In industries like media, vast swaths of entry-level jobs have long been reserved for kids whose parents payed their freight, usually indirectly. Perhaps daddy invested in the property in question; mommy gave an exclusive interview; grandad let the editor's kid into his exclusive preschool. Or maybe the family just shelled out to keep their kid fed and sheltered during a lengthy unpaid gig .

But usually a scrappy outsider without rich parents could grab a toehold and quickly begin to make a living. That, the Wall Street Journal reports, is getting rarer as white-collar job-hunting comes to resemble something out of Grapes of Wrath. Among the sadder examples of pay-for-play cited in "Buying Your Kid An Internship:" "a one-week internship at a music-production company sold last month for $12,000."

The proceeds went to charity; similar donations can score internships at Rolling Stone and at Elle.

There are also placement companies like "University of Dreams," which charges $5,000 to $10,000 to get you into an (unpaid) internship at places like "fashion house Donna Karan International or public-relations shop Ruder Finn." Two months housing is included so, wow, tremendous value.

When will employers cut out the middlemen and start treating their internships as revenue streams, a la the Philadelphia Inquirer? Probably around the time the first big cluster of fashion, media and PR firms emerge from bankruptcy and realize how hard it is to make money the old-fashioned way.

(Image via)

Grumble-chinned Megan, still the World's Worstest Person, continued her campaign of bitchery and double speak. She, at 22 years old, called out the little 19 -year-old pixie from NYU for being too young to be in the competition. Which is silly because grumble-chinned "boutique owner" 22-year-olds don't really know anything more than cute and perky editors of their large New York City university's fashion magazine. But Megan was grumble-chinned in her grumble-chinned convictions, so she grumble-chinned her way past logic and into the fallow fields of unabashed grumble-chinnedness.

Kate, who hasn't been the same since the helium accident, wept and moaned and tried to keep up with the big kids by saying nasty things in return when they said nasty things to her, but it just didn't work. Tis pity, really, because some grumble-chinned people who will go unnamed really need to be taken down a peg or eight. Other people yelled too, including Fatsy, Gay Black Guy, and Gay Fake British Guy (that is TOTALLY a fake accent, he's probably from fucking Maryland). Basically half of this episode was people yelling at each other, trying to debunk each others' qualifications. Which is just sad! There, there guys. Stop the fightin' and the bickerin'. None of you are qualified.

There were, as always, two challenges: the first was to throw some clothes in a sack for Elle fashion director Anne Slowey's jaunt to the Hamptons. She met them in the middle of the cobble-stoned street in the Meatpacking District, and sifted through the items awkwardly. I'm betting you that if you press a button behind her ear or something, her front will open up to reveal a little alien creature desperately pulling at levers, trying to manipulate this unwieldy human machine. She's the most graceless woman in fashion, after Michael Kors. No, scratch that. Miss Kors is more graceful than this old windup toy. Anyway, little NYU nymph was declared the winner of the Fashion In A Sack challenge, and some shall-not-be-named people were expectedly grumble-chinned about it, saying bitchy passive aggressive things to the camera. Sigh.

Nancy NYU picked the teams for the big challenge, and stuck Megan and Kate together, along with Ashlie the Yelling Black Girl and Danielle the Token Fat Girl. What a miserable team! Of course they would win! The task was to take a Tory Burch (I don't care if that's not spelled right) outfit and do a photoshootz forz itz! Team Grumble-Chin decided to go "retro" because Kate found an old TV whose shininess attracted her. That explains why on long drives, she'll sometimes just pull the car over and wander into an empty field, toward a piece of metal glinting in the sun. It was a sort of "bored 60's, 70's housewife" vibe (or whatever) though Megan tried to argue that "retro was the late 1960's, no the 1970's." She said it with such authority, that it almost impossibly sounded even dumber! American Girls: Grumble-Chin Learns A Lesson time. Retro is a general adjective (or sorts), not a specific time period. Stop being dumb.

Team NYU Bobcats decided to get some mannequins and make their model sad to be at a party. Dyson the Vacuum Cleaner decided that the theme should be Gossip Girl. This was later hailed as brilliant ("the idea just suddenly came to me") by all involved, which is true. Because some homo thinking about Gossip Girl while working on fashions in 2008 New York City is almost as fantastic and beautiful a synaptic leap of inspiration as sitting on the toilet and coming up with the idea "bad smell." Well done Dyson.

