The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Historically this hasn’t been an easy thing to pull off. Earlier we had walked by the famously weird statue of Marilyn Monroe outside the hotel in which she is shown at the peak of her wilyairhead-bombshell glory. I bring it up to Upton and suggest that, as a culture, we are still puzzling over whether or not it was Monroe’s volcanic sexuality that destroyed her—and if, as consumers of it, we were complicit. Upton leans in and looks me square in the eye: “Maybe it was drugs and alcohol that destroyed her. Maybe having no family support destroyed her.” She leans back. “What I try to do—and it took me a little while to learn—is to only do things I really believe in so that it’s more of a collaboration. That way, I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not. I’m not putting out this, Look at me! I’m sexy! and then feeling like a fake, which would lead to feeling depressed and empty inside.”

  Making a movie that trades off her smokin’-hot goofiness would certainly appear to be a sign that, having conquered media old and new, Upton is ready to take her career to the next level. She’s had cameos in a couple of small films, but later this month, she will star in the Nick Cassavetes comedy The Other Woman, alongside Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann, in which all three women discover they are being cheated on by the same man and plot revenge against him. When I saw the trailer in a packed theater over the holidays, the air got sucked out of the room as Upton, in a bikini, came bouncing down the beach in slow motion. It’s not exactly the role of a lifetime—more Bo Derek in 10 than Cher in Silkwood—but it’s a start. After all, Monroe had to take a lot of laughing-at-me-not-with-me dumb-blonde parts before she got to Some Like It Hot.

  Let’s admit it: Not everyone can be Kate Upton. So many of the girls who go into modeling are plucked from obscurity when they are very young, and most of them never make it anywhere near the top. As Elite’s Vicky Yang put it to me, “I think she’s an outlier. The group you are interviewing are 0.1 percent of the business.” Having written about the supermodels in the early nineties and then having looked at the industry again in 2007, I have sometimes worried that modeling was turning into a glamorous form of indentured servitude, with so many nameless, faceless women from the Czech Republic or southern Brazil walking show after show, with no real role other than to look exactly the same: mannequins, the worst cliché of the business.

  For models these days, social media offer the promise of a different kind of career: one that is more connected, more fulfilling, and, if they are lucky (and want it), lasts longer than three or four years. And while there’s nothing surprising about the fact that this new crop feels comfortable on social media—they are part of the generation that’s grown up on them—it still takes a certain mastery of the form (your own jargon, an irresistible personality) to really stand out. Even then, the top models might have only one million followers, as opposed to the tens of millions that actors and pop stars have.

  In the wake of Kate Upton’s social-media-fueled rise, models are grappling with exactly how to present themselves. “It’s a really interesting opportunity for them,” says Lara Cohen, Twitter’s head of TV and film talent, “because it gives them a voice and makes them more three-dimensional. There’s no shortage of pictures of Coco Rocha out there, but to know that she likes watching New Girl humanizes her.”

  Everyone agrees that Rocha was the first high-fashion model to embrace social media across every platform. And you can tell from one look at her constantly updated Tumblr or Instagram feed that she unequivocally loves it. So does Liu Wen. “It’s just part of my life,” she says. Liu is not only China’s first supermodel, she is America’s first Chinese supermodel—the first Chinese woman to walk the Victoria’s Secret runway, the first to become a global face of Estée Lauder, and also, along with Kloss, the current face of Coach. With 6.8 million followers on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter), Liu also has, by far, the biggest social-media audience of any model—and, perhaps uncoincidentally, she seems to be the least conflicted about it: “Before, on Instagram, only a thousand people like me. Right now it’s 280,000. I am very happy about that. Chinese people have a word. We say, Not you happy—you have to make everyone happy. To share the happy. That is very important.”

