Lost In Fashion

I never intended to be a fashion journalist. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've always been a bit crazy about clothes. Spending an entire month's budget as a student on a white fur coat, I'd mostly likely ruin by spilling chips, cheese and beans down it after a night out, say. Or trawling around New York for three days trying to find a pair of UGGs. It was 2003, ok. But my career was something different. 'I'm going to write for a women's magazine,' I announced to the scorn of my uber-feminist Oxford tutor in my first seminar there as a young, idealistic student. She didn't share my belief that as most women I knew obsessed over magazines, it was the best place to both represent and speak to them, provided you could find an intelligent, engaged version. 

Luckily, I did. And for two happy years I persuaded the woman at the centre of the news agenda who you just wanted to sit down and have a cup of tea with to talk to me, I interviewed the new TV phenomenon all my friends and I were obsessed by and I managed to put our rants in the pub into think pieces against some scarily well-respected journalists. I was living the real life of a journalist at a high-profile women's magazine. 

But what I would soon come to realise was that the core element to this, and indeed every, womens' magazine is, of course, fashion. I don't know why it didn't click earlier. After all, that's where the money came from. The freedom to go out and talk to the women surrounding Michelle Obama let's suppose, comes from that Giorgio Armani advert. Versace's sun-kissed images of Kate Moss pay for an investigative trip to India. And so, with a hop skip and a jump around the internal office career ladder, it has come to be that I am suddenly immersed in this world where shoe samples, ripped jeans and fashion show schedules are filling my days. 

There are certainly some clear advantages: endless pots of moisturers and make-up, access to sample sales and experiencing some mind-blowing beautiful clothes in the most amazingly orchestrated fashion shows. Not to mention meeting the people - and I mean everyone from designers to stylists and make-up artists - who have made me realise the enormity of this multi-billion pound industry. But being in fashion land has also been incredibly strange. Trying to explain to friends that you don't have a life in February and September when the shows are on, always thinking almost six months ahead and navigating the front row politics - that seem to last all year in different guises. Because we haven't even talked the uniform rules and air kissing etiquette. It's exhausting. And, for you to be the best in this world, it's all consuming. No time for non-work events or non-fashion friends, no money for non-office attire. As for a sex life? Forget it. The cliche about only meeting gay men is 100% true. 

So eight months and two seasons into my virgin journey into fashion land, I've decided it's time to take stock. This blog will partly be an attempt to chronicle the quite unexpected and insane activities my life now entails. (If you'd told me as a geeky, library dwelling student self I'd be blowing off drinks with friends with the excuse, 'dinner with Dolce & Gabbana' I'd have thought you were on study drugs.) And this blog will partly be an attempt to understand quite how to navigate my way through the choppy sea of an uber-fashionable life. Because when your mistake of going for a double cheek air kiss when you should have only done one is greeted with, 'Oh we're doing the European hooker thing are we?' you know you're in trouble.