Well it wasn't enough anyway, because they lost and Team Miserable got the grumble-chinned win. Megan remains to grumble-chin another day, and that makes me sad and mad and oh! Kate's still hangin' on too. They're like the Abbot & Costello of some hellish torture world. So, they're the Abbot & Costello of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Then the Anne Slowey axe fell:

My First NYU Doll went home which was too bad because I wanted her to prove grumble-chin wrong. At least she didn't have far to go. The Post-Reality Show Loss R Train Ride Of Shame. Also sent home (two people!) was Gay Fake British fellow _______. I don't remember his name. Whatever. He was sort of cute in a really stupid fake British way, and I felt bad for him. But he seemed of good cheer when he left. I would have been too. I mean, Indiana Jones and Marion were happy to be the fuck out of that pit of snakes in Raiders, weren't they? Those sun-starved little Injun kids were thrilled as punch to be hot footing it out of Mola Ram's torture cave in Temple of Doom, yeah? And everyone in the audience was breathlessly happy to be fleeing Crystal Skull, for sure. Gay Fake British must have had similar feelings, as he clicked his heels, opened his umbrella and promptly got hit by a crosstown bus. Sad story.

So that's that. The show soldiers on and somewhere right now they're oiling Anne Slowey's stiffening metallic joints and grumble-chin's grumble-chin is chinnily grumbling while the same indifferent sun beats down mercilessly on all of us.

Isn't Fashion fabulous?

Calls to stores over the last week to do just that revealed a more-surprising truth: most of the unpriced items were never available for purchase...


Out of 30 items for which prices were requested, 21 were not available at the stores at which they were listed.


Two editors at different fashion publications, who would not speak publicly because they did not want to embarrass their employers, said “price upon request” was usually a misnomer. It has become a euphemism used to credit designs that were never produced for sale...

At one point writer Eric Wilson almost (cue dramatic music!) had his cover blown: "To get the price of the Van Cleef & Arpels necklace, a caller had to give his full name and identify himself as either a news media member or a potential client before the details were revealed."

This sad practice is getting more and more common as people stop buying high-end fashion, due to the depression making them broke. So don't get your hopes up for those metal suspenders in Elle, or the Versace shoes in Harper's Bazaar, because you can't buy them.

Or maybe do get your hopes up, because if you still afford these sorts of products there are a great many poors who will enjoy seeing you cry, or even just get a little flustered.

(Picture: Harper's Bazaar via Times.)

Are there any bosses anywhere as demanding as Ms. Slowey pretends to be? Not really, and maybe on some level we miss them. Part of the appeal of a show like “Stylista” is that it resurrects a long-vanished way of office life, one filled with rules and regulations, distinct hierarchies and dress codes and nothing as fuzzy as flex time. As Ms. Slowey succinctly explains to the contestants at the outset: “To be in my world you either get it or you don’t.” No one has to spend a lot of time figuring out a manager like this.

The same sort of nostalgia fuels fans of Mad Men, whose womanizing, emotionally-distant leading man Don Draper is beloved by women not only for his smoldering good looks, but also because they long "for an era they never knew and a type of man to whom they definitely aren’t married. Who, in fact, may no longer exist." Or at least that's what the Observer would have you believe.

It's all kind of sick, isn't it? Tapping into our worst impulses toward emotional self-immolation while rebuking decades of progress in our professional and emotional lives? Yes, yes, we can agree.

What's that? Oh, yes, Stylista debuts tonight at 9. What? Oh, CW, I think. Tivoing. For your friend. Gotcha.

Elle still trailed Vogue by more than 350 ad pages in the first half of 2008 but seems to be evening the playing field online, not to mention in pop culture. Forbes' recently compiled list of the top 10 most-powerful editors in fashion had Elle's Robbie Myers and Vogue's Anna Wintour tied at No. 2, citing Elle's "Runway" exposure and significant web traffic.

Even Wintour's former intern Sean Avery is wowed by television. Supposedly he's already filmed a scene for Marie Claire's forthcoming reality show Running In Heels.

The editor's only consolation is that her rivals are divided. Internal bickering has Runway switching from Elle to Claire. And it's not at all clear that Elle can hold on to its number-two spot with its new show Stylista, which competes with both Runway and Heels and thus far appears to be premised on clumsily imitating Wintour. She should hope the show doesn't gain traction — THAT would burn.

