The Fashionista Files

by Karen Robinovitz

  It’s easy to get categorized and labeled and put in a nice, easy package when you’re a fashionista. People don’t see beyond the blowout, the well-chosen outfit, the expensive shoes. What you get is what you see, and to him I looked like some trendy, fashion-obsessed chick, which, of course, I am. But just because I was fashion-crazed and knew to rotate my conditioners daily didn’t mean that was all there was to me. Why is it always smart versus beautiful? Or fashion versus intellect? Why can’t a girl have both? I was becoming increasingly annoyed by his condescending treatment.

  Especially when he suggested a career as “costume designer” for me. Now, there’s nothing I respect more than designers of any stripe, and costume designer for a film would be a great fantasy job—but it wasn’t my dream. I swallowed my irritation when he said “You’re just like Cher in Clueless.” I had loved the film, and, of course, empathized with Alicia Silverstone’s Cher. But I hadn’t grown up in Beverly Hills, spending Daddy’s credit cards. I loved to shop; did that make me a ditz? I decided it was time to show my true colors.

  Sasha was obsessed with games—board games, like Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, and Risk, as well as puzzles and crosswords. He equated winning with superior intelligence, which is such a silly way to live. Everybody knows whoever makes the most money always wins. (I’m kidding!) We often played Jeopardy on his computer. I’m a very competitive person, but had been suppressing my gamer’s instincts. One night we played Gestures with some of his friends. “Oh, look how cute; she even laughs like a doll,” said one of the frumpy women in the group, all wanna-be writers who took themselves too seriously and probably had reindeer sweaters in the back of their closets. It was enough to set my (very whitened) teeth on edge.

  The next day, Sasha brought out the Jeopardy and I beat him handily. (My dad’s ambition for me is to go on TV, meet Alex Trebek, and win the championship.) He was stumped, and wanted to play something else. He had one of those handheld puzzle things, kind of like a Rubik’s Cube, where you have to fit all the pieces together by moving in only one direction. “Ha!” he said. “I did it in seventy-five moves! Let’s see you try.” I took the game from him and returned it after a second. “Fourteen moves,” I said flatly. His eyes widened, and he started to panic. We played Scrabble, Monopoly, and Trivial Pursuit. I beat him at every game. (I can be quite ferocious when I’m angry.) When we played Risk and I marched into Russia and claimed all his territories, he waved the white flag. I had destroyed him and his ego. I wasn’t happy about it, but I was sick of being treated like some featherheaded “little squirrel” from A Doll’s House.

  I never heard from him again. Good riddance.

  You Wear Such Silly Clothes

  KAREN

  In January of 2003 I met a guy. Not just any guy, but a gorgeous, smart, successful, tall, athletic guy with a chiseled face, aqua-blue eyes, and a full head of thick brown hair. Our first date was amazing. He even brought a digital camera to document it and told me he wanted to capture all of our great moments. He held my hand, told me I was beautiful, kissed me for hours, and shared his wine by passing it from his mouth to mine. It was all so terribly romantic. We began to spend every day together for the next two months. He brought me flowers, sent me sexy text messages on my phone, and treated me like I was special.

  My friends liked him. And I thought, just maybe, he could be “the one.” We got along so beautifully. We appreciated the same kinds of food, skiing, home design, and architecture. We went to museums, spent entire days going around Manhattan to look at the most famous buildings and show each other our favorite blocks. He even brought up getting a loft and living together—in the not-so-distant future. He was so dreamy.

  For Valentine’s Day, he took me to his winter home in Utah for a week. I couldn’t wait to be away with him. And I packed so well—my Christian Dior green-and-orange sweater and Rock & Republic jeans to be worn with Uggs, the fox-fur chubby for Juicy sweats, and two supersexy outfits for the big nights he had planned. I wanted to look like a cute little ski bunny. Sadly, that was when things started falling apart.

