Tales from the Back Row

by Amy Odell

  After having her baby, she said, “I was told, like, don’t worry about coming back too soon, just take your time and enjoy your baby, and I really appreciated that. No pressure.”

  Free from worrying about maternity leave was Candice Swanepoel, then a little younger than some of the other models, at twenty-three years old. I started talking to her about her duties as the first model out in the show, and we weren’t long into our conversation before her big blue eyes got even bigger and commotion erupted around us. I turn around to witness a throng of photographers encircling Adriana, who was standing on top of the makeup table, robe cast aside, wearing only a lace bra and panty set and posing by angling her butt and boobs simultaneously skyward. Judging by the excitement in the room, you would think she was lying on her makeup table giving birth to a cat.

  “Over here, Adriana!” the photographers shout. You have to remember that nothing truly goes on back here for hours other than girls sitting around getting their hair extended and Kanye West breezing through to chitchat with a cool fashion person.

  “Is that going to be you in a minute?” I ask Candice.

  She furrows her brow. “No, I hope not.”

  I ask her if we’re too obsessed with the models’ diet and exercise routines.

  “A lot of people, it’s always the first question: ‘So, what have you been cutting out?’ ” she says. “But I understand the speculation because it is about our bodies and we take such good care of ourselves, so people want to know how.”

  The de facto way models think about diet and exercise is “taking good care of oneself.” Is cutting out carbs and sugar for weeks truly the definition of taking good care of oneself? Or is it really just treating oneself the way one must in order to work for Victoria’s Secret in this capacity? These blurred lines are a problem, because women who enjoy dessert and buttered toast in moderation might be fooled into thinking they’re not taking care of themselves. They might be reluctant to “indulge” in a whole banana after reading in a magazine that they should have only a half of one with breakfast. The truth is that what many Victoria’s Secret models do with their diets and exercise routines is extreme. We just forget it because we’ve become such slaves to physical perfection that we’ve forgotten what’s normal, what’s healthy, and what’s just vain.

  I don’t even have to ask Candice about her specific routine for her to start telling me about it.

  “Like me, my diet doesn’t really change. I eat a lot of protein; I try to eat more to be more muscular. So I don’t know how it is for other girls, but for me, I don’t change my diet,” she says. “My exercise routine I do. I push it quite a bit ten days before.”

  She adds, “But certain people question it in a way that seems . . . They want to think that you’re unhealthy.”

  The food and dieting is such an obsession at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show because that is the story for many outlets covering the show. We watch to see the insane wings, the rock star performances (Maroon 5, Kanye West, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj have all performed at a VS show), but mostly, the perfect thighs, abs, waists, hair, etc. Victoria’s Secret will give you only so much information about the show (it won’t even tell you why all those straight dudes are there!), so once you’ve gone over how much glitter was used on the runway (which is often made of glitter, in case nothing else on the screen gets your attention), how much the wings weigh, how many carats of yellow diamonds are in the fantasy bra, the only true arc you have to your story is how the models made it there. And the answer is by working on their ­bodies—or taking really “good care” of themselves, however you see it—until they have the most enviable figures on the planet.

  While these women seem inhuman in their sheer physical perfection, all that diet and exercise suggest that they, too, are as self-conscious as the rest of us. After all, if I had to put on those wings, a thong, a bra, and bronzer, and walk down the runway in front of movie stars and Pitbull in the audience, and the 10 million people around the world who watch the show, I’d stock up on green juice, ban cupcakes and wine from my house, and spend two hours a day in the gym every day for a few weeks, too. But if I did that without their contracts, it would not be considered taking good care of myself. People would just think I had eating issues.

  • • •

  Since the VS Fashion Show is televised, the whole space has to look great—not just the runway—and in Victoria’s Secret’s opinion, “great looking” resembles the interior of a Las Vegas burlesque club. Unlike most fashion shows, here the audience’s benches have nice cushions on them, and the rows even used to be bookended with little parlor lamps.

  Being a blogger, I usually sit in the back. I arrive promptly within the specified half-hour time window, not wanting to miss this fashion show as I have others in the past due to tardiness, and take my seat. (Oh, and security is not like the airport: no one pats you down gropily or makes you go through a nudity-simulating scanner.) (There are security dogs, though.) A male announcer with the lilt of a sportscaster says things over the loudspeaker to make us feel special for being there. He constantly reminds us that we’re about to see “the twenty-eight most be-AU-tiful women in the world.” He might be telling us that “the twenty-­eight MOST beautiful women INNN the world” are backstage getting their hair done. Or that the “twenty-eight most beautiful women in the world” are filming backstage footage! Or that if we text or use our cellular devices while “THE twenty-eight most beautiful women in the world” walk down the runway in front of us, we are totally balls out insane and should be expelled. I open Twitter on my phone as the lights go down, a woman with long hair in a tight dress takes her seat across the aisle from me, and the show finally begins.

  7

  Everyone Else

  the world of the slightly famous (not even almost famous. just slightly.)