  Not every model finds it so simple. Perhaps the most in-demand model in the world, Joan Smalls is ranked number one on models.com but had only 170,000 Instagram followers when I met her in Paris at Hôtel Costes during Fashion Week. Many of her adoring fans have no idea that she is Puerto Rican, the daughter of an accountant and a social worker who grew up in rural Hatillo. Smalls, wearing a camouflage button-down, a black trucker’s cap, supertight jeans, and a pair of boyish Céline shoes, tells me she is determined to change all of that with her presence on social media (and in fact her number of followers has since grown to more than 340,000). Like most of the models I spoke with, she resisted Twitter at first. “Some people are so good at it, and I kind of envy that,” she says. “How are you so cheeky?”

  It is true that Twitter is not for the faint of heart—or the less verbally inclined. “There’s a reason why comedians and musicians have been the early adopters,” says Cohen. “They’re the ones who are most comfortable in front of an open microphone, which is basically what Twitter is.” Putting yourself out there as a model now means exposing yourself to an unprecedented level of scrutiny and criticism. Many models no longer read the comments on their feeds. And can you blame them? Scroll through and see if you feel better about humanity. “You have to kind of detach from what people think of you,” says Smalls, “because sometimes it’s just too hurtful. Opinions are like belly buttons: Everybody has one.”

  Especially when it comes to in-your-face sexuality. If Upton is a potent reminder that Sex Still Sells, not every model feels entirely comfortable with that equation. “You see some models’ profiles and what they post,” says Smalls, “and it can be oversexualized to get more followers—and more jobs. I’m like, Now, was that necessary?” Thanks to social media, models have a whole new set of lines to draw. “I will do topless in pictures but not topless in video,” says Smalls. She gestures toward her breasts and mentions the ever-popular GIF memes. “I do not want to see these in motion!” But video is now often part of the fashion picture, literally. As Stuart Vevers, who recently left Loewe to be executive creative director at Coach, explains, social media has allowed for “campaigns to be much more 360,” he says. “It’s important now to tell a story, whether it’s with video or a hashtag or an Instagram post.” Models are often the lead characters in these stories.

  To tell their own stories, Instagram really has become the Twitter feed for those who prefer to say it with pictures. So whether it’s Cara Delevingne showcasing her new grillz and posting fifteen-second videos of herself partying on New Year’s Eve with Rihanna, Karlie Kloss and her boyfriend visiting shrines in Myanmar, or Joan Smalls relaxing with her mother in Puerto Rico, Instagram offers a glimpse of these models’ peripatetic lives—and a hit of the voyeuristic thrill that is the strange pleasure of social media. “I follow all these girls,” says Prabal Gurung, “and when you see them together backstage or at an after-party, it brings you back to that glamorous world of fashion.”

  There’s no such thing as living in the moment anymore. Thanks to social media, every event, from the Super Bowl to the State of the Union, from the Olympics to your best friend’s wedding, now happens in real time and “real” time. It certainly has completely transformed our experience of fashion. As Zac Posen says, “I think the big transition started almost a decade ago, with the realization that fashion had gone beyond the industry and had become fashion-tainment.” Posen, of course, is a judge on Project Runway, a show whose success has served to point out that, surprisingly enough, untold millions are fascinated by how dresses are made—and how someone from Kalamazoo gets to Fashion Week.

  Last fall, things felt palpably different at New York Fashion Week by virtue of the fact that a giant screen at the tents at Lincoln Center “surfaced beautiful Instagram images from across the city
,” says Instagram and Facebook’s Wilson, who is part of a whole new cadre of tech-savvy fashion people who make the rounds during the shows interfacing with brands, bloggers, and models. “The idea was to bring what was happening inside the tents, these rarefied places of fashion, outside to the public and vice versa. It was like this giant beautiful feedback loop.” The Instagram screen at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week this February was twenty-seven feet wide.

