I had my own taste of Weisbergian existentialism when I interned at this major US fashion magazine we’ll call Stylin’. I quickly discovered that rather than being a learning opportunity of a lifetime and well-shod foot in the door, the whole internship system was installed just to keep the office from running to the ground. You know how they say if all the domestic helpers in Hong Kong and Singapore suddenly went on strike, their economies would descend into chaos because there would be no one to clean the toilets and diaper the babies?
The interns, bright-eyed, newly-minted grads, all get shuffled through this grinder, and those who have aspirations of contributing their talents and possibly making a difference, emerge crushed and defeated. Those who know how to play by the rules, who don’t question anything but ask a lot of questions, those who smile obsequiously when asked to get Starbucks – they make it to the next low-paying level, the editorial assistant (hereby known as ed ass.) And up and up, until finally the coveted spots of editors, where there is less work and tons of prestige and even more freebies.
Coming from working for Philippine STAR’s YStyle and Preview, and barely escaping with a journalism degree, I thought the internship would be a perfect fit and that I would soon be sailing my way up the masthead. Yet on the first day, I was shown past the fashion closet, past the copy desks and past the graphic designers, into a dingy area known as production, the department void of anything to do with clothes or articles.
That whole month sitting cross-eyed at an old Apple computer was so inanely boring that I don’t even remember most of it except that I was reading a lot of snarky blogs from the Philippines. Oh, yeah, I created schedules and made sure the workflow was indeed flowing. It was all very abstract, I was so removed from the creative meat of the magazine, while, in an ironic visionary twist, I knew exactly what the girls were going to be wearing in three months’ time (this was last summer, so velvet). The people in production, in contrast to the rest of the office, were so fashion-unconscious they were practically in a coma. They couldn’t give a darned stocking about the stories they proofed, although it was a highly specialized skill required to tell on print when healthy blue denim was looking a bit green, or when celebrity skin flushes or blanches, the former which Scarlett tends to do, and Gwyneth the latter.
Later on I was transferred to the editorial department, much to my relief, or so I thought. As a "general" I was fair game for any ed ass who needed an errand run, and I do mean run. One of my main duties was to collate the daily gossips, which was the closest thing I got to editing a paper, but closer, really, to cutting, pasting, and photocopying the heck out of the mangled morning papers. There was a certain imposed logic and flow to the gossips, where Page Six is mandatorily on page one, followed by Rush and Molloy, Cindy Adams, etc., and interspersed with magazine industry news and celeb pics, usually someone caught on the streets of New York shopping or looking bulimic. I became a force-fed tabloid junkie who sadly knew what every famous and pseudo- famous person was doing or snorting, at any given moment.
Competition among the interns was unspoken and disguised beneath frothy shopping banter and the endless circles of "Hey! How are you?" "I’m great, how are you?" but the undercurrent was so strong you could digitally perm a herd of woolly mammoths. It would manifest itself firstly through dressing, and the minimum-wage- earning interns would occasionally come to work in stilettos and a cocktail dress, only to be stationed at the Xerox machine. But sucking up was the main sport, the Olympic event. Editor/Ed Ass: "Hey, girls. I need someone to, like, pick up–" Overeager intern dying to prove herself: "OMG, I’ll do it!" after which she’ll have to tromp down to the basement docking bay and deal with burly FedEx guys and ruin her shoes.
One day I was called to work in the fashion closet. I was naively excited and glad to leave my previous digs, which had gotten overrun with holiday-themed doggie clothing. Another delusion. You get over the fact that you’re surrounded by a mountain of pretty things you can’t afford in, like, two minutes. What you are left with is the hideous chore of having to unpack each item, label it and hang it up – every capelet and scarf, bauble and bra, stacked platform and tchotchke. The ridiculous and highly wasteful process of putting together even a small fashion feature of four outfits involves calling in boxes and bagsful and trunkloads of pieces that will not make it through. Who’s stuck with repacking each dress, re-pairing each shoe, and figuring out where they get sent home to? As my one intern friend (the only other jaded one with a masters degree) scoffed, "What glamour? All it is is the non-stop trafficking of clothes."
We also lived in muted fear of the fashion editors, who were beautiful, preternaturally young-looking, and hopelessly bitchy. The bitch factor is particularly predominant in the upper-mid levels; those at the top have nothing to prove and are usually really sweet (Miss Anna might be the exception, if we are to believe what is written about her). They are also not beyond furtively "borrowing" a dress for an event and returning them un-dry cleaned. The fashion closet is manual-labor intensive and run like a plantation. I was sent to pick up three gowns from the Dolce & Gabbana showroom. They were each made completely out of rhinestones/crystals/lead balls and were so heavy that if the typically starved starlet had to wear one to an opening, she’d be crushed on the red carpet. Yes, fashion has its victims.
Style rules did not merely apply to what to wear. Writing about fashion required some fascism, too. Banned words included celeb, homey, eponymous, icon, gal pal, and uh, ho tops. They’re pants, not pant ("it’s too Vogue"), pumps, not pump, and the same goes for panties. Celebrities could not be attributed too descriptively, and so they do not gush, confess, or admit. A fashion magazine’s stylebook is an amusing 10-minute read, a useful reference for finding out how to spell Freddie Leiba, sevruga caviar, tchotchke, and Diane von Furstenberg. It’s also an insightful peek into the churning thoughts behind the vapid gloss of their pages – what one chooses to hide is often more revealing than a plunging décolletage, is it not?
So just how does chick-lit drama trauma end, through overcoming or opting out? Bridget Jones loses her job, gains the mirthy Colin Firth, but never sheds her extra poundage. The fictional assistant in The Devil Wears Prada apparently gets fired for standing up to her thinly-disguised boss, having chosen to care for her sick friend. I opted out of Stylin’ because they weren’t going to hire me anyway. But in my endearingly beleaguered heroine-ness, I was totally OK with that – being an ed ass making less than a panhandler on the corner of Broadway and Canal Street, for a magazine that never changes its covers, lost its appeal long ago. Around the time Brangelina entered the dictionary.