[Ad Age]

Oooooh, "suffered"?? "Lookalike" son? Ouch!

Who is Joanna Coles? Well, for starters she is an actual real journalist, and was a longtime New York bureau chief for the Guardian in London before she got into fashion magazines, which is one of the reasons she is considered an "outsider" by fashion people. She is an outsider!

Man, would it kill the fashion community to be kind to its earnest newcomers? Yes! Seriously, guys! Well, in defense of the shit-talkers there is nothing more irritating than the British person who comes to New York and succeeds by embodying all the irritating traits for which British people are always mocking Americans. For instance, in the interview today, she admitted that she had been keeping a diary since she was seven. Who does that? Navelgazing Americans! She admitted in another interview that she really admired marathon runners and that she was training for a half-marathon herself. Who does that? Pointlessly overachieving Americans! She famously got her job by running after Hearst president Cathy Black's JFK-bound limo and jumping into it for an hourlong pitch session and she is proud of that fact. Who does that? You know, I bet the intern who took herself seriously enough to show up for work after her poopfest would do that. Amanda from The Paper would do that. I would never do any of these things and that my friends is your public service announcement for today.

She doesn't seem a lot like Nina Garcia! Yeah, she's pretty much the exact opposite of Nina Garcia, who is known for liking nice things, taking a lot of vacations, engaging in the odd extramarital dalliance, hanging out with the indulgent socialite likes of Tinsley Mortimer and Vogue editor Lauren Davis and never really giving a shit about the whole "having it all" dilemma that is one of the foremost obsessions of Joanna and her nanny advocating deputy Lucy Kaylin until she found herself pregnant at age 42. But Nina is famous/on famously good terms with all the luxury brand gatekeepers, and Joanna is an opportunist, so that's how that happened.

Should I work for her? Joanna's writers and editors mainly seem to love her. Part of this is because women's magazine employees have either been beaten down by the oppressive stupidity of the Bonnie Fuller model (Bonnie edited Cosmo, Glamour and Us) or the oppressive conspicuous consumerism of the Anna Wintour one, but it's also because she's a smart, genuinely good person who is neither fake nor insecure, and that is rare in the top spot at women's magazines! Just know that she is very intense, starting at the interview stage!

Enemies? Well, Como editor-in-chief and fellow Hearst editress Kate White can't love that she made a point of telling Fashion Week Daily:

We don't do Ten Ways to Have Sex with your Boyfriend Tonight.' We took the word "orgasm" off the cover. It's a much more knowing, much smarter approach.

But Elle mastheaders are probably Joanna's main enemies, because the two French-transplanted brands (which used to share an owner!) are basically the only two magazines still bothering to attempt to be simultaneously "smart" and "fashion-forward" and that can be death to the newsstand performance, as Joanna has learned! Elle has had a lot more luck, but they've had Project Runway and the distinction of having always been an actually good magazine. Marie Claire likes to point out how its readership has gotten wealthier*, and also that the Hearst building is about ninety million times nicer, but that would make a job there that much harder to leave.

*Ha ha, since I stopped having to buy it for Jezebel@

Related: Joanna Coles Has Huge Handwriting Frontal Lobe

Nina told me1 last month she'd had plenty of offers to do other shows before, but didn't want to do a makeover show. She hasn't: According to Marie Claire, Running In Heels intends to "offer unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to Marie Claire and the stylish, smart women who put the magazine together each month," including "private video confessionals," in which "viewers will learn how the interns cope with their jobs, their superiors and each other." That sounds so good!!! Except, of course, for two things:

1. Seriously, it's Marie Claire.2 How bad could the bullshit be at Marie Claire? The show runs the risk of being as boring as Vogue's stupid three million dollar "documentary" web show no one except Tatiana watches. At least Elle's Stylista has the virtue of being watchable, at minimum, as a trainwreck.

2. It's going to be on the Style Network. Which is owned by Comcast, unlike new Project Runway host Lifetime, which is half-owned by Marie Claire publisher Hearst. What kind of entertainment conglomerate snatches up Nina Garcia only to not air her new foray into "docu"-reality TV? Something is off there. My guess is that Nina, who is pretty controlling of her image, did not want to make a campy gossipy addictive voyeuristic Devil Wears Prada-type reality show when she is already, you know, famous.

