by Amy Odell
“I brought you the magazine with your interview!” I told her, trying to make up for our ten-minute tardiness.
“Yes, I pick it up,” she said. “Several copies.”
This, everyone, is the difference between the world’s best fashion editors and the riffraff living among them: utter, immaculate, almost maddening but mostly enviable preparedness. One day maybe I will be this with it, I thought, in awe of ADR’s organization. First, I’d master the art of carrying a smaller purse that wasn’t always lined with a layer of garbage and lint.
“Oh great! I’m so glad,” I said, going into my standard journalistic “I am so nice and charming, you will thoroughly enjoy being interviewed by me” mode.
We briefly discussed the concept and flow of the shoot before we started filming. ADR showed us the items in her closet—an iconic hot pink monkey hair knee-length Dolce & Gabbana coat, something else outrageously amazing by Marc Jacobs, the couture tutu by a designer no one can pronounce, etc. We decided that she would show us what she brought, with me asking her questions, and then we’d film her demonstrating how to pack these items so that they’d deliver maximum chic-ness upon unpacking.
As Jonah began turning on his equipment, ADR interfered. “No, you go outside,” she said.
What?
“Go outside then open the door,” she continued.
Okay. She is Anna Dello Russo—best to obey.
“Wait,” she said. “This—no.” She picked up Jonah’s camera case and my embarrassing purse and both of our coats, and walked over to her bathroom, where she flung them onto the floor by the toilet before closing the door. “Now, outside.”
Note to self: get new purse, start saving for new coat.
Anna Dello Russo was, through and through, a fashion editor. She had planned exactly how this shoot would look, right down to her bunny ears, the dress hanging beautifully from the door of her wardrobe, and, God forbid, the shoot would be messed up by bags and coats that are not hers. I couldn’t blame her, considering how much my purse offended even me. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I owned it either.
We went outside as ordered. I would never be Anna Dello Russo, but I would be her bitch for twenty minutes.
After the door had been shut for a long enough amount of time for Jonah to turn on his camera and position me by the doorway, ADR opened the door.
“Hiiii!” she said, bunny ears perky above her head. And the shoot began.
• • •
I can’t say that any of ADR’s packing tips stuck with me, but her reaction to my coat and purse made a more lasting impression—I still think about it years later. And if Anna Dello Russo was this averse to my purse during a twenty-minute video shoot, how would Anna Wintour react to everything I own a year later in an even shorter job interview? Allergically, I was certain. But what on earth do you wear to the office of the people who control the fashion industry? These people know the provenance of everything on your person as long as it didn’t come from Walmart or HSN.
Given that I now knew only fools wear black to meet Anna Wintour, and that I had no passably chic nonblack things to wear, I realized I had only one option: attempt to borrow something designer. As it happened, New York was shooting the spring collections at the time, so the fashion assistant, Eve, who I was close with, had a lot of stuff I could feasibly borrow. She also had a great eye, so she could tell me what to wear and how to wear it. Despite having knowledge of the fashion business, I was still total crap at dressing myself, which is why the idea of me working at Vogue was so laughable. But that’s the difference between the ADRs of the world and the average people who just end up in fashion. At that time, I had only a vague idea of how to look fashionable, and it pretty much just amounted to wearing all black.
“You need something ladylike,” she told me, when I informed her of my epic Vogue opportunity. “Come with me.”
I probably should have been more concerned than I was about other editors at the magazine finding out that I was illegally borrowing clothes for a job interview at another magazine. But I had been styled in the closet by my friends in the fashion department so many times that I don’t think anyone thought anything of us sneaking in there for extended periods of time. It was really just our worktime equivalent of a bunch of girls going into the bathroom at a restaurant to talk about the other people at the table and reapply lip gloss.
She ushered me into the closet, where, in the appallingly expansive mirrors all around us I was ordered to strip down to my underwear.
“Anna’s going to know who everything is by,” she said. “You have to wear the right label and the right season.”
BCBG was afoot, but was it appropriate?
“BCBG does advertise in Vogue,” Eve said. “But you can probably do better.” From within the racks she unearthed a cream Michael Kors shift dress with elbow-length sleeves. It was almost insultingly simple but also phenomenally gorgeous. Seeing as I knew little about what made clothes look good, I didn’t quite know if this was The Dress. Though I did suspect that I wouldn’t get to wear something as fine until my wedding.
