In Fashion Part 18

Don't personalize. "I knew I would be booked for this shoot!"

The cold, hard truth? All an agency cares about is if you take a good picture and if you'll make them a lot of money.

How to Act on a Job

A good personality helps. Show in a quiet way that you are mature and can act in a professional manner. Indeed, in this world of glamour and image and fawned-over beauty, the big irony is that the more grounded you are, the more successful you will be.

Go to bed early the night before a shoot. Don't show up hung-over. Be on time. Be an active partic.i.p.ant in the process without being opinionated. It's a matter of learning your place in the process. No one really cares about your opinion on how you look. You need to know your best side and your body angles. Be calm. Be ready to work. Don't complain. Don't be grumpy. Don't make crazy requests (for special food, car services, free clothes, and so on). Remember that the maximum amount of time you'll be in front of the camera for a full-day shoot will be two hours.

The Stories That Don't Get Told

There was an underage model who showed up for a Michael Thompson beauty shoot for Bazaar still high from the night before. She came in and pa.s.sed out on the sofa. At lunchtime, she was still sleeping, and the stylist tried to wake her up and get her to eat something. She wanted a Big Mac and a c.o.ke. After that, it was 3 p.m. and she was ready for hair and makeup. And the pictures? Sublimely beautiful. Precisely why this model got away with her outrageous behavior.

The Worst Thing You Can Do to Your Booker

Not showing up for an appointment with a photographer would be bad. Not showing up for an appointment with Vogue photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott is model suicide. Think about it: What are the chances you'll have this opportunity again? How hard is your booker going to work for you if you don't do your part?

How to Be a Model Agent

You have to know the history of photographers. You have to love photography. You have to feel comfortable in the agency craziness and, ultimately, get pleasure from linking the right models to the right projects. You have to be able to visualize models in the various scenarios that present themselves. Probably most important, you have to have an eye for who will shoot well.

It's a combination of a sales job-selling the models to photographers and casting agents-and a babysitting job. "On a bad day, it's like being a mother to bad children," says Kirsten Kenney, who works with agency Bryan Bantry. "The girls tend to have the att.i.tude 'What can you do for me?' But the reality is that we both have to do 50 percent of the job. I will create the introduction and get her in the door. She needs to physically show up and get the job."

The Consummate Professional

Which model stands out in the minds of stylists, photographers, agents, and editors as the consummate professional? Christy Turlington. Because she never complains. She understands her role in the process, which is to step onto the set and make the best pictures possible. She possesses an inner calm. She keeps the perfect professional distance-always kind and friendly-but understands that this is a job and the people on the set aren't going to be her new best friends.

WHAT: Writers, editors (magazines, newspapers, websites, television programs).

DEGREES: Liberal arts BA and/or journalism BS; your major isn't important.

TRAITS: Opinionated, organized, verbal, driven.

ESSENTIAL ABILITIES: To write and speak clearly and engagingly.

ROLE: To package fashion news to a wider audience, providing guidance, fantasy, entertainment, relevancy, and context.

WORKs.p.a.cE: From bullpen or closet to gray cubicle or corner office.

PATH TO POWER: Work for or be published in one of the key brands (listed below).

MOST COVETED JOBS: Editor in chief, fashion editor, accessories editor, producer.

DOGGIE JOBS: a.s.sistant to anyone (but you must put in time), credit or closet editor.

KEY BRANDS: Vogue, W, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, WWD, Project Runway.

KEY PERSONALITIES: See mastheads and list of credits of the key brands listed above.

MODERN SUCCESS STORIES: Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld, Glenda Bailey, Grace Coddington, Kim France.

MISCONCEPTION: That the in-house staff writes the big stories.

LANGUAGES: French and Italian useful in dealing with Paris and Milan fashion houses; English accent a plus.

STARTING COMP: Half a dollar sign.

POTENTIAL COMP: $$$.

PERKS: Car and driver; preseason, highly discounted (even free) clothing, accessories, jewelry, shoes; invitations to film and theater premieres and sporting events; travel to Paris and Milan for fashion shows; high-level access to personalities and celebrities from worlds of film, music, politics, sports, media, art, design, and photography.

Call me biased, but I think fashion magazines are the greatest postcollege playground in America. Most practically, magazines are an excellent platform from which to launch amazingly divergent careers-whatever you choose to do next, no one ever looks down on a glamorous editorial experience. I know people who started at magazines and later became TV producers, novelists, makeup artists, celebrity stylists, accessories designers, clothing designers, TV journalists, Hollywood screenwriters, retailers, department store executives, moguls, ad sales stars, and public relations people.