  Along with lifting the curtain on fashion, social media have fundamentally altered its process. Jason Wu cast Christy Turlington in his last campaign after “getting to know her” on Instagram. They didn’t actually meet in the flesh until the day of the shoot. “She’s the kind of model I’m attracted to,” he says, “women who have a story behind them. It brings something to the clothes.” Designers are also responding to social media as a source of inspiration—Instamuse! “You see things that you wouldn’t have been privy to before,” Wu says. “It’s like you get to flip through everyone’s photo albums constantly.” All of these midcareer designers are having to adapt, learning by necessity to work with the tools of this new era. “When I was younger, the only thing I went to were magazines,” says Thakoon Panichgul. “I’d go through them and see these beautiful images from Bruce Weber or Avedon. But the way that I absorb information now is through Instagram. And that is sort of translating to the way that I’m designing. The clothes are a bit more reflective of that attitude of the street because of it.”

  There’s no doubt that social media have opened fashion up to new influences—and influencers, as stylish people are now called. But do selfies sell clothes? So far, the answer seems to be, not so much. Last August, the social-media-news website Mashable posted a piece with the headline “Social Media Fails to Drive Sales for Fashion Brands. Now What?” Based on a study of nearly 250 “prestige” fashion brands over the last four years, the article revealed abysmal numbers: “Less than 0.25 percent of new customers have been acquired through Facebook and less than 0.01 percent from Twitter.”

  How to monetize fashion content on social media is a big topic these days at all the social-media platforms, where fashion represents no small percentage of their content. Of the more than 170 million blogs on Tumblr, for instance, posts tagged #fashion have generated 23.7 million notes in a single month. But so far, no one seems to have found an exact correlation between chatter and sales. As Twitter’s Cohen tells me, there’s a lot of talk around the halls about “what tweeting signifies in terms of ‘intent to buy.’” Indeed, there are now tech companies like ShopSense and RewardStyle that are focusing all their code-writing know-how on figuring out how to turn tweets and likes into dollars and cents. Amber Venz created RewardStyle with her partner, Baxter Box. The nut they seem to have cracked is how to bring a “like” one step closer to a “buy” through an instantaneous e-mail of a product that has been liked. If the “liker” buys the product, the blogger or the magazine where it originally appeared gets a percentage of the sale. It’s a big if.

  Which also raises the question: Are models actually moving merchandise? “Interestingly enough, no,” says Venz. “It’s really the personal-style bloggers. And we’re talking about a twenty-two-year-old girl from Utah who’s excelling as far as driving revenue for the brands.”

  One of the many strange paradoxes that the collision of fashion and social media has created is the so-called democratization of something that has for so long been built on exclusivity. “It’s kind of cool to be nice right now,” says social-media-ist and Lucky editor in chief Eva Chen. “Look at Prabal Gurung and Alex Wang. Everyone feels like they can be part of their cool-girl clique. If you look at the brands that everyone’s talking about—Warby Parker, Toms shoes—there’s a sense of openness and transparency. It’s the Obama generation.”

  When it comes to modeling, this new mood has left room not only for Kate Upton to begin to grab magazine covers and beauty contracts back from pop and movie stars but for other outliers to dare to dream as well: girls like Charlotte Free, a.k.a. “Tumblr girl,” who has hot-pink hair; Soo Joo Park, a platinum-blonde Korean American who just hit 100,000 followers on Instagram; and Kelly Mittendorf, who updates her Tumblr seemingly every fifteen minutes. “It’s usually girls with a really striking look,” says Chen. “You see pictures of them at Coachella; they answer questions on Tumblr. They’re relatable.”

  But even in this social-media-besotted world of ours, mystique still has value, doesn’t it? If, when it comes to models, Kate Upton is the bodacious—and gravity-defying—Marilyn Monroe and Cara Delevingne is the let-it-all-hang-out Lena Dunham, Kate Moss is the never-let-’em-see-you-sweat Greta Garbo. She has not once tweeted or “liked” a single thing in her fabulous life, and yet she is, arguably, the most intriguing person modeling has ever known. “Kate is Kate,” as one fashion person put it to me. “She can do whatever she wants.” Like that pitch-perfect cover of Playboy that seemed to sell out on New York newsstands in one day. When I took my seat at Marc Jacobs’s Louis Vuitton farewell show back in October, I picked up the requisite folder off my chair and flipped through the list of models and looks. Included among the sheaf of exquisite black stationery was a letter from Jacobs. Its theme: “the showgirl in all of us.” Among the list of the thirty-four women who inspire him, Kate Moss was the only model who made the cut.

