by Lynn Messina
Fashionistas
Lynn Messina
Fashionistas
For Mom
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to:
my father, my brothers, the Linwoods, Roell Schmidt, Elena Ro Yang, Jennifer Lewis
And:
Susan Ramer, Farrin Jacobs, Margaret Marbury
Also:
Chris Catanese—peace, love and lightbulb
Contents
My First Day of Work
My 1,233rd Day
Fashionista
Marguerite Tourneau Holland Beckett Velazquez Constantine Thomas
The Beginnings of a Plot
Jane McNeill
A Plot Takes Shape
Allison Harper
The Linchpin
Alex Keller
The Plot
Your Silly Life
Getting To Know You
Jane Carolyn-Ann McNeill
Drinks at the Paramount
My 102nd Day
Wavering
Phase One
Phase One Continued
My 15th Day
More Phase One
The Maine Filibuster
Superwoman
Man and Myth
Connecticut Small Talk
Terms of Reference, August 19: Cultivate Hustle
An Idea Germinates
Still Phase One
Delia’s First Job
How To Build a Better Career
My 529th Day
Phase One: Accomplished (Finally)
Phase Two
An Idea Takes Root
Too Much of a Linchpin
The Bridesmaid Maneuver
The Factotum Strike
Your Life Gets Sillier
Pinky
An Idea Blossoms
The Delia Files
Phase Three
The Contract
Terms of Reference, August 24: Switch Genres
Jane’s File
This Is Just a Date
Enemy at the Thumbtack Wall
The Pitch
Phase Four
The Jesus Package
Drinks at 60 Thompson
The Fine Print
This Is Just Another Date
The Majordomo Counterstrike
More Plotting
Marguerite’s File
Senior Editor: Day 31
The Spring Collection
This Is Not a Relationship
Urban Renewal
Jane Carolyn-Ann Whiting McNeill
Drinks at the W
Omens
Judas
Calgary
Resurrection
My Last Day of Work
Epilogue
My First Day of Work
“Vig, what does your roommate look like?”
“She’s tall and blond and has green eyes.”
“Does she have a boyish figure like yours?”
“Uh…”
“Is she a stick, a lollipop, a drainpipe with no dents?”
“Uh…”
“We’re talking completely flat. Not a curve to be found, even with surveying equipment and six of the Royal Cartographers Association’s best men.”
“Uh…”
“Because if she has any shape at all, it won’t do. We need flatter than the salt plains of Utah. We’d use you, but company policy prevents us from employing our own employees. I could fire you, but then I’d have to go through the hassle of finding another assistant, which is twenty minutes I just don’t have. Listen up, go down to the Ford Agency in Soho and tell them that we need a girl just like you for our story on bridesmaids with awful figures. Stress the fact that we need a model who looks real, like one of our readers but not as dumpy. And tell them we need a large girl, too. But only a plus-size model with a pretty face. Make sure her face is pretty. We are not in the magazine business to give airtime to ugly women. Go on, what are you waiting for? Shoo. Be back in thirty minutes and don’t forget to pick up my lunch. I want tuna on toasted rye bread with one lettuce leaf on the bottom. Make sure they put it on the bottom. I can’t eat a sandwich with lettuce on the top. Order it from Mangia. Their number is in your Rolodex. All right, stop staring and go do something. This isn’t one of those jobs where you stand around the water cooler talking about must-see television. And don’t forget my coffee. I like it black.”
My 1,233rd Day
The offices of Fashionista are like the streets of San Francisco, only with microscent zones instead of microclimates. Every editor in every office is always burning some kind of candle—lilacs, vanilla, cinnamon, multifragranted concoctions called Grandmother’s Kitchen—and if you don’t like the smell, all you have to do is walk a few feet to the left and breathe different air.
But things are different today. Someone is burning incense. Its scent is heavy and powerful and floats down the hallway like a thick-soled phantom, seeping under doorways. Even the bathroom’s ordinarily antiseptic aroma is undermined.
