My rubber-band ball, made entirely from rubber bands, grew bigger every day. It was bigger than a softball, bigger than a grapefruit. It was heavy and perfectly round. I liked to bounce it, like Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” off the wall of my first office at Vogue magazine, when I got my start in 1998. Everyone loved Steve McQueen, the 1970s tough guy with cruel lips, in the summer of 1998.
Bam. Pause. Bam.
People often ask me about what life was like at Vogue, back in the Gilded Age before the Millennium, before 9/11, before the collapse of print media.
It was the Gilded Age, it was a gilded cage. Occasionally, I stood at the door to my office and stretched out my bangled and be-charmed arm, holding the mirror of a palm-size powder compact through a crack in the door, so that I could see the reflection of my co-workers, in their ranks, alongside me, like Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke.” (Kidding! I didn’t really.)
Bam. Pause. Bam.
Pause. Bam. Pause.
Not long ago on a rerun of “The Moth Radio Hour,” I heard Simon Doonan, the style commentator best known for decorating the windows at Barneys New York with Mr. Potato Heads and Margaret Thatcher mannequins dressed in dominatrix gear, complaining that “The Devil Wears Prada” was a bad depiction of the fashion industry, because it portrayed the magazine as a workplace devoid of fun.
Simon Doonan was correct that fashion can and should be a high old time. Especially the zany fringes, where unfettered nonconformists create chapeaux out of boxer shorts and ponchos out of My Little Pony beach towels. But Simon Doonan was completely wrong about the corporate wing, in which I was — depending on how I want to remember it — either a doorknob-polisher or a gatekeeper. While life in vogue was entertaining, certainly, “fun” was not usually the word.
Nostalgia — edged with a little fillip of lingering anxiety — is what I feel when I look back.
The great publishing empire of Condé Nast was nicknamed “Condéscending Nasty” over at Hachette Filipacchi publishing, from which I hailed. In those days, the Condé Nast headquarters was a dark warren on the 13th floor of an overheated, nondescript, brown building of indeterminate age at 350 Madison Avenue, near 44th Street. We called it three-fifty. The dim corners, the city grime on the old window frames, the dressmakers dummies scattered here and there gave the office a quiet, almost clubby, almost cozy feel. There was an old-fashioned newsstand in the lobby where I bought gum and The Daily News.
My title was senior editor in the features department, but mostly I was a fixer. My job was to edit — which often meant rewrite entirely — fashion and beauty features, and to oversee — which, again, often meant to rewrite — the little bits and pieces of copy that were the Voice of Vogue: the captions and headlines on fashion shoots; the Point of View page, which summed up in prose wry or poetical the mood and imperatives of the month; the Last Look, on the final page, which showcased some extra-desirable accessory.
A canvas tote trimmed in unstained leather.
Knee boots with nail-narrow heels so high they pushed the ankle to its maximum flexion and toes so radically pointy they drew the eye — and therefore the wearer’s leg — to its maximum length.
The fashionable might of the staff was the publishing equivalent of the Green Berets. We were better, stronger, faster, meaner, shrewder, better shod. I always explained it to friends like this: Imagine if God
— that is, Condé Nast’s senior H.R. executive — had gathered together in one office all the prettiest, most ambitious, and most ruthless recently graduated sorority chieftains. The girl who worked at Vogue was so very fit, so very bright.
My office was tucked into an especially moody, twilight corner near the hall occupied by the beauty department. (The beauty girls were always the nicest. Yes, we said “girls.”) A door behind me opened onto a fire escape, in the dark gulch between three-fifty and the building alongside. A few times a day a junior staffer would come by to borrow the privacy of the fire escape for a smoke or a good cry.
It was at three-fifty that I learned to sit with my legs crossed tightly, one ankle twisted around the other, knees slanted to one side. I had never really noticed this posture until my first fashion-department meeting in Anna Wintour’s office, when I looked around the semicircle of chairs — placed an awkward distance from Anna’s desk — and attempted, awkwardly, to do the same. (Reader, try it: This seated attitude can’t be achieved casually unless you are thin.) I suspect, but have no proof, that this way of sitting stretched back in Vogue time to the days of Diana Vreeland and the pencil skirts of the 1950s, or perhaps beyond, to the high hems of the 1920s.
There was a special catering extension at three-fifty that you could dial to have Veuve Clicquot delivered for an office birthday or a farewell when someone was leaving to launch an E-commerce website or to become editor in chief at a women’s golf magazine. The Condé Nast catering staff in their white shirts and black ties would wheel up trays of brownies, garnished with sliced strawberries, and cheese plates, and finger sandwiches. The staff would stand around holding plastic flutes of champagne. They’d gather one brownie, one oatmeal-raisin cookie, and a few hunks of pineapple on a small plastic plate, and hold the plate at their midriff, occasionally prodding the morsels with a plastic fork, but never swallowing.
Bam. Pause. Bam.
I do not miss Vogue, but, ah, how I wish I still lived in a world where a desktop hotline would deliver me Veuve Clicquot!