Tales from the Back Row (3 page)

We need to implement new distinctions for “new media” people. As much I would like it to be my job, I am never going to succeed in making a career out of posting photos of myself wearing different outfits for people to enthuse over on the internet.

As for my personal style, it progressed slower than the speed
of fossilization. When I started at the Cut, I knew as much about fashion as I did about gardening. Just as I knew soil is required to grow vegetables, some of which grow
above
ground and some of which grow
below
ground, I knew that people wear clothes. I knew that really expensive ones with price tags affixed to labels by leather strings were more likely to be considered “fashion” than Jeggings with clear MMMMMMMM stickers running down the legs. For months when I started, I would get up before seven each morning so that I could read every word in
Women's Wear Daily
to figure out what mattered the most in the fashion world that day. I could read enough to learn about the fashion business and how it worked and all that. I could figure out which designers worked at which labels, which labels people cared about the most, and what the trends were in everything from online retail strategy to spring denim. But I could not nearly as easily adopt a sense of personal style that said, “I am a person who understands fashion and excels at getting dressed. Do worship my choice of blouse.” I was very cavelady about it: “This is shirt, this is pants, this is outfit.” I used to wear this one white knit top with a tattoo print-esque design on it (shhh!) that had three-quarter-length bell sleeves. I had not yet switched to skinny jeans, so I wore said top with boot-cut Abercrombie jeans I'd owned since high school—the “worn in” kind that looked like they had been used as a rag to wash hippos before they became pants. (This was the hot look for seventeen-year-olds in Austin, Texas.) I wore Reef flip-flops made of fuzzy leopard-printed material. In terms of an everyday outfit for a person who would leave her house, it was perfectly fine in that it
clothed
me. But as an outfit for a person who would have to go to fashion shows and write about them, it was
embarrassing
. Like arriving at a wedding and not realizing
your nipples are showing until you get there, and then you spend the next three hours wondering if anyone else can tell. Visible nipples would have been preferable to my tattoo prints and bell sleeves. At least then I'd have something in common with runway models, who I'm sure would prefer to wear sheer clothing than be seen in my old clothes on a runway.

But I'm not a stylist—I'm a writer and editor. It's not necessarily my job to know how to put really interesting outfits together. It's my job to understand trends, interview designers and models and celebrities, and to piece it all together for various blog items for my readers. I had to look professional, yes, and ideally sort of stylish, but I didn't necessarily need to know that the black-and-white leopard Cavalli top goes perfectly with those Lucite-heeled neon-trimmed Marni shoes and that pair of high-waisted jean shorts with the Chanel brooch on the upper right ass cheek.

I loved getting to riff and joke all day about celebrity clothing lines and J. Lo's sequined body stockings. I loved taking interviews and turning them into stories. I love writing about almost anything, really. But I am not a personal-style blogger, and I do not possess the same talents as Rumi “Fashiontoast” Neely, who is one of the original stars. She shot a series a few years back I'll always remember. She was wearing white and sashaying down a dark road holding a dream catcher. This is her work. Put on a ridiculously cool outfit, pose somewhere telegenic with a dream catcher or meal of fast food or one of her fluffy cats, repeat. She's managed to make a handsome career out of living her life as though it was one giant fashion editorial aka making her followers (me) wildly jealous of her life and taste. She ended up starring in a campaign for Forever 21. She has an agent. She's a jet-setter.

What I find people are usually referring to when they say “fash
ion bloggers,” are people like Fashiontoast, or the Man Repeller (who models clothing that women love but that—wait for it—­repels men), and Sea of Shoes (who, well, actually does the same thing). They are personal-style bloggers who operate independent sites, formatted like blogs. Some brands are really into having these bloggers come to Fashion Week and will organize them all in the front row the way I imagine Martha Stewart's flavored salt collection to be arranged attractively in the foreground of her spice cupboard. Brands seem to think that putting a bunch of bloggers in the front row will make a statement about how digitally savvy they are. But this says very little: seating a bunch of personal-­style bloggers together in one place just means that that brand was able to print out the names of the most successful independently employed professional clothes wearers and tape them to some adjoining chair backs.

