Tales from the Back Row
Page 7
“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 York 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.” )
You’re surely dying to know if I’ve ever been banned from something. Well, yes, I have been banned from some things! And received a few threats about being banned from other things, all for similarly silly reasons, but I do love when a good ban threat letter comes through. Here’s a sample.
Hi Amy,
I have to say I was greatly saddened to see that you chose to include [REDACTED DESIGNER]’s name in the article you ran today on the Cut headlined “[REDACTED].”
[BOSS OF LETTER WRITER, REDACTED] is personally quite upset about your continued insistence on reporting a rumor that is not only yesterday’s news, but has been denied multiple times by [REDACTED LABEL] and its parent corporation [REDACTED]. [CEO OF REDACTED COMPANY] . . . has been quoted in WWD as strictly denying the rumors that [REDACTED DESIGNER] was at all in risk of losing his job. Quite on the contrary, he invited [REDACTED DESIGNER] to [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY]’s financial results meeting and credited him with helping turn [REDACTED LABEL] around. The New York Times also ran an article recently completely denying the rumors.
In continuing to spread these baseless rumors, you are not only practicing bad journalism, but you are offending [REDACTED CEO] personally, and [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY] as a company. Additionally, to mention [REDACTED DESIGNER]’s name in any capacity in an article that is about substance abuse, drugs, etc., is further unfair and unnecessary defamation of his character.
There is absolutely no truth to these claims. Should these sort of articles continue to run on NYmag.com, [REDACTED BOSS OF LETTER WRITER] has vowed to make it his personal mission to not only exclude New York magazine from all [REDACTED PR FIRM]’s news and events, but also to make sure that [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY] & [REDACTED PARENT COMPANY’S CEO] are made specifically aware of the poor journalism practices taken by NY Mag as an organization.
I hope you can understand our frustration,
[REDACTED]
Fun! Right? I also got into some trouble with a designer after I did a blog post foreshadowing what we might see in his show. He and his company president freaked out and threatened to ban the whole magazine, which had nothing to do with my blog post, from all their shows—because we were excited enough about his fashion show to even bother uncovering that he might have socks and low heels on the runway. We (but mostly me, who knew a model walking in the show) are such bad, bad people. I haven’t been invited back since.
• • •
Famous fashion people are like Tootsie Pops. On the outside is a hard shell composed of publicists and assistants and those publicists’ publicists and assistants, and it’s only through much persistence and considerable work that you’ll get to the human core at the center of it all. Considering Rachel’s history, I can see why her Fortress of Protection is more like a jawbreaker that maybe, if you’re lucky, has gum inside. First, she has, like, double the celebrity cred of most famous fashion people, being at once a fashion person (first stylist, then designer) and famous in her own right. She entered the tabloids as a villainlike character once everyone found out she was responsible for making Nicole Richie look like a beautiful, elegant, slim Los Angeles fairy princess instead of the person she used to be when she was Paris Hilton’s sidekick, and dressed as though all her clothes came from mall kiosks and she lived in a Las Vegas pool. I don’t know why making Nicole Richie an iconic person of style turned Rachel Zoe into an object of tabloid hatred. I think everyone was just jealous that once Rachel came into Nicole’s life, she suddenly had baby-smooth J. Lo skin, lost weight, and could wear a hippie scarf as a dress and look completely spectacular. If there’s anything people—especially LA people—wanted in the early 2000s it was J. Lo’s skin and a certain bohemian je ne sais quoi. Even if that certain je ne sais quoi is purely derived from people forgetting your hair used to be two colors: brunette and bleached. Anyway, you can see why Rachel would be wary of reporters. Her good work in La La Land transforming hopeless celebrities into people who had the strength to just say no to denim shorts cut off at both the waistband and leg holes was making everyone spiteful.
It’s not always necessary to go through a major fashion person’s hard shell. There is a highly scientific method I use to avoid this very thing, which I have practiced and perfected over the years: it’s called “stalking.”
This is not to be confused with the scary, can-get-you-arrested kind of stalking, like where Miranda Kerr gets home and—surprise!—you’re in her kitchen smelling her washcloth and jerking off to her family portrait. Legal stalking can be done by any member of the media with an email in-box.
There are two steps to legal stalking: Step 1. Pay a
ttention to boldfaced names publicists claim will attend the events they are constantly inviting you to. Resist the impulse to delete the invites for things as silly as teatime in honor of Charmin toilet paper and the cat fashion show for Meow Mix. You never know what famous persons will show up to these things, slightly drunk and willing to run their mouths. Step 2. Once you have identified your targets, show up to those places and accost them with a recording device.
Without this method, I would have never come face to face with one of the most important designers of our time, Karl Lagerfeld. Long before I got that call from Rachel’s publicist, when I had just started at the Cut, I received a fateful invitation for face time with his fashion majesty.
It read:
Peter MacGill
and
Gerhard Steidl
invite you to the launch of the book
KARL LAGERFELD
METAMORPHOSES of an AMERICAN
A CYCLE OF YOUTH 2003 – 2008
Reception
Friday, May 16, 2008
7:00 – 9:00 pm
And underneath all that, in the tiniest font on the whole invite, completely without ceremony or exclamation points (or any correct punctuation at all, because I guess that was out this season) or the big glittery arrow it surely deserved, was this:
KARL LAGERFELD WILL BE PRESENT
Now, when someone as famous and unusual as Karl Lagerfeld—who basically lives in a bubble where his eccentricity is heralded as genius—swings through town, you go, and you do not think twice about what else you could be doing. Especially when all else you’d be doing is drinking at one of many nightclubs where both the male and female patrons wear the exact same jeweled belts.
A bit of background on Karl: Karl is important to the world because he’s created fashion that mixes the classics with camp, most famously for the house of Chanel, which people said was a lost cause when Karl took it over. He not only revived the label by making it feel luxurious, sexy, and exciting in the early ’80s, but he also turned it into something that tween starlets were just as hungry to wear as people like Anna Wintour. Pause to consider how remarkable this is: can you think of a single place where you, your mom, and your grandma all want to shop, aside from the grocery store?