  National Journal

  FINALIST—PUBLIC INTEREST

  Described as “wrenching” and “thorough” by the National Magazine Award judges, “Jackie’s Goodbye” is both Tiffany Stanley’s personal account of caring for an aunt suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and an indictment of our failure as a nation to provide assistance not only to the victims of the disease but also to those burdened with its emotional and financial costs. Stanley is the managing editor of Religion and Politics, the online journal of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Founded in 1969, National Journal is published weekly by the Atlantic Media Company for a readership largely consisting of Washington policy makers.

  Tiffany Stanley

  Jackie’s Goodbye

  I became an Alzheimer’s caregiver the week of my twenty-ninth birthday. It was August 2012, and I was standing at my kitchen counter in Washington when I got a call from a family friend telling me, “We have a problem.” My father had been hospitalized with congestive heart failure. For seven years, he’d been the primary caregiver for his older sister, who had Alzheimer’s disease. Without his oversight, she had followed his hospitalization with one of her own after collapsing in her bedroom from dehydration or low blood sugar or both. My sixty-six-year-old aunt was a widow with no children. My father was a divorced bachelor, and I was an only child. They were my responsibility.

  I had thought I would drive the eight hours to my hometown in South Carolina to get my aunt, Jackie Belcoe, settled back at home, and perhaps hire a nurse to come help out during the day. But when I got there, I found a much graver situation than I had expected.

  Tucked into her hospital bed at Lexington Medical Center, Jackie looked so frail and sick that it was heartbreaking. She had been a hairdresser for many years and once owned her own salon. She was the woman who taught me to wear lipstick, who never left the house without her mascara on and her blond bob perfectly styled. Now, her hair was matted and unkempt. She needed a bath and her teeth brushed.

  In the emergency room, a nurse had cut the urine-soaked T-shirt off her body. When the paramedics found her, she told them she was nineteen and lived at home with her parents.

  Though her parents were no longer alive, it was true that she lived in the house where she had grown up. I soon learned that conditions there were as deplorable as the state she was found in. Her bed and sheets were soiled, and dirty laundry had been left beside the washer. A trail of feces stained the carpet from the bed to the bathroom. It was clear that Jackie, like many late-stage dementia patients, had become incontinent—a fact that perhaps a caregiver who was also a brother
was too ashamed to admit. Full trash bags were piled in the kitchen. Shards of broken cups were scattered on the floor. The mess had attracted pests, and mice and flies had invaded the brick ranch house.

  I traced the chaos to my father’s own declining health. That spring, after years with a weak heart, he took leave from work. He tried to stay upbeat and not worry me. I had stopped by to see them in recent months but kept my visit short. It was so hard, seeing Jackie the way she was. Now, I wondered, how had I missed that something was terribly wrong? Or had I just not wanted to see?

  For years, I had been pressuring my dad to think about the long-term plan. What would we do if Jackie needed more support than we could provide at home? Should we decide on a facility where we could place her if the time came?

  We had to consider a nursing home, I assumed. My hand had been forced. Naïvely, at first I didn’t think about the money involved. It had been a relief when Jackie reached age sixty-five, with all its attendant public benefits. Surely, I thought, Medicare would cover the kind of care she needed.

  “There is nothing medically wrong with her,” the hospital social worker told me.

  I was incredulous. “What do you mean nothing is wrong with her?” I implored. “Her brain is decaying. If she was left alone, she would die.”

  The social worker informed me that there was nothing wrong with Jackie that warranted a longer hospital stay or a transfer to a skilled nursing home. What she meant was that Jackie needed custodial care—help with eating, dressing, and bathing. She needed a watchful eye, the adult equivalent of day care. She did not need the assistance of a registered nurse or another medical professional who could administer IVs or monitor complicated equipment and treatments.