Confessions: Fashion Magazine Assistants
"I stopped wearing mascara to work because I would cry every single day."
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“Retail Confessions” is a popular series I’ve been running in this newsletter for months now. The idea behind it was to gain insight into luxury shoppers from retail workers on the front lines of high-fashion sales. I’ve talked to people who have worked at Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Harrods, Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, and Chanel. That series has been fascinating to me and many of you and will continue. But today, I’m trying out a new “Confessions” column requested by commenters: ex-fashion magazine assistants. Ahead are interviews with two, both of which have been edited and condensed for clarity and anonymized to protect sources.
I had a fascinating window into the rise and fall of the magazine world when I was reporting ANNA: The Biography. Anna Wintour herself is probably the industry’s biggest success, wearing her crown atop a business that has been on a downslope for around 15 years now. If the magazine industry used to wear Prada just like her, today it wears H&M. What stood out to me in these conversations is how little the industry has done to adapt to its realities — like how many editors find themselves unable to work in in this industry past the age of 30 because they feel burned out and don’t see how they will ever earn enough money to make the jobs worth it personally and have the quality of life they want.
I’ll work more of these columns into the lineup here at Back Row. If you are a former assistant or luxury retail worker open to speaking with me, please reply to one of these emails or DM me on Instagram.
The first former assistant worked at a top fashion magazine in recent years.
You got this job pretty much right out of college. You must have been excited.
I thought I hit the jackpot. And I really did learn so much from that job. I started on a freelance contract. All the freelancers made minimum wage. I thankfully always made overtime because I wouldn't have been able to afford living in New York otherwise. But also that meant that I was working 70 if not 80 hours [per week]. I probably scrounged up a $50,000 paycheck.
When I got on staff, I had freelancers underneath me. Having to constantly train or find new people was one of the most stressful things about the job. I had no capacity to teach people and we were constantly cycling through people.
Why did you work such long hours?
My boss was a market editor. I had to make sure that all of her market got in for any photo shoot, and then make sure it got returned. It was a lot of logistics. It’s very tedious. It was very physical, lugging stuff around all the time. You have this whole cataloging system of anything that comes into the closet where you have to know what time it got there, take a photo of it so that god forbid if something got lost, you could track it down. As soon as an editor doesn't want something for a shoot you need to get it back to the PR immediately. On top of that, you're constantly on a time constraint. And sometimes I would be the one to go pick up stuff because messengers are slow.
Talk about the kinds of clothes you got in the office. I imagine you had some pretty amazing stuff?
Couture was exciting to have in the office. You called in a lot less when it was couture, you almost had to promise brands it would be shot because they were so protective over it. Also so much of couture was made of material that you can't ship. A lot of couture shoots we would do in Europe because you couldn't ship the products to the U.S. There were definitely feathers that US imports would not allow you to bring in.
Was there any Devil Wears Prada-type stuff that went on? Crises over coffee-fetching, and so forth?
I absolutely loved the editors who were my direct bosses. There were some directors and other people that just didn’t treat people correctly. The amount of yelling over things that should not be yelled about was insane. Or just treating people with such disrespect when they're trying their hardest. A lot of the editors, I felt, came from such a place of insecurity that they would just take it out on the assistants.
You were expected to be on call 24-7 and if you didn't answer an email within five minutes, you would be getting a text like, Hey, did you see my email? And if you didn't answer the text, you’d get a phone call, you’d get a voicemail.
When you would get those texts or those emails, what were some of the things that people were worried about?
It would be like, “The shoes for look 25 are a size eight, and the model is a size nine.” Or, “The belt from Look 30 didn't come in.” Everything was a crisis.
I stopped wearing mascara to work because I would cry every single day. Even if you didn’t do something wrong, people are still going to treat you however they want to treat you, and you can’t control that. I could go in and kill it and someone could still want to take something out on me.
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