I always thought that I liked fashion, but really, I liked clothes. Fashion is a different beast entirely, and it’s a culture that hinges on something impossible to maintain: exclusivity. I had no idea what I was getting into.
Since I started out as a beauty editor, I was eased into the fashion world. My first few times at New York Fashion Week were spent doing backstage reporting, which means you dash from venue to venue several hours before the shows start. It’s a lot of arduous interviews (depending, I guess, on how excited you are to hear about bold brows and dewy skin on repeat) and a lot of running around, but in general it was pretty low stakes: backstage you could wear whatever you wanted, as long as you didn’t get in anyone’s way. And people who worked in beauty were generally nice—I found there’s a kind of nurturing personality that’s attracted to doing hair, nails, and makeup. Certain manicurists were known to do editors’ nails during preshow interviews. Everyone knew everyone. I didn’t mind missing out on the actual shows. I wasn’t that interested in them. I wanted to know about makeup and hair tricks that people could actually use, rather than clothes that I couldn’t afford.
I started actually attending shows when I went to Nylon in 2014 as a senior editor, and it didn’t take me long to realize that despite what it looks like on Instagram, very few people actually enjoy Fashion Week (fashion month if you work for a company with enough money to send you to the European shows). And really, for people who are there to work, what’s to enjoy? The days of “the tents”—when NYFW had one sponsor and so all the shows happened in one place—ended shortly after I started working in fashion, so there were only one or two seasons when I got to experience that luxury. The weeklong event that I came up in was spread throughout Manhattan, and Brooklyn too, with multiple conflicting calendars making it impossible to be anywhere on time. It was chaotic, zoo-like—and the worst part was that you were expected to look perfect, so even though it involved quite literally running around the city, when you hit the corner filled with street style photographers or you took your seat next to a former boss, not a single hair could be out of place.
Fashion Week in general is the last remaining vestige of a dying ethos. On a superficial, capitalistic level, it’s totally at odds with what we know about contemporary consumer behavior: In our digital age people want instant gratification, especially when it comes to fashion. But aside from the few brands that have recently shifted to a see-now, buy-now model, you can’t buy what you see on the runway—because it won’t be available for several months, and because often a lot of the clothes never even go into production (bigger brands make most of their money off of shoes and bags). But then, it’s not really for consumers at all, anyway. The shows were originally for buyers, and for print magazine editors for whom the season-ahead schedule is relevant to their pace (fall/winter collections show in February; spring/summer shows in September). But as more and more print magazines folded, most coverage of NYFW became less centered around the shows themselves and more about the attendees—and specifically where people sit (the curation of a front row, for example, has the power to make headlines) and what they wear.
And oh, what I wore! Though the street style photography frenzy had probably reached critical mass, the pressure to turn up in the absolute newest clothes and accessories—so new they weren’t available to anyone yet—had never felt greater. I learned that there was no amount of preparedness that was out of proportion to the pressure; every fashion season I set up a rack in my living room and spent a week visiting showrooms to borrow samples, because my own clothes would truly never cut it, and if I could have one less thing to worry about, great. Borrowing clothes was a lot of fun if you’re a sample size—a size zero, basically, to fit the runway models—which I was for a few years. It was like playing dress up, only with clothes I’d probably never be able to afford, and I had to wear them in front of the most notable fashion people in the world, and then on the subway.
Obviously, this is a great perk for a very, very tiny group of people, which creates an implicit hierarchy: those who can borrow, and those who are left to fend for themselves. And generally it’s the borrowed outfits—the clothes no one has seen before—that get photographed by street style photographers, and so the street style stars that popped up in every magazine roundup remained the same size. Some publications made a concerted effort to feature size diversity, and others like InStyle at one point pledged to feature only plus-size women in their slideshows online. Those were the exceptions, though. From the outside, if you only looked at photographs of Fashion Week, it would appear that only thin white women attended. That was very much not the case.
But back to Fashion Week’s slow, stressful descent into irrelevancy. In addition to understanding that consumers want immediacy, we also knew that they want diversity of all kinds: race, size, age, gender. But I think someone forgot to tell the designers that. Or, worse, they knew and simply did not care. Season after season, a parade of skinny young white women filled almost every runway, and everyone took out their phones to document them, unquestioning.
Just how white and thin was it? The year of my first Fashion Week, the New York Times reported that 82.7 percent of the models were white. It was also the first year ever that a plus-size designer presented a collection. A few years later, according to a report put out by the Fashion Spot, in February 2018, 62.7 percent of all models on the runway were white. The size-diversity numbers are even more troubling: 1.1 percent of the models were plus-size. The rest of the models were treated like clothes hangers. They looked, in all frankness, like starving, cold teenagers—at best they were very thin; at worst (and more commonly) you could see all their bones, the bags under their glazed-over eyes.
We all became so used to the shape of models’ bodies that, even if we could abstractly acknowledge that that’s not what average, healthy women look like, it felt like everyone just pretended it was normal—because what would happen if we actually considered the amount of starvation required to look like that? I’m sure some of the models were naturally thin, but the vast majority were so clearly suffering from severe eating disorders that it’s a wonder to me they could even walk down the runway at all.