  Where does one wear a fur sandal?” I wondered aloud when I was working at Cosmopolitan.com one day. I had gone from being surrounded by fashion people at the Cut to working at BuzzFeed, where no one understood the importance of an Alexander ­McQueen corset, and the bright red company hoodie was basically standard work attire. Finally, I was once again in the presence of fashion. Being able to blurt out these questions to people who care about the answers as much as I do made me feel at home.

  The style editor sitting next to me, Charles, replied without thinking: “To stand outside of a fashion show.”

  He’s right: you can’t wear fur sandals out in the world, where there’s dirt, to walk around and grocery shop and have brunch. Fur sandals are for attention and attention only. And no group of people is more down with giving (and receiving) attention than fashion people—probably the only subculture of society who will collectively regard a fur sandal as an impossible invention somehow made possible by a brilliant mind.

  The perfect place to wear a fur sandal is the outside of a fashion show, where people lollygag to get noticed by street-style paparazzi. A fur sandal can transform an otherwise “invisible person” into a “fashion person”—someone who matters because she was photographed wearing fur sandals. The horrifyingly great thing about being alive now is that it’s that easy to be slightly famous. Many personal-style bloggers are proof of this.

  In fact, even if you don’t share photos of yourself, you can become Someone. Just start a Twitter account. Take a photo of a celebrity—again, there’s no shortage these days—and put it in your feed. Take shameless credit for being in the presence of fame, and you’re basically on your way to having some yourself.

  A lot of people who seem to be a legitimate part of the industry have no discernable job. I call these people—who seem to make entire careers out of having or frequently being around wealth, showing up to various parties to get their photos taken riding around in chauffeured vehicles with models and socialites or going backstage at major concerts—Dubiously Employed Folk. Meanwhile, I worked sixty to eighty hours a
week to become a journalist and editor, never attaining the same number of Twitter followers as the people who fanny about at parties like it’s their job (because it pretty much is, except they’re on the opposite side of the velvet rope). And it is an unquestionable truth of working in publishing that your success, talent, self-worth, and reason for being are defined solely and entirely by the number of people who follow you on Twitter. Encountering the DEF, you feel, acutely, the dividing line between journalists and a red carpet, and DEF make it difficult to understand at what point one crosses from one side of that divide to the other.

  The result of this social networking is that DEF and a group of people who were once behind the scenes are no longer behind the scenes. Hairstylists, stylists, makeup artists, assistants, lesser editors who aren’t “in chief”—all the people we never used to hear from we now hear from all the time. Some people (old ones) call this “noise.” I call this the hum of modernity and youth.

  I am one of these lesser people batting at the ever-present fishhook of slight fame—only, unlike many people around me, I never expect to be caught and lifted, Mary Poppins–like, onto that sweet cloud of stardom, where you show up and people know who you are just by looking at you and, if you wear sunglasses inside, no one thinks you’re the biggest asshole in the room. I used to (and still do, a little bit) feel conflicted about self-promotion. I felt uncomfortable promoting myself on my own, but if someone else asked me, I’d be all up in it, no hesitations. I’d buy a fur sandal if I felt like it, and if it got me photographed, great, but I’d never seek out a fur sandal for the express purpose of getting on a style blog.

  One day, I was being snide about a certain member of the DEF to my friend Tara over a dinner of brown-rice-based dishes at an allegedly healthy restaurant.

  “I mean, what a talentless hack. What is the point of this person? Like, put on some pants when it’s twenty-nine degrees outside. Or stay inside for once,” I complained.

  “It’s always like this. In any industry, there’s always someone who’s successful because they’re really good at self-promotion,” she said. “Even if they’re not the most talented, they beat out other people for jobs or opportunities because they’re really good at getting attention.”

  I realized self-promotion is not only as natural as breathing to my smartphone-wed generation, but also a requirement for success. Though I mostly have always felt weird talking about myself in my Twitter feed unless to share an interaction I just had with my bitchy cat, when the website Into the Gloss hollered asking if it could photograph my makeup cabinet and interview me about my favorite moisturizer, I said yes immediately. I now wholeheartedly accept the attention that readily comes the way of people lucky to work in an industry that is as small as it is navel gazing. And here I am writing a book about my limited life experiences. HI!

  Random middling press opportunities creep up on one rather quickly in fashion. One day you’re a fashion blogger, and before you know it, the Sunglass Hut is interviewing you for that blog it has that you didn’t know existed until it wanted to put your face on it.

  You’ll giddily do all of these training bra interviews but tell your friends over dinner later, “It was just for practice. I mean, I need to get used to speaking to the media, right? My industry is in the public eye so much that it’s just part of my job.” They nod sympathetically. No one will want to punch you in the face when you say things like this anymore because everyone spends all day photographing themselves for social media and a great many getting featured somewhere or other.

  Soon enough, the big opportunities will start rolling in.

  • • •

  Some months into my fashion writing career at the Cut, because my name was on the internet enough, Elle wanted to photograph me for a spread about fashion bloggers. It was to be part of then–creative director Joe Zee’s column. A Real Magazine! The printed-­on-paper, decades-old sort of deal! This would be the most legitimate, sober portraiture of me since fifth-grade picture day. A photo free of duck face that I could proudly send to my mother.