The biggest surprise might be that magazines are excellent training grounds for both academic sn.o.bs, as I was, and those of you with altruistic dreams of making the world a greener, cleaner, safer, or more equitable place. Magazines are also a huge amount of F-U-N-a near perfect postacademic state of arrested development. This is an environment where irreverence is essential and sarcasm sacrosanct; where boredom isn't an option; where colorful and unconventional personalities thrive; where each day is different: One day, it's a sitcom, the next a docudrama. Either way, you feel as if you are at the center of the universe. This is a world with direct access to major personalities, musicians, authors, actors, artists, politicians, dancers, designers; to news and events and openings that define our culture right now. One day you're struggling over credits for a weekend knitwear story; that same night you're on a last-minute flight to Paris delivering a Couture Chanel gown back to the House so that Nicole Kidman can wear it in the next day's filming of a new Chanel No. 5 commercial; then, boom, you're on your knees on a cement floor tying Madonna's shoes on a photo set in Los Angeles. "More water, Madonna?"

Something superbasic you need to know about magazines: The word editorial means the creative side of the business. Editors are the people who a.s.sign and create all the words and pictures in the magazine. An editor's cool status is determined by how cool is the magazine and what exactly is his or her function there. The word advertising in a magazine means the noneditorial pages bought by companies who like the image of the magazine and want to be a.s.sociated with it. It includes the business of publishing the magazine. If you start on the advertising or publishing side of the business, you are selling ad pages, and from there it's almost impossible to move to the editorial side of the business. Conversely, starting in editorial and moving to advertising is rare, but it can be a powerful combo.

Do you get it? Open any magazine. The front cover, the letter from the editor, the uninterrupted pages of fashion, how-to pages, and horoscopes are all editorial pages. The back cover of the magazine and the two-page spreads that begin just inside the front cover and about half of the total pages in most magazines are advertising from companies like Estee Lauder, Prada, Armani, Ralph Lauren, and Guess. These companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to appear in this setting.

Plus, given that you've survived four years of college, you're already in the groove. Creative businesses like book publishing, television production, advertising, and magazines are intense and fun in the same way college can be. Closings are like finals; deadlines like midterms; story meetings like seminars or self-study courses. Daily interactions are often soph.o.m.oric-not unlike those in a sorority or fraternity-but this mostly female environment welcomes (actually requires) gay men. The pace is supersonic. Interaction is crackling with intensity. Your commitment must be complete. Since you spend more time with your officemates than with friends or family, it can be hard to remember that it's a j-o-b. For most of us who have thrived in these worlds, it takes over our lives.

As in college-where months of labor and learning are expressed and then purged via a term paper, project, or final exam-in the creative business world, you get the regular ma.s.sive satisfaction of seeing your efforts published and distributed or packaged and sold to hundreds of thousands or millions of readers or viewers or consumers every month. Compared to the fast-paced, adaptive world of creative business, it would be suffocating for most people like me to work for a packaged-goods company where it takes years to make any impact on the look or feel of a product and, even then, the feedback and matrices of success are rarely objective.

If fashion magazines strike you as superficial and unworthy, consider this: If deep in your heart, you are an altruist and dream of devoting all of your energies to saving endangered dolphins, building girls' schools in India, or funding clean water sources in Nigeria, an editorial setting would sharpen your skills and open your eyes to the reality of what motivates people far better than some sappy, inbred, not-for-profit organization. Magazines arm you with glamour creds, providing you with connections to major personalities and companies always on the prowl for the next "cause." You'll get on a most basic level something most midcareer do-gooders never grasp: how to make your cause s.e.xy. Because, perhaps sadly, even in philanthropy, s.e.x(y) sells. That today's most effective U.N. goodwill amba.s.sador is Angelina Jolie says it all.

As you can see, there are different ways to get to the top as a fashion critic. Of course, we'd all like to be Anointed Ones, but, alas, this happens only rarely. It's safest to be a Work Horse, but even this doesn't offer job security. No one wants to be a Burn Out, but how one manages this process on one's way to a fresh start as a Second Chancer (or not) determines true fashionista greatness.

What's tricky for newcomers is that each magazine, TV show, ad, and agency has its own distinct internal language, dos and don'ts, habits, and customs and border controls. There are hazing rituals, the most common relating to staying very late on a Friday night or mandatory attendance in the office on Thanksgiving Day for a taping or a "close." It's standard initiation when at week two the managing director comes by your desk and demands that you clean up your area and your look. You naively express a desire to write and soon find yourself with 225-word captions to finish by the next morning while all the experienced a.s.sistants boisterously exit for c.o.c.ktails. Get past the early social rites and you'll begin to enjoy the incredibly appealing freedom of speech and access that is inherent to creative businesses. Every shoe company, exercise method, bra brand, nail strengthener, and hand cream manufacturer wants access to YOU and to your magazine or to your blog, website, TV or radio show, because if you pay attention to their products, better yet, photograph their items, you could change their destiny. Help them make it. This is touching and a tremendous responsibility, and, if not properly managed, it can turn into a major annoyance. But think of the plus side: When you have hundreds of companies and their PR spokespeople after you to write about them, you naturally harden into a cynic, a judge, an editor, and an arbiter of style and substance. Isn't that what you set out to be?