We aren’t prepared to deal with incense. It is the heavy artillery, the big guns, and we have no place to take cover. We are exposed in the center, a shantytown of cubicles, and our only recourse is to breathe the cigarette-infused air outside the revolving door on the ground floor.
“It’s frankincense and myrrh,” says Christine, popping her head over the cubicle wall.
“What?” I’m trying to write an article about celebrity-owned restaurants, but I can’t concentrate. The smell is too distracting.
“The incense. It’s frankincense and myrrh,” she explains.
I’m surprised by her revelation and not quite sure I believe her. This is the twenty-first century, and we have all forgotten what frankincense and myrrh smell like.
“Myrrh has a bitter, pungent taste,” says Christine.
“It’s not myrrh,” I say, my eyes focused on my computer screen. “Myrrh doesn’t exist anymore.”
Christine leans against the wall and it gives slightly under her weight. “Vig, you can’t deny the existence of myrrh.”
I look at her. “I can. I deny the existence of myrrh.”
“That’s ridiculous. The wise men brought it to baby Jesus as a birthday present.”
“So?” I say with a shrug before making some comment about dodo birds. My point is only that dodo birds used to exist and now they don’t, but somehow I’ve managed to suggest that dodo birds were another gift of the magi.
Christine’s eyes widen as she misunderstands me. “The wise men didn’t bring dodo birds to Bethlehem. What a ridiculous thing to imply,” she huffs.
“How do you know?” I ask, because the vehemence in her tone is too strong. You should never be that sure about anything. “I mean, how do you know for a fact that they didn’t also bring dodo birds?”
“Because it’s not in the bible,” she says with more insistence than the topic calls for. I’m only teasing. “There’s no mention of dodo birds anywhere.”
I don’t have Christine’s religious bent—in fact, I don’t have a religion at all—and I’m amused by her vehemence. It’s not my intention to upset her. The last thing I want is for her to clutch the thin thumbtack wall with clenched fists, but I don’t apologize. It’s my belief that myrrh no longer exists and even though I don’t believe in much, I have the right to these thin convictions. I have no problem accepting the existence of frankincense, with its ugly f and traffic-stopping k, but not myrrh, something so light and airy that it is only a soft breeze on your lips.
“Besides,” she says, “I know for a fact that myrrh still exists. We had some in my cooking class.”
Christine is trying to get out of Fashionista and the route she has taken is aspiring food critic. She harbors dreams of being a food writer. She wants to
be one of those people who is paid to detect the impertinent flavor of cumin in a spring roll. She wants to go to James Beard foundation dinners and sit next to Julia Child. She wants to work at a magazine that has a little more substance than seeping incense.
Fashionista
Fashionista is a magazine about nothing. It’s aggressively hip and overwhelmingly current and every glossy page drips with beauty, but the nuggets of wisdom it dispenses are gold for fools. Despite what they say, you can’t steal Gwyneth’s arched brow or Nicole’s flowing tresses.
But stealing things from the rich and famous is central to Fashionista’s raison d’être. The magazine devotes itself completely to the tireless pursuit of all things celebrity, especially those aspects most basic for survival—food, clothing, shelter. Fame is the planet around which everything orbits. This is Jennifer Aniston’s plunger. This is where you can get it.
It’s not a new concept—ever since Mary Pickford stepped onto the red carpet batting her Max Factor eyelashes, the press has been foisting these images of glamour onto the public. But this is the magazine I work for and it makes me cringe. I cringe because insider’s tidbits that have been spoonfed to us by self-aggrandizing prophets are presented as news. Fashionista is a shrine to celebrity, and publicists carefully place their idols in the center of the altar for maximum exposure.