The continued silence around the issue was particularly ironic once that empowerment turned into an aesthetic. In 2017 multiple shows had models walking in variations on a theme of girl-power T-shirts, selling a political ideology that somehow didn’t extend to the actual women modeling the messaging. Not to mention the editors in the audience and their newfound concern with feminist content—every season, another fashion publication joined the chorus of criticism, pointing out the ways fashion is failing women, mourning the lack of diversity on the runways, and often very smartly deconstructing the problematic values of the industry.
And yet: these same writers and editors still went to the shows. As many shows as possible, even. Myself included. We put effort into our appearances; we scheduled our lives around Fashion Week. We posted about it all month long on our social media accounts. And in doing so, we were complicit. Even though I knew better than to blindly worship designers, I couldn’t help but get swept up in the shimmery madness of it all; how do you turn down a front-row seat when you’ve been fighting for years to be taken seriously? You don’t. Or at least, I didn’t.
Take, for example, the global editorial obsession with Chanel, the pinnacle of couture. I don’t know a single fashion person who doesn’t have a weakness for the brand. It’s a name you almost have to whisper. Chanel. And yet. Gabrielle Chanel is rumored to have been a Nazi, and her successor, Karl Lagerfeld, was notorious for his very public hatred of—as he put it—fat women and ugly women. Recently deceased, his legacy lingers—he’s considered one of the most influential fashion icons of all time, and one of the most beloved. But his definition of beauty was limited to thin white women, and though he indisputably made beautiful work, his personal biases helped uphold the idea that only a certain kind of person with a certain kind of body should have
access to luxury fashion. None of that is a secret; it’s an inconvenient fact that was largely ignored by otherwise feminist-oriented editors. Even I was once in a branded editorial for Refinery29 featuring women named Gabrielle in celebration of Chanel’s Gabrielle bag. I got paid in a gift of the bag featured, which is still the most expensive thing I own and sits on its own shelf in my bedroom.
It was easy to blame the designers for the glorification of eating disorders. It seemed like such an easy fix: cast curve models. Make the clothes to fit them. It felt like laziness, like a willful disregard for not only women’s bodies but our well-being. But by continuing to show up in droves for these shows, we were telling them that we were okay with it. We forgave the designer for being a fatphobic misogynist if the clothes were super pretty.
I am fully implicating myself in the problem, but I also felt that if I had stopped going to shows, rather than any sort of wave being made, I’d just quickly be forgotten and everything would continue as is. I had no delusions of grandeur about my own participation and what it signified. Yes, when I was an editor in chief, I tended to get a front-row seat, but there was a line of people behind me who would have loved to have taken it. I could have stopped going on principle, and actually every season I fantasized about doing just that, but at a time in media when layoffs happen faster than anyone could keep track of, I worried about reminding my peers that I was still there. I worried that if I didn’t go, the assumption would be that I’d given up. When I left my job, I realized how ridiculous that was. No one was keeping tabs on me like that. And leaving a job isn’t seen as giving up, either—when I announced my resignation, my peers completely understood why. Some even expressed jealousy.
For any real change to happen in the fashion industry, all of the editors and bloggers and influencers would have to come together and agree to stop showing up for designers that aren’t making an active effort to improve diversity. That would mean going to probably four or five shows as opposed to the nearly one hundred that happen during New York Fashion Week alone.
Those four or five designers per season that are working to make a difference—usually queer people and people of color—were worth showing up for. Shows like Chromat, Christian Siriano, and Gypsy Sport became known for runways that felt more like celebrations than showcases. It was an emotional experience, going to a show with proper representation. Runway shows usually featured too-loud music and silent crowds, but at these, people cheered. Moments like when Chromat sent every size model down the runway in T-shirts that read “Sample Size” and when well-known plus-size models like Ashley Graham or Paloma Elsesser appeared always elicited claps and shouts. I’d look at my peers around me, and we’d all have tears in our eyes. There was the time the trans actress Laverne Cox opened the show for a brand that was featuring only plus sizes—she burst onto the runway in a dramatic, voluminous red dress, twirling gloriously. We all documented the experience on our social media, eager to get eyeballs on people whose values are worth promoting. But then we gathered up our belongings and ran to the next show.
Fashion isn’t solely to blame for the eating disorder epidemic—there are tons of factors that contribute to someone’s pathology—but it certainly isn’t helping. While there is, in my opinion, no right or wrong way to have a body, according to an often-cited study from 1996, runway models are thinner than 98 percent of American women. If fashion shows are for the 2 percent of women who see themselves reflected on the runways, the rest of America is left to feel not just excluded from something they might otherwise enjoy but like their bodies aren’t good enough for it.