Fortunately, Eve was there to set me straight.
“Yes,” she said, looking me up and down. “Let’s add a necklace.”
She rummaged through a shelf filled with plastic bags full of jewelry and dug out a few Philip Crangi pieces. She doubled a long brass strand around my neck, and once I saw it against the ivory pureness of the Kors shift dress, I knew that this was it—this was Vogue.
“What about shoes?” I said, nervously eyeing myself in the mirror. Also, what if I spill something on myself?
Fist to chin, Eve pondered my ensemble: “Nude. Nude pumps.” I didn’t own those, and Eve didn’t have any in the closet, so I had to go to Bloomingdale’s and buy some after work, hoping the contents of the eight issues of Vogue I had stacked in my apartment waiting to be read would magically migrate into my memory as I did so.
Eve-less, I called in backup: my dear friend Tara, who graciously subjected herself to the tedious boredom of watching me trying on unexciting fashion office shoes for forty-five minutes. I was leaning toward a pair of peep-toe nude Cole Haans—another Vogue brand, I reasoned. But I was afraid of the price: $250. Tara, like a good, sane, reliable friend, saw beyond tomorrow. “You can wear those again,” she said. “You’ll get a lot of use out of them.”
“You’re right,” I said. “They’re a great basic.” Years later, I can report she was right: I have since worn these nude peep-toe pumps to many a wedding in my late twenties. I didn’t know at the time that all my vacation time at this stage in my life would be devoted to going to other people’s weddings, but I didn’t need to because Tara is my seer. It was also a valuable lesson in investment pieces: stylists always talk about “cost per wear.” If you buy something you wear only once that costs $200, that’s $200 you spend every time you wear it. But if you wear something that costs $200 at least forty times, that’s only $5 each time you wear it. (Math!)
At 8:00 p.m., I made it back to my apartment where I spent the night studying as many issues of Vogue as I could. There was no point in trying to get sleep because sleeping the night before your job interview with Anna Wintour would be about as likely as sleeping on a Deadliest Catch boat. It just wasn’t happening. When I finally laid down to rest, I repeated my to-do list over and over in my head. I would change into the Michael Kors and Crangi in the closet as soon as Eve got back from a hair appointment in the afternoon, mere hours before I had to be interviewed by the Supreme Ruler. I would spend the day sitting in front of my computer acting like everything is normal and secretly Googling Vogue things. I would maybe complete 40 percent of the work I would normally get done. I can get this job, I thought as I rested upon my pillow, mentally reviewing the notes I had made when flipping through all those issues earlier that night. What I did not consider as I obsessed over the timing of my costum
e change and remembering the names of as many Vogue writers as possible was whether or not I actually wanted the job. Of course, I wanted it because I was supposed to want it. Everyone working in fashion is supposed to want to work at Vogue. When I was in high school and college and following Anna Wintour obsessively, I decided it’s she who I would become. And if I wanted to become her, I’d have to work at Vogue. As much as I wanted the gig in the days leading up to the interview, I had neglected to consider the many meaningful ways the job would affect my life. There were several things that I refused to acknowledge as I psyched myself up for the next day:
1.Working at Vogue would mean I could not make sarcastic remarks about the fashion industry, as I saw it, with any regularity. I felt humor was a way to lay bare the seemingly antifeminist constructs of the fashion and media industries that drew me to it in the first place. People pay attention to humor. And I wanted people to pay attention to fashion not only for the escapism everyone wants from their everyday lives, but also because it has a lot to do with why women feel insecure about themselves. Fashion and the media that cover it often feel designed to make us all feel fat, poor, ugly, and tasteless. And I wanted women to see that the industry is great fun but in many ways also ridiculous, and, therefore, should not make us feel this way about ourselves. Writing this book as a Vogue staffer would be about as likely as the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue featuring only one-pieces and banning body paint.
2.Getting dressed for work every day would be absolute torture. Also, I’d have to do that gross thing where you get Botox injected into the bottoms of your feet to make high heels tolerable, because I’d have to wear those every day. I’d also have to take out a massive post-student loan to afford these heels and other acceptable work wear, because Michael Kors and Philip Crangi aren’t exactly stocked in my household with the same regularity as spiced tortilla chips.
