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Coming 8.9.10

So, I just wanted to let you know I AM in fact, working on something.

Tonight, I saw an old friend and in the course of conversation she said, “But aren’t you TheSwankest?! What have you been doing? I check that site every DAY!”. This… blew my mind. I had no idea people even checked in on this site more than once or twice, ever. I told her a tiny little bit of the master plan, and so she realized tiny wheels were turning. They are in fact, turning. I will be sure to let you (whoever you are) know when this project launch comes into fruition.

Until then….. I’ll probably just be reposting old playlists.

“It could be a lot worse! I could be addicted to heroin or something Mom!”. This was *Sally’s defense after an argument over spending too much money on shoes.  She was “addicted” to them, she couldn’t help it.

Technically, an addiction is “a condition in which the body requires a drug in order to function without physical and psychological reactions to its absence”.  I started to concoct funny visions in my head of her scrounging around homeless one day still wearing her Manolo Blahniks, unwilling to sell them to buy food, begging on the side of the street, “Just one Choo man, that’s all I need! JUST ONE CHOO!”. Then one day I saw her taking polaroids of purses; tons of them, all lined up.  She never saw me watch her as she slid the polaroids in her gigantic leather purse.  She wasn’t just addicted to shoes. She was addicted to shoes AND purses: comorbidity. It was worse than I thought. Comorbidity is the psychological term for a patient who is exhibiting more than one disorder at the same time. It was shortly after I witnessed this incident that my vision of the Manolo wearing homeless girl turned into the Manolo wearing homeless girl who clenched pictures of purses in her sleep.

I started diagnosing within my first month of interning at Conde Nast.  Picking apart human situations and interactions was something my brain was used to.  I felt like they were my lab rats; my lab rats in Gucci. How did I get here though?  Not even a year ago, I had lectured on eating disorders, worked at the Child Victims of Sexual Assault Unit, and was writing a culmination paper diagnosing Kurt Cobain.  Way down in South Carolina, halfway through my senior year, I had come to the conclusion that I did not want to get my PhD in Clinical Psychology.  I threw my grad school applications in the trash, turned on the computer, and started looking for internships in New York City.  I had to get there, after all, I had dreamed of living there my entire life.

Ever since I was a little girl I had butchered my mother’s magazines into mass collages, adorning every inch of wall space my bedroom could afford me.  I crawled through her sewing room in my dress up clothes, bejeweled with whatever my mother thought I wouldn’t break or lose.  I put on fashion shows with any doll I could find, even the Nutcrackers couldn’t escape me come Christmas time.  As a child I was small and shy, so I escaped into my “dress up” closet.  With braids and floral shift dresses I was quickly transformed into Laura Ingalls, struggling with Ma and Pa on the farm.  Wrapped in black silky fabric and strands of fake pearls, I became Anne Boleyn, praying before my execution.  Tightening the fabric, I could add a hat and glasses to convert myself into Holly Golightly, chatting it up with the prisoners at Sing Sing. My first dress for a boy-girl dance was a floral, light blue Betsey Johnson.  I was in 7th grade, had braces, a permanent grape juice mustache and chicken legs, but that dress made me feel a type of beautiful I had never experienced. I couldn’t bare to take it off after the dance, and slept in it that night. Fashion was more to me than just something “cool” to like. What I was wearing could change my entire world. I knew moving to New York was just something I had to experience. The little girl inside of me was begging me to do it. I was taking the couture highway out of the south to embark on a new adventure.

As I fell blindly into a world that I had only seen while flipping through the pages of my glossy paged magazines, I was completely overwhelmed.  I stepped through the revolving doors into a frenzied circus of four inch heels, lithe bodies and marbled walls.  My intern pass beeped me through the silver gates to what I believed was my mecca.  Like Versaille’s “Hall of Mirrors”, the elevators loomed before me.  As I waited, I nervously bit my lip and looked around at all the beautiful women.  I kept asking God to send me a sign that I wasn’t completely crazy for not going after my PhD, that this was a truly sane thing I was doing.  As if I had spoken the words out loud, my reassurance came towards me in the form of the waifish five-foot-two  Madonna-of-fashion herself: Ms. Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue.  My heart started beating faster and before I knew it we were getting into the same elevator. She stood right next to me, no one made a sound. The smell of Chanel flooded the air. Tingles paraded up and down my legs and  I suddenly felt like I was going to either faint or throw up.  I knew this would never land me a job at Vogue in the future, so I just kept staring straight ahead and tried to focus. I stepped off on my floor, gasping for the breath I hadn’t dare take in the elevator, leaving Ms.Wintour behind.  I collected myself and looked at my reflection in the monstrous glass doors in front of me.  As elegantly as I could, I opened them and looked around.  On that first day I had no idea what was about to happen, I just knew that I had gotten there all by myself…..