And as someone who was struggling with my own eating issues, Fashion Week felt like one giant trigger, and I had to assume it was for other people, too. It was hard for me to look at my peers without wondering if they were currently going hungry to fit into whatever fabulous thing they had on. If someone was particularly rude, my first thought was that she probably hadn’t eaten that day. It took mental gymnastics deserving of a gold medal for me to get dressed for it once I couldn’t throw on any borrowed sample I wanted, to not spend the month ahead of the event skipping meals and working out obsessively. February, when any extra flesh can be bundled, was easier than September, when it was usually at least eighty degrees outside and there was no hiding. But either way I ended up spending a gross amount of time worrying about my own appearance, undoing the years I spent trying to do the exact opposite. Even if I landed on something that I felt good about, overall it was my worst look: that spiral of anxiety and then shame over the anxiety. Watching models walk down the runway, I had to force myself to not focus on their bodies. All this, postrecovery, just to stay afloat.
In our current political landscape, when there are more men accused of sexual assault on the Supreme Court than there are women of color, this can seem superficial. It’s just fashion, after all—surely there are more important things to worry about, like, um, our fundamental rights over our own bodies. But how you clothe that body is a right, too. It’s not news that you can be feminist and also love fashion—that’s one thing my generation has definitely proven. But by continuing to participate in an event that seems to take women’s well-being out of the equation, the message is that feminism only applies when it’s convenient. It’s a deeply harmful inconsistency, evidence of an ideology that makes exceptions for major institutions because of things like vanity, and advertising dollars, and FOMO.
If there’s any hope of making the world a more equal place for women, we have to look at every industry, at every event, at every single moment in our lives and be honest about the power structures we’re helping to uphold. Just because Fashion Week is exciting and glamorous and Instagram friendly doesn’t mean it should be exempt from this lens. If anything, a predominantly female event should be the ultimate space for equality and empowerment—not just a space with the occasional girl-power T-shirt.
For as long as I can remember, exclusivity has been at the core of fashion. Aspirational for everyone, accessible to almost no one. It’s a totally backward, unsustainable concept. At a certain point, people are bound to get sick of longing for something they can never attain, and they’ll start to create their own fashion on their own terms. That’s already starting to happen and is probably why NYFW is becoming such a disorganized nightmare.
Fashion Week in February 2019 was more disorganized than ever. There were two shows in a row that I couldn’t get into because the people at the door had accidentally let in so many influencers who didn’t actually have seats that the venues hit capacity. A few PR people for the brands spotted me in the line and tried to get me in, but the security guards wouldn’t let them. Rather than waiting outside in the freezing cold for the chance to access my own seat, I said fuck it and I went home to Wallace and the dogs. I had absolutely zero FOMO. I was annoyed that I had to spend so much time waiting for nothing, but really, I was starting to feel like it was totally punk rock for people to start crashing what is typically the most inaccessible event of the year.
My first Fashion Week, when I set the alarm off, I was desperate to find a hidden exit to sneak out of. But the only way out was through: in full view of the editors, the models, the glam teams, the publicists. That was the only way to open the door to real change, too—not quietly, not out the back, but with everyone watching. And a few years later, I was more than happy to take a step back and watch other people pry open those doors, literally and symbolically. After all, I finally had somewhere I’d rather be.
8 Bone Broth
In the early spring of 2017, I was cast as the anchor of an exclusive weekly news show. I had barely begun talking about my anorexia, and the thought of having to be on camera every week made me feel like I’d have to put recovery on hold and stay as skinny as possible, which I had just learned meant the show would be “a trigger.” But I also didn’t feel like I could say no—it would be, I was told, an amazing opportunity for me to get my voice and face out there to an international audience. I was pi
cking what stories we’d cover and then riffing on everything off the top of my head on camera, as I’d proven incapable of using a teleprompter. It was literally a show centered around my authentic, unfiltered thoughts on pop culture, and people were spending a lot of money to get those thoughts out there. I knew it would be counterproductive for my mental health, but it felt worth it.
Throughout the filming of the show, I made it a point to explicitly prioritize stories of body positivity and to promote racial diversity within every vertical. It ran the gamut from serious—talking about racism as Trump-inspired white supremacy rallies took place across the country—to playful, highlighting a fashion brand that had an entirely vagina-themed collection during NYFW. This was feminism for 2017: fast-paced, content oriented, based on progressive values, and hosted by me, a clinically underweight white twentysomething.
On the first day of filming, we stopped to order lunch. The producer asked the team what we all wanted. Someone said, “I’d love a bone broth.” I hadn’t heard of bone broth; it had yet to become fully trendy and was still kind of a fringe diet thing. Everyone else had, though, and I was quickly filled in on all of its benefits and variations. Protein without the calories! So many nutrients! You can add turmeric! It’s basically like a meal! As everyone chatted excitedly about bone broth, something took hold in my brain: Bone broth, yes. That’s what I wanted. What I needed! Bone broth was the compromise between starving myself and committing to recovery. I was still looking for loopholes in the plan I’d agreed to with my doctor, and this seemed like a good one. We all ordered it for lunch, and after I drank it, someone remarked to me that my eyes looked more alive.
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 13