  My first sign was when we planned a party at his house for his friend’s birthday. I helped him devise a fun menu of small PB&J sandwiches, cupcakes (Duncan Hines), shot glasses of mac-and-cheese, and s’mores. As we cooked and scurried around his kitchen—a huge kitchen with three stainless-steel fridges, a Viking stove, and limestone counters—he noticed that after I washed my hands, I shook them out as I walked across the room. “Um, we do not shake our hands out over the floor and ruin the marble. We use the towels in the top drawer,” he scolded as if I were some three-year-old. I made a mental note of his behavior (possible warning signal) and continued. Insult number two came next. As I poured the cupcake batter into the pan, he yelled, “That is not how you do it. Use a different spoon. You’ll make a mess.” Okay. I figured messes could be cleaned, but I’d use a different spoon. Before I knew it, everything I did was wrong. Apparently I couldn’t even light the candles correctly. (“Use a lighter, not matches,” he reprimanded.) My perfect man turned into the most awful control freak.

  I went to shower in order to take a break. When I emerged from the bathroom, wearing low-waisted shiny black Stella McCartney pants and a one-shouldered wine-colored top and big hoop earrings, he gave me a double take. I thought for sure a compliment was coming.

  “What are you wearing? You look like a tramp,” he said.

  A tramp? “This shirt is hot. It’s Calvin Klein.”

  “God, you’re such a label whore. You wouldn’t know good design if it bit you on the ass,” he said.

  I told him he was being passive-aggressive and that that was no way to talk to a lady. And he told me to change. Screw that. No man tells me how to dress! I gave him the benefit of the doubt, however, and figured he was nervous or stressed about work and the party that was about to begin. The next night he took me to a big benefit for the opening of some public library designed by a famous architect. I put on a ruched black Chanel dress from a sample sale and he looked me up and down and barked, “What are you wearing? This is Utah. You don’t need to be so dolled up. And that dress is so hoochie-mama.”

  It was a classic Chanel, anything but hoochie. I said, “It must be lost on you, and I love it.” I wore it anyway and got a dozen compliments from women I didn’t know.

  The next day he lost it on me. “You wear such silly clothes. You look ridiculous,” he said when I put on jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that I had cut into a V-neck. Could I have been more basic? “Why do you have to cut your tops to reveal your breasts?” he asked. First of all, the cut was nowhere near my breasts, and second of all, I’ll cut what I want to cut! “Don’t you have any respect for your clothes? You just cut them,” he barked.

  The next two days, things got worse. Every minute of the day I was told my jeans were too tight (ironic, considering he told me he thought I had a good ass), my slit-sleeved shirt was impractical (okay, so what if it kept dipping into the garlic-butter sauce of my king salmon?), and the lingerie I had bought specifically to surprise him was “dumb.”

  That was the last straw. I packed my silly clothes, took a cab to the airport, and went back to New York, where my style was much more appreciated.

  The Five Guys Fashionistas Date

  Before They Settle Down

  The troubled artist—Because your friends will respect you for it. You love going to see his work at a gallery or on a stage, where he’s performing. And he will treat you like you’re his muse. Be warned: He’s whiny.

  The gift-giving finance guy—Because lavishing you with luxury is part of his self-esteem. Be warned: He can be truly wretched and boring. You’re definitely dating for dollars here. And don’t think he’s rewarding just you with gifts. He goes to strip bars on his lunch break.

  The gorgeous model—Just so you can say you did. Complain about his self-involvedness.

  The totally inappropriate guy—He’s a bartender; you make seven figures. He’s your
plumber or your gardener, but truly hot. You can’t imagine marrying him, but some of us do.

  The tattooed bad boy—They walk on the wild side. Live a little.

  CHAPTER 9

  Money! Financing Your

  Fashionista Habit and Battling

  (or Preventing!) Bankruptcy

  Fashionistas love to accumulate things: vintage cameos, the same pair of shoes in every color, jeans of almost identical hue, and six-figure credit card debt chief among them. Even the thriftiest fashionista cannot escape it. Fashionista assets are Balenciaga dresses, a very special Bruce vest, and Vivienne Westwood corsets (vintage!). When you consider the positive feelings that shopping and buying something new evokes, it can become easy to overlook things—like phone bills, taxes, the money you owe your best friend who loaned you a few hundred bucks when you were short—for the sake of getting the instant fix of fashion. We don’t own apartments, cars, or vacation homes. We don’t have 401(k)s or IRAs, and there’s a good chance we’ll probably spend our retirements as little old ladies who live in their (very expensive) shoes—or maybe just the boxes, which, of course, we always save.