3.I’d written a LOT about Vogue and Anna Wintour on the Cut, and not all of it was exactly what you’d call “favorable.” But once you’re called upon to dine with the cool girls in the cafeteria, it’s awfully easy to stop talking about them behind their backs, because the recognition—the will to fit in—is at least temporarily more important than the LOL of it all. To this end, a mentor, an editor far wiser than me with boatloads more experience, suggested I ask Anna why she even bothered to interview me. I can scarcely look at a cat without giggling, to say nothing of fashion shows, and I knew she would sometimes call upon six staffers to consider, in all seriousness, how to shoot the clothes in one runway collection. How would I do a 180 in attitude and begin to take fashion so seriously as a career? Dazzled by the Vogue disco ball, I was blinded to the things that interested me most: humor writing and social issues shaping the lives of women. But having spent a couple years on the outside of this world with just a toe on the inside, it was hard not to long to be completely in that world. Vogue was the Inside. Once you’re on the Inside, it becomes impossible to question it.
And now, as I prepared to try out officially to be a part of that world, the massive amounts of exorbitantly priced stuff the magazine endorsed became a sheer thrill to me. Yay—STUFF! Eye candy! Pretty! The models wore designer apparel with such grace. Skinny! YAY AGAIN! The celebrities were so delightfully inoffensive and talented at wearing ball gowns on expansive Sicilian patios. Photoshop! Puff pieces! More skinny! ANNIE LEIBOVITZ IS A GREAT ARTISTE OF OUR TIME!
And then there were the “issues.” Hillary Clinton! The World! Fascinating! And the personal essays: “I once found my neighbor’s 20 birds dead! It completely changed the way I thought about shoes!” More pictures of skinny pretty people in outfits that cost twenty times as much as what I have in my savings and checking accounts right now! This was Vogue. And, like Anna Wintour, she was a classy broad. A classy broad whom I could then trust not to fan the fame of a Fergie or a Kardashian or an Amber Rose (though Real Housewife of Atlanta NeNe Leakes and Kim Kardashian have since made it into the magazine—maybe I’d have a better shot of getting hired there now). I decided that a magazine that seems to have banned people who appear on magazine covers for no discernible reason (and launching a $13 perfume or having a baby at the age of fifteen is not an excuse) was just the place I should work. When one publicist suggested I try for a job at Vogue, I replied, “Yeah, right—I am mincemeat beneath their Manolo Blahniks.” She countered: “But it’s the Bible.”
Of course, every fashion writer should work at Vogue—people say it’s “the Bible” of fashion, which basically makes Anna the Pope of fashion and everyone who works directly for her very powerful and influential. I suppose that if you ever dreamed of dictating what skirt shape the masses should wear a particular season, working at Vogue is for you. (This has never been a dream of mine. Owning a miniature Pomeranian, yes; influencing what people wear, no.)
On the day of my interview, the worst possible thing that could have happened happened: Eve was late coming back from her hair appointment.
One minute past her proclaimed arrival time, I started emailing her with lots of harass-y punctuation. “Eve where are you????!!! I need to go put on that dress!!!!!!!!!” Eve was my only friend in the office with a key to that closet.
“Running late,” she wrote back. “Brazilian hair-straightening. Back soon.”
I was still two hours away from my scheduled departure time but felt as though the world was about to enter its next ice age, and I was stranded in a pair of flip-flops. I had a day-terror of showing up to Condé in the outfit I was wearing right then: black jeans, a T-shirt, and faux snakeskin flats. In this imagined scenario, I walk into Mark Holgate’s office and burst into tears. He looks me up and down and bursts into tears also. He then sends me home to think about what I’ve done.
But the thing about job interviews that I’d completely forgotten in this moment but know well now that I have gone on to hire and manage teams of people is that the person you’re meeting wants you to get the job. This is easy to forget when you’re interviewing with people you see basically as celebrities whom you actually respect, but it’s the most calming thing for me to remember when I’m interviewing for a job and terror strikes.