These bloggers are valuable in terms of publicizing certain brands. They have loyal followings that buy the items they link to or wear. And they're often “safe” because they generally cover everything positively. I was not a visible “face” in the industry and am not guaranteed to be positive about everything, so I get a great view of these bloggers from my seat twelve rows behind them, in the back row. I look upon these beautiful, ornately dressed people in envy, marveling at how I'd never think to wear two sheer blouses at once.

What's interesting about the bloggers' rush to the front row is how quickly they're displacing print media. Some of these bloggers have more significant—and probably more valuable—web presences than some legacy media brands. And you wonder why that is when these magazines have at least a couple dozen people on staff, and these blogs are run by maybe one person plus, argu
ably, whoever takes their pictures. Why some magazine websites aren't met with the same enthusiasm as
ManRepeller.com
is an embarrassment to these brands
,
which have, presumably, many, many more resources than a girl with a computer, a dream, and an affinity for fabulous shoes.

It's not like people like Sea of Shoes have taken Anna Wintour's front-row seat (LOL, no), but they might end up sitting across from her, which suggests they're of fairly similar importance as far as fashion world personalities go. Anna is surely more powerful, but she and the Seas of Shoeses of this world do have one significant thing in common: they're recognizable. They have a look. They're street-style photographer bait, whether they like it (Sea of Shoes) or not (Anna, seemingly). Street-style publicity is important because it helps make someone a personality, and the more of a personality you are, the more valuable you become. The bloggers seem to like street-style attention, for the most part, but they don't have much choice because it's essential to their brands. Meanwhile, for people like Anna, who walks past photographers as though it's just started raining and she can't wait to get inside, getting to wherever one's going is always more important than getting photographed going there. Anna is part of the group who shows up for the work itself, but for the new guard of fashion internet celebs, getting attention for showing up is part of the work.

Street style has become VERY intense at Fashion Week. It can feel like the paparazzi stalking Britney Spears in the weeks leading up to her head-shaving meltdown, except Fashion Week people don't scream at the street-style photographers for taking their pictures. Rather, they
invite
it by dressing elaborately and out of season and making themselves as available as a hot dog vendor outside
show venues. I once came across a serious street-style photograph, by esteemed street-style photographer Mr. Newton, of a woman who happened to be a fashion blogger, “having lunch at the Seagram Building” in Manhattan on a Monday, wearing a sheer black blouse with nothing underneath. You could see all of her boobs, so it was like she was topless, and one imagined if she was indeed just on a lunchtime stroll, there would be lots of bankers in suits gathering around, staring at her boobs. I remember wondering,
Is this what street style has come to? The painfully stylish look is so done that people have to be NUDE to get photographed?

It used to be that people who had clearly styled their outfits
just so
would linger around fashion events pretending to be engaged in meaningful conversations with friends they see so infrequently that 90 percent of their interactions are air-kissing. And then if they were dressed right, a street-style photographer would notice their
fab
outfit, and they'd be like, “Oh, me? You want to photograph me? OKAY, I GUESS I HAVE TIME!
Enchanté, Josephine,
but IT'S TIME FOR MY MOMENT!” And then they'd pose with one leg bent inward a little bit like they'd practiced it. Now, swarms of street-style paparazzi and being photographed for that little corner of the internet has become such a
fact
at Fashion Week that it's now perfectly acceptable to show up dressed really bizarrely and flashily and just stand there until people gather around you to photograph you. You couldn't find a more perfect relic of this narcissistic internet age.

