Tales from the Back Row

by Amy Odell

  Why, I—are cupcakes overrated? Are pandas the best kind of bear?

  “Yes,” I said into the phone. “Twist my arm.”

  “Great,” Holgate said. “Can you send me your résumé and five clips? And contact HR so we can find a time for you to come in and meet Anna.”

  “Absolutely,” I replied. “My life shall go on hold until these tasks are complete.”

  Vogue is seen as the bible of fashion magazines. Anna Wintour, its editor in chief, is therefore like the Creator of fashion. She is unquestionably the most influential and powerful person in the fashion industry. Working at Vogue meant you were, therefore, also one of the most influential and important people in the industry. It was a validation of one’s own self-importance, and validating one’s self-importance is, in many respects, the reason fashion exists in the first place.

  Working at Vogue meant living a glamorous life not unlike that represented in The Devil Wears Prada, where you fly business class to Paris for Fashion Week, constantly attend private dinners with celebrities and famous designers, and get so many free and discounted designer clothes and spa treatments and gym memberships that you may as well be a B-list celebrity. The life of Vogue, it seems, is a never-ending whirlwind of wearing Manolo Blahnik pumps, elegant tablescapes, being thin, and being envied by everyone else in the industry. Naturally, rather than admit that I was jealous of the people who worked at Vogue, I would pretend like I was deeply turned off by their backward, stuffy ways. Since everyone is jealous of Vogue people but doesn’t want to admit it, you can often find people to pretend they agree with you.

  Naturally, as soon as they call you and dangle the opportunity in front of your face, you cease the shit talking and revert, teenager-­like, to Vogue idol worship.

  I realized I was sweating hard. (Did Vogue people sweat? Probably not. Note to self: remove sweat glands before Anna interview.) It would only be a matter of time before the dye from my $25 neon Forever 21 bikini started bleeding into my precious white House of Deréon beach towel. Every time summer rolls around, this gift reaffirms my lying-out style as the embodiment of timelessness and elegance. I peeled myself off my towel and headed down to my apartment.

  In my rapid descent to my Ikea-furnished studio, I did not stop to consider the true implications of working at Vogue. One, I’d have to go to work every day looking like I stepped out of the magazine in head-to-toe designer clothes and with professionally-done-­looking hair and makeup, and here I already found it exhausting to get to my office in the most base-level nonpajama outfit—jeans, a Beyoncé T-shirt, flats—with my hair in a damp bun. Two, I’d have to write sunshine and daisies about everything in fashion, a far cry from my dryly humorous approach to writing about the business on the Cut. And three, I’d have to interview with Anna Wintour—my idol—with no barf bag at the ready.

  Wait, I said to myself as the magnitude of this interview process began to sink in. If I have to interview with Anna Wintour, how will I speak actual words to her face? And what on god’s/her great earth am I going to wear?

  If only Tina Knowles had thrown in a skirt suit.

  • • •

  But of all the celebrity folk I intrepidly—and at times, ignorantly—attempted to interview on New York’s endless circuit of events promoting things that no one really cares about (like celebrity perfume), Anna Wintour was one I never had the balls to approach. Anna, to me, is a great icon. The greatest icon. Few women command the same amount of respect, power, and influence as Anna. Whenever I have to do something scary and feel like I need an added cloak of confidence, I just imagine I’m Anna Wintour and act as though she would. For instance, say you’re asking your boss for a raise. For many women—myself included—this is a scary thing to do. But wearing my invisible Anna costume, I can easily imagine myself walking into his office, sitting down in the chair opposite his desk, leaning back as though I have this conversation and wear $3,000 skirt suits every day, and saying, “You’ll find my presence here has greatly improved the overall quality and class of this organization. For my services, I think you’ll find an augmentation of my salary by thirty percent not only fair but also quite necessary. You simply just don’t find talent like mine walking down Fifth Avenue any day of the week. I expect this adjustment to my pay to take effect immediately.” And then I’d breeze out to Cipriani for lunch. Usually I can apply bits of this imagined reality to my life, and the resulting scene amounts to me tripping on the way into the office, developing hand tremors once I sit down, and barely making eye contact as I mumble how great I am and politely request more money. But this beats the alternative, which is not having the guts to ask for the raise at all.