1 Yes, I know! I talked to her many times. Her favorite movie is "Scarface"! But Anne Slowey is more fun to hang out with. Which is to say, Anne Slowey would actually hang out with me.
2I mean, I know people who work at Marie Claire. They are completely totally normal, and not in that "for a brainwashed person" way!

Although we've wondered whether Zee makes Elle too gay, he comes complete with long-running connections with J. Lo, Justin Timberlake and Sarah Jessica Parker plus a Horacio Alger, immigrant-makes-good biography. And he apparently also has a silver tongue. Here's what he told Page Six about the naked Vanity Fair shoot:

“Keira and Scarlett really were naked [in front of the cameras] for a while, but they got it. You have [photographer] Annie Leibovitz, you have Tom Ford—I think the girls realized that they were in trusted hands. It’s not Playboy. They knew it would be interesting and artful. Plus, Tom Ford [guest edited this issue and he] is incredibly visual and incredibly specific. He wants to direct movies now, and no doubt he’ll be phenomenal at it.”

Zee also bends other celebrity women to his will, through the magic of, uh, listening. Tricky and clever! Here's how it works:

“I identify with big personality women like Jennifer, Madonna, Mariah,” Joe says of the connection he has with stars. “I love their style, but I also love their careers, the decisions they make—all those things that make them who they are. Maybe it’s because I treat them as three-dimensional, successful women with real ideas, not as models.”

At the moment, though, J.Lo looks as comfortable in front of the camera as any career catwalker. It’s not the first time the pair has collaborated: Joe styled her for every W cover she’s shot over the years and for her album art for 2001’s J.Lo. Today, she rolls her caramel shoulders and tosses her hair before photographer Carter Smith as Joe stands nearby, directing her while chewing furiously on a piece of gum. “Gorgeous with your arm up like that,” he shouts. “Hot! Hot! She’s smokin’!”

You know what else Joe Zee is good at, besides fashion? Name dropping!

[Page Six Magazine]

Here, boiled down, are the arguments pro and con, which I gleaned in the process of chronicling the Anne Slowey-Nina Garcia Project Runway Stylista saga a couple weeks ago. As a non-consumer of fashion, I don't have a very strong personal opinion on the matter, but I bet I know someone who does! (Ha ha ha, well, my boss duh.)

JOE ZEE'S ELLE = TOO GAY.
Joe Zee is too gay. He is so gay he immediately brought in his gay boyfriend to work as the web editor. He thinks everyone should dress like Mary-Kate Olsen and he only likes gay celebrities like Mariah and Lindsay, except he is probably over Linds now that she is actually really gay. Everyone who loves him and thinks he is so nice is just fooled by the fact that he is a gay man and everyone knows gay men act nicer than straight men but deep down they are STILL MEN. Also he has ADD and is a self-promoter. When Gilles and Nina and their crew were running things, the magazine was classier and not so trendy and the halls were filled with the sounds of cool accents screaming at one another. Now everyone screams in American. Gilles' style was more timeless and feminine and less consumerporny and that's how it differentiated itself from Vogue. And seriously, why do you think Gilles is Tyra's favorite photographer?

JOE ZEE'S ELLE = JUST GAY ENOUGH
Whatevs! You are in America now, and in America people who like fashion (Marc! Tom! Christian Siriano!) are GAY. Like is it just through some bizarre series of unrelated circumstances that Elle resurrected its whole business thanks to its appearance on the gayest show on the gay network? And where do you expect all those mediagays to work, anyway? Men's magazines???? Hahahahahahahaha sorry, but the Fashion Week galas are just slightly better in women's! Oh, and Joe's boyfriend can actually code HTML, which is just a little more than slightly more qualified than we might say for that ex-wife Gilles made "editor in chief" of Elle Accessories! In any case, the rising generation of fashion consumers is a bunch of Fashion Spot-posting Project Runway marathoning MK-idolizing Santogold-muxtaping Andy Sachs wannabes with just the sort of warped priorities that sell fashion magazines, and you know what? When that generation invariably arrives in New York to waste its twenties buying boots and learning the hard way that there is no such thing as a free bump, it is going to need some real friends and guess what THOSE FRIENDS ARE ALL GAY.

Okay everybody, recess! We'll follow up with some exhibits from both sides once we're reunited with our scanners.

