The fashion industry is known for its volatile creatives and unshakable self-seriousness. If you ask anyone who’s worked in fashion or at a magazine if it’s like The Devil Wears Prada, they will likely tell you that’s a G-rated shadow of their lived experience. With our generation’s waning patience with abusive workplaces and megalomaniac bosses, these stories from our collective past are taking on a new light. Often dismissed flippantly as part of “paying our dues,” fashion veterans and current employees alike are re-examining their experiences with newfound clarity. Somehow, even in this relatively progressive era we’ve entered, the fashion industry remains one of the last bastions of unchecked and wildly inappropriate behavior. From former fashion interns to magazine assistants to models, we’re compiling an oral history of fashion workplace experiences in the series Fashion Horror Stories.
After hearing about Anthony’s debauched Fashion Week nights in Milan, we’re his second experience at a New York-based fashion magazine, here is another tale from the early-2000s Fashion Week archive:
Set the scene; where are we in this story?
“The year was around 1999 or 2000, and we were back in Milan for fashion week. It’s so different now than it used to be because this is back when shows actually happened, and people still had money. Every year, people would come to a hotel called the Principe—they would arrive on a Saturday, and the shows would start on Sunday morning. Each year, we would travel with a crew from the magazine I worked at and a few other publications. We would coordinate our flight bookings, and it was literally a flying party bus.”
So the fashion week clique was like your camp friends you would see once a year?
“It was totally like that. And some of them were our clients, so part of our job was to entertain them. Well, entertaining is a nice way to put it. We would basically pay for booze and drugs. I would pay for their drinks,…
Read the full article here