  So then, here’s an awkward situation: how do you pretend to be the person who’s interviewing you? I had no idea how I’d survive a face-to-face meeting with a woman I’ve looked up to my entire young adult and adult life. So, like the dutiful reporter I was, I started researching. I asked everyone I could think of in the media industry what interviewing with Anna was like. The most useful notes came in an email from an ex-Vogue employee who was friends with a friend. It read that I was “very far along” in the interview process if Anna Wintour herself was giving me time. My tipster also gave me four key tips. First, don’t wear black because Anna is “all about color” (indeed, in a video posted to Vogue.com, she said the one thing she would never wear, unlike many a fashion person actually, is “head-to-toe black”). She also advised me to “have a life” because Anna will “ask more nonprofessional qs than professional,” like what I do on the weekends. I was cautioned against claiming to be a tennis fan because Anna knows everything about it and there would be no way for me to fake it with her, which was no problem because even as much as I wanted to work at Vogue at that time, I’d never be able to convince anyone I was interested even remotely in any sort of sport that involves balls. Finally, she told me to mention an image or story from the magazine that I loved, and, perhaps most importantly, she cautioned me not to be thrown by Anna, who “is shy and of few words more than she’s mean or anything like that. She won’t bother to warm the room, usual throwaway niceties. It’s just her way.”

  All I really had to do was study Vogue, wear not-black, not expect niceties, and speak intelligently about my hobbies. Do I have hobbies? I reasoned it was probably best not to go in there and say, “Matter of fact, I spend my weekends drinking and dancing to house music at nightclubs. Thanks to those brunch parties, you don’t even have to go home anymore!” Note to self: get hobbies.

  Despite my singular fear of Anna, and the possibility I didn’t have any hobbies, I took some comfort in knowing that I had been edited by many high-profile magazine editors over the course of my career and had interviewed many more. But certain differences exist between editors who focus on text and editors who focus on visuals. You sort of have to look at it (and this is generalizing—many editors aren’t exactly one type or the other) as the book nerds and the popular pretty kids in high school. Many editors who focus on textual storytelling won’t look twice at what you wear so long as you show up wearing clothes. A fashion editor is likely to notice everything about your appearance. When I began working in fashion, I started noticing everything everyone around me wore. It was horrible—suddenly “that girl on the corner” becomes “that girl with the questionable gladiator sandals on the corner.” Anna’s background is as a fashion editor—a person who conceptualizes and styles fashion photo shoots. So I knew my outfit was absolutely key, as I have seen just how picky these editors can be. And indeed, it’s an editor’s job to be picky: editing is all about cutting stuff and redoing things until you end up with something perfect. Editors are constantly looking at things and trying to make them better. They are the gatekeepers between the runways and the general public, and ultimately after a runway show, the image of the clothes is in the hands of editors who choose (and are allowed) to photograph it.

  My first expansive view into th
is world came when I had been working at the Cut for about two years and got assigned a story on Anna Dello Russo, the fashion director of Japanese Vogue. I interviewed her over the phone for New York’s spring fashion issue, and she described how she spent fifteen years working her way up from being an assistant who packs clothes for far-flung photo shoots to the spectacular fashion editor she is now. She studied fashion in university under Gianfranco Ferré and spent years toiling as an anonymous assistant and stylist before becoming internet-famous thanks to street-style photographers and her immaculate clothing collection. I admired her hard work and devotion to her job and the shameless glee with which she embraced the fame that didn’t find her until middle age. Flaunting oneself becomes somehow not-obnoxious when the person doing the flaunting admits that’s exactly what they’re doing.