Alas, consider yourself forewarned: This is not a world of great stability. Nor is it a world for great riches. Other than the top five to six names on an editorial masthead (see the listings of editorial mastheads at MediaBistro.com), the pay is paltry. Rich perks and the high "glam" factor keep the magazine machine firing with beautiful, well-educated "talent."

Seeking freedom, money, or more time for their families, countless magazine people (like me) have dropped out of the daily swirl of fashion publications to write or style freelance for those same magazines and a slightly wider group of compet.i.tors. Others shift into PR or retail sales. Unlike so many women who had lucrative careers as bankers or lawyers and are unable to use their experience in the context of a more flexible schedule after they've had children, I have always felt fortunate to have skills that could be translatable into myriad fronts: corporate brand consulting (beauty, fashion, high tech), copywriting for ad agencies, and developing PR strategies, as well as writing for magazines and authoring books.

Let's look back in history to find some interesting examples of editors leaving the "bubble" of fashion magazines and entering cool, creative, much higher compensating, second careers: Now here's a role model. The arch and quotable Dorothy Parker managed to sell some poetry to Vogue (1917) and converted the relationship into a full-time job with Conde Nast himself, moving to the boss's Vanity Fair (1920), before moving to Hollywood and becoming a screenwriter. While she continued to write reviews for The New Yorker, Dorothy wrote A Star Is Born and won the Oscar for Best Original Story. She became politicized, standing up against n.a.z.ism and Fascism, and was blacklisted for declaring herself a Communist during the McCarthy era. She worked as a frontlines reporter during the Spanish Civil War, collaborated on plays, and helped found the Screen Writers' Guild.

The daughter and sister of literary talent, the brilliant self-effacing Nora Ephron blows me away. Upon graduating from Wellesley, she started her career as a reporter for the New York Post. She then worked at Hearst's Cosmopolitan in the late 1960s (where she is credited for answering the phone "what fresh h.e.l.l is this?"), then writing a column with a woman's point of view for Hearst's Esquire. She went on to become an award-winning author (Heartburn, a novel, and I Feel Bad about My Neck, an essay collection) and screenwriter (Heartburn, Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle), often collaborating with her sister Delia. She is a totally cool lady-I know because I spent a whole day in her apartment with her once while shooting her for the cover of New York Woman magazine. Nora has the amazing talent of finding humor and bigger meaning in everyday catastrophes.

The perfectionist Carol Phillips, Vogue managing editor in the late 1960s, went on to help found Clinique, now the $3 billion global beauty brand at Estee Lauder, Inc.

The elegant and groovy Mary Randolph Carter left Conde Nast Publications, where she was a fashion editor, to join Polo Ralph Lauren, where she's had a long career as a muse, art director, and stylist.

Andrea Quinn Robinson left off shooting beauty stories at Vogue to run beauty companies like the Polo Ralph Lauren beauty brand for L'Oreal, its licensor.

Shirley Lord went from being the Vogue beauty diva to writing a succession of successful romance novels.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I, too, have sprung from the confines of fashion magazines. I am now working at Bobbi Brown Cosmetics overseeing creative, PR, communicating her practical teaching approach to beauty, and product development. My fave thing about the job? Bobbi's sincerity and the cool kids I get to work with every day.

EDITORIAL JOB LISTINGS: A TRANSLATOR.

Checking the names and t.i.tles of the people who work at magazines couldn't be easier. You need to find the magazine's masthead-that is, the list of jobs at the magazine. It usually falls within the first thirty pages of a publication and can be found on a left-hand page. The editorial masthead lists the editors-that is, people who create the editorial content of the publication-with their t.i.tles. The publishing masthead lists all the names and t.i.tles of the people who sell the advertising and market the magazine, supporting the advertisers with special access and events. You might see the same t.i.tle, say, "jewelry director," on both of these mastheads. The editorial jewelry job is to cover trends in the jewelry marketplace, help conceptualize stories based on those trends, and integrate jewelry into other aspects of the magazine. The publishing jewelry person is responsible for bringing in (selling) and keeping jewelry advertising pages. A fashion magazine's jobs are listed below in descending order of importance. Basically, the lower your name in the masthead and the smaller the typeface, the more unimportant your job. How clear is that?

EDITORIAL JOBS.

Editor in chief. The top editorial talent at a publication who determines its vision, tone, and content and, ultimately, which photographers, writers, and editors work there. Famous examples include Anna Wintour (Vogue), the late Liz Tilberis (Harper's Bazaar), and, fict.i.tiously, Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada).