To distract my brain from the torturous thoughts of how badly Mark and Anna would judge my clothes and what would happen if I were late, I set about organizing several key items from my hideous molting patent leather purse into a black portfolio-type thing that fit my BlackBerry, MetroCard, money, ID, and résumé. There was no way I was bringing the bag ADR felt the need to lock behind a door next to her toilet as soon as it entered her field of vision.
Eve returned to the office twenty minutes later. I speed-walked toward her, hands aflutter. “Eve! I need to change!” I said in my best stage whisper. (I was trying to act normal here, after all.) “Great hair. Very straight.”
“Let’s go,” she said, taking me back into the closet, where I surreptitiously slipped into my “Anna Wintour, please like me” costume. The heels I planned to wear I had brought to work separately, so I put those on at the last minute before tiptoeing out the door for my “eye doctor appointment.”
Eve wished me luck, spritzed me with holy water, and waved a smoking clump of sage in front of my head, and I headed out into the world to meet the woman I pretended to be all the time. Don’t fall in the heels. Don’t vomit. Don’t stain the Kors. You can do this, I told myself as I hailed a cab. The trip to Condé Nast HQ was so quick that I ended up arriving a stupid twenty-five minutes before my interview. A conveniently situated Gap has never come in so handy. I teetered over there and tried to pretend like I was perusing the cotton shorts selection. I thought sitting down might calm my nerves but with no seating available, I ended up killing twenty minutes by roaming the store like a sleepwalking child in a horror movie, moved by something beyond the norm.
I knew that I’d be warming up with a woman in Condé Nast HR. After a reasonably calming few minutes telling the HR people about how much I love Annie L
eibovitz, I ascended to the twelfth floor: Vogue’s chambers. Its lobby was decorated in a country-chic style that seemed to mirror Anna Wintour’s Long Island house, the interior of which I’d seen on the internet. Layoffs forced Condé magazines to get rid of its receptionists long ago, so there’s no one sitting there to call the person you’re going to see. Without a receptionist overseeing things, the lobby effectively becomes a windowless living room outfitted in overstuffed furniture, accent pillows, and—an unfortunate side effect of no sunlight entering this enclosure—fake or dried houseplants, which everyone knows are the counterfeit handbags of the interior decorating world. As I wondered if an absence of real, fresh flowers was something Anna had just come to grudgingly accept, several skinny girls in hip-skimming dresses, asymmetrical skirts, and stilettos teetered across the lobby, pushing cumbersome racks of clothes on and off elevators. I just thought, Glamorous. But looking back on it, those rack pushers should really be allowed to wear comfortable shoes.
As I waited and people-watched (it’s not rude if the people dressed for it, right?), a peppy young lady was being interviewed for an internship. How cruel to interview her publicly. I couldn’t imagine doing what I was about to do for an audience, even if that audience was me, the lady with the Personal Styling Disorder. Not that having one person in the room counts as “publicly,” but still—I am just made very uncomfortable by other people being able to hear my conversations, which is why I’m so embarrassed by drunk friends and loud talkers. This is only to say: I’m uptight. So Vogue should work out for me?
The woman interviewing this girl proceeded to explain the tasks involved in the job, and the girl explained enthusiastically how she’s had lots of experience carrying clothes to and fro, and she totally knew how fashion closets work, and she was happy to sign away her social life and bunion-free feet for the chance to organize shoes and earrings while dressed in a very constricting fashion. Because I’m an asshole, all I can think is, Wrong outfit, not going to happen. Vogue is a tastemaker, and if you don’t demonstrate that you have Vogue taste, you’re not likely to get hired. This is helpful for the prospective employees in a way because if you feel a sense of doom picking out your outfit for your interview, you certainly won’t be able emotionally to handle picking out your outfit for work every day. In addition to her messy half-ponytail and ill-fitting accordion-pleated skirt, she had a big turquoise plastic suitcase, the kind that people push around upright instead of tilted. Having previously been subject to the trauma of possessing the wrong personal effects in ADR’s hotel room, I wouldn’t dare walk in there with a receptacle meant for holding that many of my things unless it was a Louis Vuitton trunk, and it was being carried by my own interns. This girl was probably one of those types whose parents wouldn’t let her move to the city until she had a job, and she was going to get on a train and go right home to Connecticut or Jersey or whatever nearby state she came from right after this interview.