• • •

People who go to Fashion Week sometimes dress just to get photographed. This does not mean people were necessarily dressing
more thoughtfully or more creatively or (dare I even suggest the concept) more
practically
, but now they seem to dress just purely outlandishly, wearing clothing just for the sake of ornamentation and spectacle. As I started my second year at the Cut, I noticed that's how it worked: the stranger and flashier you looked—the more garish of a trend cocktail you could turn your body into—the more likely you were to get shot by these photographers. Runway clothes often work the same way: you see so many “normal” outfits as a person who works in the fashion business, that only the weird stuff becomes interesting and the so-weird-it's-borderline-not-clothing stuff becomes the only apparel that can possibly unhinge the extreme boredom brought on by most fashion shows that suckles the life straight from the teat of a fashion person's soul. Standing out—and I mean
really
standing out—becomes the new normal. The
good
thing about the street-style nonsense is that you get even more spectacular people watching than you'd get without it. Women end up going to fashion shows wearing stiletto sandals and chiffon skirts with no tights in February, or with glittery pineapples affixed to their heads, or with hair dyed to look gray instead of the other way around, or with big furry neon tails attached to their purses or slung around their necks because they're Louis Vuitton and Prada and therefore elevated from completely absurd items of excess to
so on-trend
. If a well-styled Fashion Week person got off the plane in 99 percent of the places on the rest of the earth, they'd be treated like aliens, of this I'm certain. Because that's how you fit in in this industry: wear something that would look insane just about everywhere that is not Fashion Week.

I once undertook an experiment to see if I could get photographed. At this point, I had three years at the Cut on my résumé: I understood the secret salt of the personal-style blogger. So I de
cided to go to the shows one day wearing a street-style costume. Ideally, I'd end up with a story about how street-style stardom boils down to a few things that don't necessarily bespeak one's
totes fab
style, but rather a sanitized version of looking ridiculous. My friend at work, Diana, a market editor, tried to call in a bunch of spectacular designer things for me to wear. This being Fashion Week, no one was interested in lending me an outfit because I'm not Madonna (breaking news) and they had actual important shows to put on—and here the back-row girl wants to borrow something? Though just about everyone we asked had negative interest in getting back to us to even reject us, we did manage to get Miu Miu to loan us a pair of open-toed glitter booties. But as the days dragged on and the window of time in which I had to pull off this experiment closed, I became increasingly anxious.

Day three of Fashion Week arrived. This is one of the most important days of New York Fashion Week, because designers Prabal Gurung, Alexander Wang, and Joseph Altuzarra all usually show. Often this is a busy day of actual work for me (reporting and writing about what happens that day, by which I mean
willing things to happen
because usually nothing worth writing about happens when all that's at stake is a bunch of people sitting in a room watching skinny tall girls walk back and forth wearing stuff), which leaves little time for self-indulgent outfit planning.

On day three, Prabal Gurung often has the first big show of the day. He is a really fabulous human being who remembers people and is always extra-kind when he speaks to them, but not in a fake, meeting-your-friend's-other-bridesmaids sort of way that makes you want to fork yourself. Before the show that year, I was on the list for a backstage interview, as was then
New
York Times
critic Cathy Horyn, so I had to wait.

Like moviemaking,
waiting
is a big part of Fashion Week. If you're not waiting backstage for a designer or headsetted person to find you important enough to speak to, you're waiting to get inside a show venue, or waiting in your seat for a show to start. Most shows start, on average, half an hour late. Which doesn't make sense because, you may wonder, how long could it take to comb a girl's hair, fill in her eyebrows, and slip her into a dress? Forever, actually. It takes until the end of time to do these things. Partly because the models just came from a show where they had their hair painted with liquid clay and their entire eye sockets coated with red glitter. So that has to be undone before their hair, makeup, and nails can be done all over again for the show you're waiting to see. Then the designer has to finish visiting with important fashion critics like Cathy Horyn, before he finishes dressing his models and regarding them and so forth. Also, he has to wait for his seats to fill up, because often attendees are late because they had to preen for some cameras and have no expectation of these things starting on time anyway. (Some designers can afford to start on time, because everything revolves around them, and the guests are the ones who will really feel stupid if they are late and miss the show, but this is only, like, two people.)