In the five years that I’ve been working here, we’ve never run a story that doesn’t name-drop at least one celebrity. The closest we came was an article I wrote three months ago about the preservation and presentation of teeth (the new braces, the new bleaches, the new bonds). For the most part, it was a full-service piece, the sort you’d find in any other women’s magazine, the useful kind that actually lists names of dentists that ordinary people go to. However, this much-needed information ran alongside a list of the top five sets of teeth in Hollywood. The practical sidebar on gum disease—what to look for, how to prevent it—was quickly axed. At Fashionista, we don’t mention a disease unless a celebrity is trying to cure it.
I spend most of my time on the phone, charting trends and inventing cultural drifts. It’s exhausting business finding out who’s going where and who’s using what and who’s wearing who, and I impatiently wait for spa directors and salon owners and store managers to return my calls. The information always trickles in and it’s never as pat as it should be. A trend needs three examples to be declared—two might be a coincidence—and I frequently have to dig deep to find the third. This is why you often see the picture of an unknown actress with a humiliating ID tag under her name next to a silhouette of Julia Roberts.
Despite Fashionista’s huge readership and record-breaking ad revenues, it’s a magazine about nothing. Regardless of what our press releases say, we aren’t the epicenter of hip. This empty stillness you feel is not the calm at the eye of a hurricane.
Marguerite Tourneau Holland Beckett Velazquez Constantine Thomas
The Monday afternoon meeting is an extremely dull affair. Fifty people gather around a large conference table with coffee cups in hand to talk about prints and photographers and shoots and stylists and schedules and all the other mind-numbing minutiae that go into a successful layout. Only seven or eight people are actually needed for these conversations, but we all have to go and suffer. We all have to drag our overworked carcasses to the conference room and listen to the photo department argue over which photo of Cate Blanchett best represents her curly phase.
We rarely discuss anything copy-related and when we do, it’s just to establish if an article is in and, if it’s not in, when it can be expected. One Monday a month—usually the second, but sometimes the third—there is extended debate about who’s going to appear as a contributor. The contributor’s page is that page after the editor’s note that you skip over on your way to the letters. Readers barely glance at it if they even look at it at all. Still, finding the right balance of people is a delicate science and we discuss the ingredients of the contributor’s page as if preparing a soufflé (a soupçon less stylist, a dash of writer). When Jane isn’t at meetings, I’m usually hard-pressed to keep my eyes open.
I’m trying to keep my eyes open now when the conference room door opens. A striking woman in a classic black dress enters carrying a Chanel bag. She has an Audrey Hepburn thing going, with her long cigarette holder, her string of pearls and her tall, thin frame, and she’s standing inside the doorway, as though she hasn’t decided if she wants to stay, as though she might just flag down a cab and leave. There are no cabs in the conference room.
The managing editor stops berating the staff for not filling out green sheets and looks up. She sees the smoke swirling around the conference room and starts coughing pointedly. Smoking is allowed but only in one’s office with the door closed.
“Am I late?” the woman says, having decided she might as well stay.
Lydia coughs again and then shakes her head. “No, of course not.” She smiles in the obsequious way we all do when Jane is present. But this is not Jane, so the smile seems out of place and toadyish. “We were just going over some preliminary information while waiting for you.”
The woman smiles and puffs on the cigarette through six inches of plastic before sitting down to the right of Lydia. “Excellent.”
Christine leans in. “That’s the woman who was burning incense this morning,” she whispers in my ear.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I followed the scent. I think she’s the new editorial director.”
This is news. “What happened to Eleanor?”
“She was fired in Paris last week. I don’t know the details.”
“Eleanor was sitting in Jane’s seat during the Anna Sui show,” says Delia, the editorial assistant for the events pages. She’s sitting behind us, on a bench that lines the conference room’s east wall, and she leans forward to speak quietly in our ears. “Jane was forced to sit in the last row and, as soon as the show was over, she fired Eleanor right then and there. Eleanor insisted that it was all a misunderstanding—someone showed her to that seat—but Jane didn’t believe a word of it. As it turns out, the publisher was at the show sitting next to an old acquaintance who just happened to be perfect for the job. He hired her on the spot.”