  ADR is a woman who truly love love LOVES fashion. It’s her breakfast, lunch, and dinner—in order to help accommodate her clothing collection, she has in fact edited the kitchen out of her home. She also keeps a separate apartment next to the gold-trimmed one she inhabits in Milan just for her clothes. She called this apartment her “studio” in our interview and explained that she even keeps it at a certain temperature so that she doesn’t ruin her clothes.

  “Collecting clothes is complicated because the clothes need a space and the right temperature, otherwise they get—you [can] really destroy clothes,” she explained in her syrupy Italian accent. “It’s dusty, it’s hot—it ruins the clothes. I know very well how to store clothes, then everything is perfect. It’s so freezing in my house! The clothes need to be cold.”

  I have a hard time imagining needing to store clothing in a ­temperature-controlled environment. But this is the difference between a woman who has “thousands” of pairs of designer shoes and a woman whose most prized items of apparel include a Beyoncé T-shirt and who interprets seaside elegance as a House of Deréon beach towel. For ADR, fashion is an attainable aspiration. For me, it’s merely an aspiration. My chief clothing storage-related concerns amount to storing and packing my $25 bikinis so that they don’t bleed neon dye into my Old Navy tank tops. As ADR described the ideal temperature for storing clothes, I found myself thinking of the layout of a grocery store: you have the warm part in the middle where the cheap, boring stuff like flour is, and the absolutely freezing part off to the side where they have the pricier, more exciting items like fish and meat and fine cheese. Having not been to ADR’s apartment(s), I imagine the temperature scheme to be something like that. (Grocery stores, I get. High fashion, I’m still working on. Can you guess how that Vogue interview turned out?)

  ADR became famous when street style started blowing up on the internet. She wore full runway looks to Fashion Week, and she wasn’t borrowing these clothes—she was buying them herself. With her own money. (She won’t say how much she spends on clothes.) A lot of people going to Fashion Week now borrow clothes, the way a celebrity does before going to the Oscars, so this might have been seen as even more eccentric behavior than the fact that she wears only the world’s awesomest clothes and does not dress according to the season. What’s more, once she’s photographed in something, she goes home and changes, so she needs multiple outfits each day she goes to shows. I asked her about the process of packing for New York Fashion Week.

  “Oh! Nightmare. I know very well packing—because that was my first job when I used to be fashion editor and travel around the world. We used to carry lot of stuff,” she said. “If you arrive in Mexico, for example, and are shooting in chiffon, if you pack very well you will not iron clothes for three days. I had the best packing. I always teach my assistant how to pack the stuff the perfect way.

  “Clothes for me are a religion,” she continued. “I know how to pack, how to make it look good. So many times I see people . . . pack in a horrible way, and they need more volume, their dress is flat or something. One time I’ll show you.”

  Oh, will you now? I was dying to take her up on her offer. Anything to interact with ADR in person and play with clothes.

  At my next ideas meeting at work—where the fashion staff at the magazine spit out story ideas for yay/nay by the editors—I pitched shooting a video of Anna Dello Russo teaching the world how to pack designer clothes properly, which seemed like just the everyday conundrum New York should decode. Naturally, it was approved, so I emailed ADR posthaste to ask her if she’d let us shoot the video with her at her hotel when she was in town. She replied right away that she’d be happy to. One of the things I love about ADR is that she loves being famous and isn’t shy about admitting it. Many celebrities who actively sought out fame act like they hate all the attention and we can all go fuck ourselves for caring, which is just ungrateful and obviously a lie. These are the celebs who roll their eyes at you and act like you should hang yourself when you try to interview them at their own film premieres. If I were super-famous I would enjoy every minute of it. Deep down inside, most people working in media enjoy attention to some degree, since the work means your name will be made public in some capacity—whether as a byline on a story or at the top of a masthead or as a famous person on the internet. And the second I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would make myself seem as scary as Anna Wintour so that reporters would be too afraid to talk to me. Then I could enjoy my notoriety and the enigma of my being in peace and quiet.

  • • •

  One frigid morning during Fashion Week in February, the season after I first interviewed ADR, my videographer and I headed over to her posh Tribeca Hotel for our packing lesson.