*Robbie Myers is famously a very nice and smart person who is hated by no one I know. It is hard to be that type of person in this business I think. Just putting that out there! Also: I am sorry to those of you who found this post in poor taste. I don't actually think it's so much of a "gay" matter as a "generational/camp" one but again, what do I know? Nothing apparently! Anyway XO to all my (super-constructive) critics.

Further Reading:
How Reality TV Turned Anne Slowey And Nina Garcia Into Rivals [NY]
Just How Creative Is Elle Creative Director Joe Zee? [Jossip]
Is Joe Zee Ruining Elle? [Jossip]
Elle Has A Little Work Done [NYT]

While Garcia comes across as a natural fashionista descended from South American aristocracy, Slowey seems like an East Village hippie with no claim on the Miranda Priestly airs she apparently will put on in Stylista. She's described in "Birkenstocks and vintage frocks" and consulting "healers [and] alternative-medicine practitioners." She even hires an "energy cleaner" to get rid of negative energy after Garcia leaves.

Perhaps the clearest contrast between the two, the article notes, is revealed in comparing Elle.com videos touring each woman's closet. As you can see in excerpts from both videos above, that's true: Note the size and organization of Garcia's closet (presented first), in an apartment overlooking Central Park, to that of Slowey's in the East Village.

Garcia may now be known as "the evil one" or "the monster" around Elle, as Moe writes. But at least her show brings some redeeming value to the world of fashion, rather than indulging a contrived (for Elle and for Slowey, at least) and masochistic view of magazine employment.

[NY Mag]

Vs.



(Guilty)

For this week's examination of the ideal surgically-enhanced face, New York's Jonathan Van Meter spoke with the publisher of a fashion magazine. 'When I told her I was working on a piece about plastic surgery, she leaned in and whispered, “You must talk to David Rosenberg.” Then my friend, who will turn 60 next spring, confessed that she had just plunked down a $4,000 deposit and will be going under Rosenberg’s knife for a face-lift later this year. All told, it will cost her $30,000, including recovery in a fancy hotel and a private nurse attending to her every need.'

The source's name wasn't explicitly revealed in the piece, but there simply aren't that many fashion magazines; there are fewer female publishers; and a basic Nexis search shows that Elle's Carol Smith (pictured here next to New York's plastic-surgery cover) turns 60 in May 2009. In case there was any doubt, Van Meter's "friend" was once his colleague at Vibe magazine, where he was editor and she was publisher in the early 1990s. It didn't take long for Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici to make the connection, and extract an embarrassing admission from the Elle publisher that she was the one with the birthday plastic-surgery plans.

According to Bercovici, Van Meter declined to confirm whether Smith was the publisher in question. Given the obvious clues he so carelessly left, his belated discretion is redundant.

According to a tipster, Elle publisher Carol Smith signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Anne Klein to have Garcia—then an Elle staffer—do in-store appearance and promotions on behalf of the fashion brand. But Garcia refused to wear Anne Klein clothes at the appearances, because she believed it would be a "conflict of interest." This put the huge endorsement deal in jeopardy, we hear, and everyone from Elle's editor-in-chief to former Hachette boss Jack Kliger was putting pressure on Garcia to give in and wear the damn clothes to keep the customer happy.

But Garcia was stubborn! By the time her final mandatory appearance for Anne Klein rolled around, says the source, the publisher actually drove to Garcia's home and waited for her to make sure she wore an appropriately Klein-ish outfit. The entire ordeal was so outlandish that the whole staff was gossiping about it. Shortly after the endorsement deal wrapped up, Nina Garcia was fired—after Elle had made its money. Or so we hear.

In an odd way, we respect her crazily firm editorial commitment to picking her own clothes NO MATTER WHAT.

First of all, you would have think they've gotten the technique down by now. I mean, we can land a man on the moon, but we can't do a subtle-yet-miraculous Photoshop job? In fact, we probably can. It's just that the people working at fashion magazines are so divorced from reality that they're not even sure what a good/bad/reasonable Photoshop job/human body is even supposed to look like anymore.

Secondly, one might think that women's magazines would be more aware that their audience is on to them by now—if only because a variety of blogs, including this one, now run Photoshop hatchet jobs as a matter of course. Their audiences may not have any control over the images they're fed, but they can at least comment and call attention to their mistakes in a large forum.

("I didn't know nothin', I was stupid, I was foolish, I was lying to myself..."-Mariah Carey)