I stare at Delia, amazed by the details she’s managed to track down in a few hours. “How do you know all this?”
Delia shrugs and rests her head against the wall. “I hear things.”
Before I respond to Delia, Lydia coughs again. The new editorial director shifts the cigarette from her right hand to her left. She will let no cough pass unavenged.
“I’d like to introduce a new member of our staff,” Lydia says with little enthusiasm. “She comes to us from Sydney, where she served as editor in chief for Australian Vogue for six years. Say hello to Marguerite Tourneau Holland Beckett Velazquez Constantine Thomas.”
There is a quiet murmur of people mumbling and saying hello.
“No,” I say very quietly in Christine’s ear.
She smiles. “Yes.”
“No,” I say again, more insistent. She can’t be for real. Nobody drags a laundry list of names behind them.
“I think she’s on her fifth husband.”
“But still….”
“She loved them all.”
“Can you see that on the masthead? It’ll take up three lines. She’s an editor, for God’s sake. She must know how to cut for fit.”
Christine smiles but doesn’t say a thing. She’s watching the drama unfold with unprecedented interest. Everyone around the table is now alert, not just the photography department.
“Thank you, Linda, for that—” she pauses here to find an adjective but after a long search abandons the endeavor “—introduction. So kind of you. Well,” she says, blowing smoke once more in Lydia’s face before turning her attention to the people around the table, “I’m very happy to be here. I’ve long been an admirer of Fashionista and look forward to working with the team that puts together such a
fine magazine.”
We are not used to being told by editorial directors that we put together a fine magazine and some of us actually titter at the novelty.
“Now, I want to get to know everyone around this table,” she assures us with a convincing amount of sincerity, “but since time is of the essence, why don’t we start with each of you telling me your name and what you do at Fashionista.”
Despite the fact that we perform this sort of ritual with alarming regularity—every time someone new starts or a person from Human Resources comes down to “say hi”—it’s still one of my least favorite activities. I hate having to say, “Vig Morgan, associate editor,” and I hate hearing everyone else say it as well. There is something vaguely embarrassing about identifying yourself like you’re a Von Trapp child stepping out of line at the sound of a dog whistle.
David Rodrigues from the art department goes first, and instead of just nodding vaguely like the people from Human Resources do, Marguerite asks him a question. She asks him about the shirt he is wearing, a brown cotton tee with a curious logo. David tells her that it’s his own design. Our new editorial director says something about him being the next William Morris and orders one for herself. She continues around the table in the same vein, getting a feel for each staff member and paying at least one compliment. She asks Christine about her cooking classes. She tells me that she’s thinking of getting her teeth whitened thanks to my article.
Marguerite Tourneau Holland Beckett Velazquez Constantine Thomas is winning and it works. We are won.
The afternoon meeting lasts until three-thirty, but nobody minds except Lydia. Lydia has watched the proceedings get away from her like a little girl who’s lost her kite to a strong gust of wind. There is an odd, helpless look on her face. She tries several times to regain control—she still has the string and is holding on tight—but Marguerite, with her seemingly endless cigarette, just blows smoke at her with indifference.
In the end, there is little talk of photo shoots. Lydia has no idea where matters stand for most of November’s layouts and she now has to do things the hard way. She now has to visit each editor with her mock-up and her map and talk one-on-one in order to sort it all out.
But nobody cares. Lydia is a nice enough managing editor and she gets the job done, but she never goes to bat for you. She’s not one of those managers who goes to the boss and stands up for “her people.” She’s a kowtowing minion. She’s a yes gal with a limited vocabulary. When you work three nights straight until two in the morning because Jane decides at six o’clock that she hates the whole issue, don’t expect anything. Don’t expect a raise. Don’t expect comp time. Don’t expect a dashed-off, handwritten note saying thank you. Don’t expect Lydia to remind your editor in chief that six o’clock isn’t the time to start tearing up layouts. Just don’t expect a thing.