  As I contemplated how to dress to meet one of the most fabulous women in the entire world, my closet devolved before me into a pile of garbage. It was as though Hermione came along with a wand, waved it in front of all my clothes, and turned them to a mess of dishrags and tattoo prints. Had I been going to meet a friend from my Austin, Texas, high school, I would have looked at my closet and seen stylish things from places like Zara that look more expensive than they were, but that’s because the niceness and coolness of clothes is all relative, depending on who they’re worn around. But now, looking at my apparel, everything looked like shit. The American Apparel sweaters, the Uniqlo jeans, even the black blazer I saved up to buy from Saks looked like a one-way ticket to embarrassment.

  Here’s a dressing tip for everyone with normal clothes who randomly finds themselves in an impossibly fabulous fashion-­related situation: just wear all black. Unless you’re meeting Anna Wintour, that is, in which case you’re probably just fucked all around unless you can borrow something designer. But ­generally, if Anna Wintour won’t be around, wear head-to-toe black. It’s a uniform for some fashion people. I think it works because not that many people wear all black unless they’re working at Sephora or an airport Chili’s, and then it only looks unchic because they have to pair the all black with name tags and aprons. If you wear all black without a name tag and with uncomfortable shoes, you will look so fashion, trust. Generally, the more uncomfortable the shoe, the chicer, cooler, and more fashion-y an outfit is.

  So out from the depths of the compost pile that was, sadly, my clothes, I fished a bunch of black things: a black blazer, a black tank, tight black pants made of scuba material (a long-lost trend—I’m not doing pants DIY projects with wetsuits here), and stiletto black ankle booties with silver zippers up the front. I wore a black coat on top and carried a big black patent leather shoulder bag with gold hardware that looked like it was molting shiny black bits. I was embarrassed about this bag for about 90 percent of the time that I carried it, including this time. But it was my best option then, so hopefully she wouldn’t notice?

  Suited up in my fashion black, I went to the Tribeca Grand Hotel, where videographer Jonah said he’d meet me in the lobby. I got there and didn’t see him, so I sat on a chair looking much more important than usual, as one does when wearing all black, and waited. At 9:05, there was no sign of him, and we were officially running late. I called him and info
rmed him I was there and ready!

  “I’m here, too,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “In an armchair in front wearing shades indoors. At the Tribeca Grand?” I replied.

  “The Tribeca Grand? No—it’s the Greenwich Hotel,” he said.

  Fuck.

  “WHERE IS THAT I’VE NEVER BEEN THERE.” I began panicking.

  “It’s not far from where you are,” he said, sanely. “Greenwich and North Moore.”

  Now completely panicking, I ran out of the Tribeca Grand and several blocks over to the Greenwich Hotel. It was the kind of cold outside where the air feels like needles on any exposed skin. Texans were made for these elements about as much as cats were for showers.

  Just as I lost all feeling in my face, I arrived at the correct hotel and found Jonah in the lobby. He was acting like this was just another day at work.

  “OH MY GOD, IS IT OKAY WE’RE LATE?” I continued, panicking and red-faced, yet also noticing that this hotel was noticeably nicer than the previous one. But of course.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, sanely. “Let’s go up to her room.”

  We took the cavernous rustic-chic elevator up to her floor and walked down the hallway to her room. The door was open, and therein sat fashion goddess/icon/angel Anna Dello Russo at the edge of her perfectly made bed. On her head were Louis Vuitton bunny ears.

  Shit, I thought. She was ready on time, and this is really happening. BUNNY EARS HAPPENING.

  “Hiiii!” I said. “I’m Amy Odell, it’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’m SO, so sorry we’re a little late.” I noticed she had a beautiful black-and-white tutu dress hanging just so on the outside of her armoire.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay!” she said in her seductive Italian-y English, ushering us inside and introducing us to her edgy Japanese assistant. Jonah and I took our coats off and set them with our bags on the floor of her room, which made Pottery Barn’s best in-store displays look like a regular barn.