But my enthusiasm and love of clothes wasn’t enough to keep the psychologist in me from creeping out eventually. Every day was so exciting for me, because every day I would notice something or someone else. I would analyze and pick everything apart, humorously applying peoples’ behavior to psychological terminology. So much of it was easily identifiable, and I began my assessments.

Every day interns are faced with a bombardment of information, questions, tasks and responsibilities. In your left ear, one editor is telling you to make photo copies of the eight pounds of jewelry that just came in, organize it according to style, color and shape. Your right ear is managing the information being given to you by another editor, who is looking for a dress that came in three months ago. She needs to find it as soon as possible, but she can’t find the address of where it came from, it doesn’t have a label in it, and could you please call the PR person to get it? And find the dress? This is called dichotic listening, which is technically an experimental technique where different auditory stimuli are presented to each ear at the same time.  Interns quickly adapt, and gain the ability to do tasks simultaneously and quickly, while giving the illusion that they are solely working on one editors task.  One would think this would drive an intern crazy, but maybe you have to be crazy to be an intern in the first place.

Speaking of crazy, Freud may have been a bit eccentric but i personally think he knew exactly what he was talking about when it came to the “Id”. This is especially true after witnessing it Conde Nast style.  A person’s Id is the unconscious part of their personality.  The Id is impulsive and acts irrationally in order to obtain pleasure.  I heard a story when I first started working about an editor who only ate ramen noodles for three months so that she could buy a Christian Dior bag.  A perfect example of your Id taking over.  Perhaps her irrational Id was co-morbid with a purse addiction. Perhaps she should talk to the Manolo wearing homeless girl. I bet they would be great friends.

The greatest of all my psychological discoveries at Conde Nast culminated from various studies taken in the elevator.  Early on I noticed the differences in the way people dressed.  I shared an elevator with a number of magazines, and I was astonished at how quickly I gained the ability to guess what floor a person would get off on before they even pushed the button. L — magazine seemed to be the “it” girls of the moment, wearing whatever was really trendy that month: motorcycle jackets, dark eyeliner, shaggy hair cuts and bright pink fingernail polish.  I begain to consider L— mag the “downtown chic-sters” of Conde Nast.  S— girls were cool and casual, with natural hair, freckles and sandals.  At S— you could wear jeans to work (I was right at home!).  A—- girls always had the best makeup of course, and seemed to wear a lot of neutrals.  And then there was V—-: long legged, beautiful women who wore black. Their hair was usually parted down the middle and neatly pulled into a low pony tail.  Their shoes were at least three inches high, always black, and always stiletto.  Like soldiers in a fashion army, they roamed together. When they came towards me I frequently felt as if I were in a movie montage where the “popular” girls are walking in a perfect line, completely in-sync, down a high school hallway.

This was social categorization at it’s finest.  Social categorization is “the process by which people oranize the social environment by categorizing themselves and others into groups”.  Within social categorization, groups of individuals refer to themselves as the “in-group“, and everyone else as the “out-group“.  By dressing differently, the ladies of Conde Nast made it easier for members of their own in-group to recognize them quickly, also making it easier to identify those who do not belong, the out-group.

This social categorization triggers conformity, which is “the tendency for people to adopt the behaviors, attitudes, and values of other members of a reference group”.  Once you pass through those silver gates for the first time, it takes approximately four and a half seconds before you start to feel inadequate.  It’s like the middle school cafeteria all over again: her shoes are cuter than mine, her hair is so shiny, five foot five is too short! Why could I not have grown three more inches! “This is totally ridiculous,” I kept saying to myself the night before my second day.  I was standing in front of my closet waiting for the perfect outfit I didn’t have to leap out of the closet and onto me. “I cannot be thirteen again, I barely made it out alive the first time.” The sane part of me had apparently left. Was every confident, intellectual, recent college grad turned Conde intern doing this too? Was everyone conforming to this Conde Couture Club?

It’s not just the clothes either.  A fellow intern, *Jenny, brought peanut butter cookies with her every day the first week she started.  This was particularly exciting for me because she shared them.  On Friday, Jenny came back into the fashion closet with a wrinkled brow. “Um, I think I’m going to just get a salad in the cafeteria today”.  She never brought peanut butter cookies again. Now I have to make my own.

I knew in time, I would fall victim to my own game.  I too would be diagnosed with something.  As my internship days were drawing to an end, I calmly realized there was an entire theory surrounding my newfound psychosis.  Fortunately, I was not alone, for many other interns felt the same way.  The expectancy theory is defined as “a cognitive theory of work motivation that proposes that workers are motivated when they expect their efforts and job performance to result in desired outcomes.”  This is exactly what every intern at Conde Nast envisions: the idea that all of their hard work will land them a job within five months of being there, in the magazine they choose, and they will have great shoes.

**This was written by your swanky blogger way back in 2005, during an internship in New York City. It was written for a writing class at NYU, and some parts have been exaggerated, obviously.

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