  Fashion may very well give you an instant high. But it can also be a harsh reality check, a means to confront some of your mental demons, especially the ones that revolve around money. It’s easy to feel like a failure when you can’t afford something. Money, in our society, tends to represent a measure of success. While the truth of success has nothing to do with dollar signs, we are still victims of a materialistic culture caught up in the throes of competition, oneupmanship, and “which handbag did you get this season?” pettiness. In the fashion industry, such pressures are hard to avoid.

  In fact, being in the fashion industry really warps the mind. After years of writing about the decadence of $5,000 jackets, $2,500 cocktail dresses, and $1,200 evening wraps, career fashionistas, many of whom get 30 percent discounts from designer stores and have the privilege of receiving free gifts from designers and ordering things wholesale from showrooms, begin to see things that are still astronomically priced, like $1,000 dresses or sweaters, as affordable. Cheap even. We have witnessed many a fashionista picking up a pair of $295 shoes and cheering, “They’re practically free! I’ll take two!” just because they’re used to paying more like $500 for one pair. It’s not something to be proud of, this crazy sense of monetary value or lack thereof.

  This chapter was not easy for us to write. We have both struggled (and continue to struggle) with money issues, especially in the fashion department. We’ve fielded calls from creditors, walked twenty blocks because we could afford to go only so far in a taxi (“Greene Street and Prince, please, but I only have six dollars, so you’ll have to stop the cab when you get to five dollars”), and had zero dollars in the bank. Just because this life has “worked” for us does not mean we recommend it. In fact, we don’t! We beseech fellow fashionistas to take it easy out there! The biggest tip we can provide is this: Never say, “I’m poor”; say, “I’m broke” instead. Remember: Broke is temporary. Poor is forever! Just like a bad sense of style.

  The following pages will give you the inside scoop on ascertaining your financial situation (there are many different levels of sickness), financial tricks to get you through the fiscal fashion year, making money off of old clothes, dealing with your weakness, and balancing your checkbook—and your style needs. Not to mention a few skeletons from our closets that we’re not exactly proud of, but maybe you can learn from our mistakes!

  Our net worth in clothes

  AWARENESS: ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM IS HALF THE BATTLE

  You Charge Me $150 per Hour and Call This Advice? KAREN

  I was recently complaining to my therapist about the fact that I have no money. I wasn’t even sure how I’d pay her at the end of the month. It was one of those awful moments in life when I felt totally out of control, unsure how to handle my predicament and the fact that what I have in clothing, I lack in the bank.

  I had twelve dollars to my name, and no one would ever have suspected it by the way I looked—like a million bucks. “I need to learn how to budget,” I told her, feeling truly helpless and doomed. “I spend way too much money. I never take public transportation. I go out to dinner every night. It’s bad,” I continued, trying to blame my situation on something other than my fashion addiction.

  “I don’t think the problem is that,” my therapist said. “I think it may have something to do with your shopping.” My shopping? What? She started talking to me about learning to control myself. (Control?)

  Then she looked at me from her brown leather reclining chair, her clog-clad feet perched perfectly on the ottoman, and proposed a probable solution: “I think you should consider limiting yourself to a certain amount of money each season and try to stay within that budget.” After a bit of a pause, she said, “Say, for example, three thousand dollars for spring.” Three thousand dollars! I looked at her in all seriousness and started cackling. Cackling! I recognize that for most people, $3,000 per season is an absurd amount of clothing, but for a fashionista who is powerless over enticingly pretty new trends and the latest version of the trench coat and who fancies things like $800 handbags and $500 shoes, $3,000 doesn’t get you much.

  I scanned my outfit and quickly did some math. “I’m wearing three thousand dollars!” I said. The breakdown: $725 Balenciaga white jeans, $680 Gaultier shredded-leather biker top, $600 Pierre Hardy ankle boots, $300 Dean Harris gold hoop earrings, $900 Balenciaga handbag.

