardly ever writes anything bad about designers (or anyone else, for that matter). This also helps with advertising, allowing Anna Wintour to beef up her prized September issue with ad pages, so she can truck the thing into her meeting with Condé Nast executives on a wheelie cart, and then go on TV and talk about how much the issue WEIGHS and gloat about HOW FAT her magazine is this September (fatter than ever!). It is truly the only celebration of fatness the industry throws all year, for those September issues.

That's how you
avoid
getting “banned.” Innocuous things can get you “banned,” and once you are “banned,” you have to work to get the ban “lifted.” This is how designers hold sway over coverage: they threaten to ban outlets from their shows and pull advertising if outlets displease them.

Getting
banned feels much easier to do. You might make some fairly innocuous observations about the attendees at a designer's show, as
New
Y
ork Times
critic Cathy Horyn did once, prompting a ban letter from Armani, which she turned into an article about how she doesn't really need to go to his show anyway since all the runway photos just end up online. “What being banned tells me is that fashion has entered a borderland between the old and the new,” she wrote. “Practiced mainly by older designers, whose careers took flight in the 1980s, banning seems a reflexive action against a perceived threat to their power.”

Though
Vogue
possesses the uncanny ability to not get banned, even it was in fact banned from one designer's show—Azzedine Alaia—because it never photographs his clothing, presumably partly because he doesn't advertise and business-wise it has no reason to cater to him. (Fashion magazines tend to photograph the clothing of their advertisers.) Once an alleged list of whose clothes had to be photographed the most for a
Harper's Bazaar
shoot leaked on the internet. It read:

MINIMAL

10 PAGES +1A

PHOTOGRAPHER: [REDACTED]

FASHION EDITOR: [REDACTED]

LOCATION: LA

IN PRIORITY ORDER:

1-GIORGIO ARMANI

2-MICHAEL KORS

3-CALVIN KLEIN

4-YSL

5-CHLOÉ

6-VERSACE

7-AKRIS

8-DEREK LAM

9-CAROLINA HERRERA

10-CÉLINE

11-GIVENCHY (CHECKING)

12-STELLA MCCARTNEY

13-HERMÈS

14-REED KRAKOFF

NON-ADVERTISER (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

1-3.1 PHILLIP LIM

2-HELMUT LANG

3-NARCISO RODRIGUEZ

4-PRABAL GURUNG

5-PROENZA SCHOULER

This was greatly scandalous, as though
no one knew this happened
. (We do.) And I doubt that many readers care that small, penniless avant-garde labels that make hats out of Slinkies aren't getting photographed by
Harper's Bazaar
as regularly as Michael Kors. French
Vogue
and all its staff was also once banned from Balenciaga for a variety of rumored reasons, one involving an editor taking a sample Balenciaga coat to Max Mara, a label she consulted for. Eventually, the editor of the magazine had tea with Balenciaga's designer
and patched things up before going to ride on Ferris wheels together in a montage-worthy celebration of their friendship. (Kidding about everything after “tea,” but I just like imagining fashion people's lives as a series of montages set to the Beach Boys hit “Wouldn't It Be Nice.” )