  Elle did not assume I was a prepackaged deal who would come dressed to their editors’ standards. And they were right: I was about as fluent in looking classy as I was in speaking Mandarin. So I was summoned to their office and led to their fashion closet to be fitted for designer clothes I could never afford that still looked something like what I’d wear if I had style and four times as much money. These clothes were to create the illusion of candid dressing, as though I just showed up to work looking nice like this instead of having barely managed to put jeans on after the gym. This is where I discovered how great $2,000 Stella McCartney blazers look on. This is where I also discovered that shoes made just for runway shows but not to sell to people (“samples”) are actually torture devices. You truly wonder how models wear them with a straight face much less manage to walk back and forth in them for a full forty-five seconds without falling down.

  I was dressed by creative director Joe Zee’s assistant, Annie. Assistants, like publicists, make the world go round in the fashion industry. They grease the wheels, style the riffraff (me), make appointments, get coffee, and often do it all in closets or other areas of large offices that don’t have windows. To manage whatever emergencies the day may throw at them, they are never without a healthy supply of Post-its and nipple covers. They’re also always super­organized and cheerful about everything, because if they’re not, they’ll get fired and have to go back to working the sales floor at the Club Monaco from whence they came. (Unless you’re Lauren Weisberger, and you quit to write a book based on your torture and go on to be played by Anne Hathaway in an excellent feature film.) They have to be humble, because they do a lot of work they won’t get public credit for but their bosses will. They might do the bulk of the work on a whole shoot or whole page, and their supervisor’s name will end up on it because that’s just how it works. The best assistants keep their heads down, work hard, and go on to be incredibly famous and fabulous themselves (see: Anna Wintour, Anna Dello Russo).

  While it’s true that some assistants document their exploits on reality television or in columns about what it’s like being an assistant, many are more focused on having a career than being in the public eye, which is much to their credit, I think, in a business where everywhere you look, someone’s Instagramming their shoes because they think their followers NEED to know. And resisting the ability to self-promote at all times can take willpower.

  Annie was very much this kind of assistant.

  “What designers do you like?” she asked me when I showed up.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had practically just learned the names of real fashion designers who don’t have linens lines at Macy’s yesterday.

  “Alexander Wang!” I said, partly because it was one of the few I could think of and partly because I knew he made a lot of black stuff, and black is supposed to be slimming.

  “What else?” Annie asked as she escorted me to the closet, a big room stuffed with racks of designer clothing. It was like a condensed version of Barneys, only nothing was for sale, and if you take your clothes off in the middle of the room to try stuff on, no one tries to arrest you. Annie seemed to know exactly where all the most Amy-ish clothes were and had packing materials ready to go to wrap up anything I might want.

  “Uh.”

  “I think you’d look good in Stella McCartney. How about Elizabeth & James?” she continued.

  “Really, when you’re looking at what I came in wearing,” I noted, “you can only elevate the situation.”

  I tried on several black things, including a Stella blazer and a two-piece Alexander Wang outfit: a cropped turtleneck with a matching, equally tight skirt that, worn together, was like one giant sock with sleeves.

  You can see why they hire professionals to be in magazine spreads once you try on sample clothing. Giving birth is probably a sexier sensation.

&nb
sp; “That looks great on you. Do you like it?”

  I looked in the mirror. The sweater outfit was as tight as sausage casing, which meant it was either holding me in, flatteringly, or making me pucker, unflatteringly. I didn’t know what looked good or bad, honestly, but Annie most certainly knew. In addition to having great taste when it came to dressing me, she was wearing leather shorts in a way that looked not just normal, but awesome. That’s the kind of thing that separates a true stylist from everyone else: a stylist can wear shit like that and make it look like something you want, as opposed to when a regular person wears the same thing and looks like a weirdo for owning shorts made of leather.

  “Yes, if you think it looks good?” I said.

  She said she approved and then packed up all the stuff I might wear for the shoot—including options so we’d have more clothes than we’d photograph. She arrived some days later at my office at New York magazine, along with a hair person, makeup person, and photographer. They straightened my hair, coated my face with foundation, and helped me into my sleeved sock. Stylists like Annie oversee the whole process, and I absolutely love them. In making sure their subject looks the best she can look at shoots, they become protective, ready to mess with anyone trying to mess with you. They fight for your hair’s honor when a stylist tries to tease it where it’s not wanted. They tell the makeup artist to settle when she tries to contour your pale skin too heavily. Because the stylist knows everything. Stylists are the seers of fashion, knowing what will look good, when to push you past your comfort zone and when to hold you back from wearing something ridiculous. On top of all that, a stylist actually dresses the photo subject. They zip up her dress, cuff her sleeves, pin her clothes in all the baggy places, and they might even fetch you a straw so you can sip your drink without messing up your lipstick. In sum, they’re paid to not only make you look amazing, but also to treat you like an infant. When you feel uncomfortable in your designer sleeved tube sock, they’ll make soothing noises until you’ve gone from simpering to giggling again.