  I was laughing, yes. But I was also mortified. What has happened to me? I thought. Where did my integrity go? I am no TFB (trust-fund baby). I do okay for myself, but I do not make that much money (in fact, some months I can barely pay my $300 cell phone bill). I have no right to be wearing these things, and yet I feel like I cannot survive without them. It was such a reality check. It was the first time that I really looked at myself and said, “I am a fashionista and I need help!”

  Money to Burn

  MELISSA

  1996—I was broke. I had $45 in my wallet, $2 in my savings account, and $1 in my checking account. I had no credit cards, no bank cards, no department-store cards, and my debt was in the high five-figure range. Yet my tax returns insisted I should be an affluent member of society—someone who needs to put money in a condo, set up a tax shelter, invest in mutual funds, and generally be leading the good life.

  Instead, I owned a closetful of designer clothes I hardly wore, an apartmentful of furniture for people I’ll never entertain, and absolutely nothing to show for the hundreds of thousands of dollars I’ve made except for multiple taxi receipts, torn dinner chits, club invitations, souvenir champagne corks, and maybe a Polaroid of me, drunk and completely decked out, smiling garishly into the flashing lights.

  I was a debtor, and an insatiable one. At twenty-six, I hadn’t met a credit card I couldn’t charge to its maximum limit. Overdraft was my middle name. So was Over-the-limit. And Overspend. Of the fourteen credit cards I used to wield, ranging from the tacky (A&S) to the sublime (Bergdorf Goodman), not one of them has ever been paid on time . . . to be honest, not many were paid, period. Same goes at one time or another for rent, electricity, and phone bills. Because of my shopping habits, I’ve been almost evicted twice, threatened with arrest once, and was banned from opening a bank account in the state of New York.

  Of my post-tax-and-401(k)-withholding income every two weeks, 95 percent was spent in the first two days upon joyous deliverance of such sum by direct deposit into my checking account. I was a pauper until the cycle begins itself again. When I found myself broke—which was often—I even resorted to turning in gift certificates for cash, Christmas presents for cash, Valentine’s Day presents for cash, selling jewelry for cash, and even the clothing off my back for cash. My life was a roller-coaster ride of feast or famine—dinner at the Four Seasons one evening, canned vegetables the next. I was never able to live within my means.

  I had absolutely no idea what my “means”
were. To find out, I was constantly adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, costs and expenses—not to balance my checkbook, of course, but to calculate how much I could spend before I had to starve. This was a necessary pastime of mine—calculating money. Everywhere in my apartment and in my office cubicle—on scraps of paper, on the backs of envelopes, laundry tickets, business cards, Post-its, scribbled in the pages of my Filofax, my sketchbook, my journal— marched a column of figures that calculated how much I had in my bank account, and exactly how much, after all the bills were paid and the rent was due and the food was bought—how much exactly— there was to burn.

  Most of the time the answer was “not nearly enough,” which was why I was in trouble. Because even with my meticulous calculations, I never quite paid off the obligatory bills, and instead threw it away on superfluous trivialities—a $900 Helmut Lang jacket, say, while the electric company threatened final disconnection, or else a $200 dinner the month I couldn’t pay the rent. To be homeless but cultured, poor but dressed divinely—it wasn’t an ambition; it was my lifestyle.

  My one solace was that I was not alone in my heedlessness. There isn’t a great history of handling financial responsibility in my family. My grandfather was notorious for the pride he vested in his credit cards. He had about twenty of them, and kept them in an accordion-like cardholder in his wallet, so that he could pull them out and show them to strangers. Which he did. Usually on San Francisco BART trains, on his way to triple-X movie theaters in Oakland. “I’m very rich; I own my own business,” he’d tell passengers seated next to him. “Look at my credit cards. Macy’s. Saks. Visa Gold.”

  Even if most of the credit cards had expired or were practically useless from maxed-out credit limits, and my grandfather had never owned a business of any kind, it didn’t stop him from thinking he was a rich man. My grandfather had grown up the second child of a wealthy Chinese family in Manila. He bought expensive clothes, and told strangers his father owned the largest movie theaters in Quezon City. He was heavily in debt, perennially on the verge of bankruptcy, and proud of his credit cards.