Requirement: You are the glamorous embodiment of the publication.

Deputy editor, executive editor, managing editor. These are the number 2 editors, to whom all decisions are deferred when the top cat is away. While there is no science to these t.i.tles, an executive editor tends to come from the features side of the business and focuses more on the word content, whereas a deputy editor brings along production experience (making deadlines and smoothing the connection between the art department and the printer), and a managing editor is more the gatekeeper, focusing on the hiring and firing of editors and a.s.suming other administrative or corporate duties. Sometimes two or possibly three of these positions all exist at a single t.i.tle in various orders of importance. Maintaining good communications with the business or publishing side and an ability to manage the crucial pacing of the magazine (the ordering of an issue's editorial and advertising pages in the most logical, visually pleasing way for the reader and nonconflicted way for the advertisers) are among the key functions.

Requirement: You know who's boss.

Fashion director. This most-senior fashion editor reports to the editor in chief and is responsible for conceptualizing, creating, and producing all fashion pages. Often fashion directors are also the most-senior sittings editors.

Requirement: You're good in Paris and Milan, and your ideas are brilliant.

Fashion editor. Reporting to the fashion director, the fashion editor oversees (which includes sifting through and amalgamating their work) the various market editors.

Requirement: You have been trained by a great fashion director.

Sittings editor. The person responsible for the fashion photography of the publication and for budgeting, booking, and interacting with the photographers, models, and stylists. Reports to the fashion director but is in direct contact with the editor in chief.

Requirement: An operator, you have been trained by a great sittings director.

Market editor. For the variously t.i.tled market editors (accessories editors, sportswear editors, denim editors, swimwear editors, fur editors, and so on), watching a runway show is an exercise in memorization. In addition to almost daily conversations with key runway brands' PR staffs and regular visits to their showrooms, smart market editors comb downtown shops and foreign publications looking for the next cool designer or trend in the category. a.s.sistant market editor is a higher rank (representing one to five or more years of experience), and it is the next step up from a.s.sistant to the market editor.

Requirement: A good understanding of how a fashion department functions; a good grasp of brands and personalities who populate your particular area; you've done time as a fashion intern and/or a.s.sistant.

Beauty director. Equal parts amba.s.sador to the beauty marketplace (Estee Lauder, Chanel, L'Oreal, Cover Girl, and so on) and inside (in-house) story generator, a beauty director is a most coveted position that reports to the editor in chief.

Requirement: Writing, editing skills, and fresh ideas as well as being able to competently represent the magazine to the advertising community.

Beauty editor. A well-organized, efficient editor who manages to attend two-hour advertiser lunches and then pop by a shoot to grab quotes from the hair and makeup people-after which, she still makes the deadline.

Requirement: Know how to make your publication and the beauty director look good.

a.s.sISTANT-LAND: WHERE TO START.

Beauty a.s.sistant. A fun, booty-filled job for someone who is superorganized and manages a tight beauty closet.

Editorial a.s.sistant. First job that can be wonderful or horrid depending on your att.i.tude and the person to whom you are now cojoined-your BOSS. Who'll look up to you? Interns who arrive after you did.

a.s.sistant editor. Not to be confused with the above, this is your first step up in the world! A PROMOTION! Perhaps in name (not $$) only, when you become an a.s.sistant editor, you've earned a stripe. Well, maybe half a stripe.

Art department a.s.sistant. Great start if you aim to be a photo editor or a graphic designer.

Production a.s.sistant. Fine start if your wish is to be in production.

Fact checker. Great job to learn everything that matters to your publication. Like taking a graduate-level reporting cla.s.s in J school. Don't do this for more than one year unless you are in a rock band at night.

Copy editor. A great skill to have, but often a dead-end job. Don't do this for more than a year unless you want copyediting to be your calling. An easily freelance-able skill.

Research a.s.sistant. A good start if you want to be a fashion writer. A good way to get a "sign-off" (not a proper byline, but your name is tagged at the end of an extended caption). At Time Inc., this is an excellent first posting.

a.s.sistant to the managing editor. Great job for getting the lay of the land, knowing who's who and what's what. Not as demanding as being an a.s.sistant to the editor in chief, and probably more administrative.

a.s.sistant to the features editor. Perfect for the English majors among you. Besides cappuccino runs for features meetings that you are technically invited to attend and booking lunches for your editor at DB Bistro, you may actually get to read (unsolicited) submissions, thumb through reviewers' copies of new releases from all the publishing houses, and meet writers whose work you've admired. I know you are still idealistic, but one word of advice: Don't bring up printing your favorite poetry or fiction unless you're at The New Yorker. Even there, I'd wait a few years.

a.s.sistant to the lifestyle editor. Lifestyle is usually code for cooking, home decorating, and architecture lite. If "shelter" magazines (that is, about the home) are your thing, this is the job you want.