In Another Life
Getting papped at LFW, fashion vs shopping, and which jibbitz I chose for my Crocs.
I used to be a fashion journalist.
The mechanics of how it happened were quite straightforward. I was working as a freelance casual sub editor at The Irish Times as part of what was then called Special Reports – the arm of the newspaper that dealt with paid, or sponsored, content, before sponsored content was the norm.
I would design single-page advertorials for banks and building societies; work on putting together seasonal magazines for shopping centres and luxury designer stores; check for grammatical, spelling and factual errors in four-page pullouts on some third-level institution or another.
It was, initially, to my mind, a foot in the door – but I loved the job itself, much more than I thought I would. There is something satisfying about putting broadsheet pages together, perhaps in the same way that there is something satisfying about doing a jigsaw, or knitting. It’s repetitive, sure, but there is a rhythm to it, not to mention an end result that provides a satisfaction of its own.
I’d been there a few months when I pitched the idea – to be clear, it was not an original idea, even in 2008 – of a fashion blog. At the time, the paper had two blogs on its website: Fiona McCann’s Pursued by a Bear, a theatre blog; and Jim Carroll’s popular On the Record, which would forever put the rest of us to shame when it came to reader interaction, with its very lively comments section.
“You really need a fashion blog,” I told the online editor. “All other newspapers have one.” (I did not quite know if this was true, but it seemed true, which was good enough for me.)
My proposal was accepted. I started to post an average of three posts a day: shopping updates; catwalk run-downs; street style snaps I’d taken on my phone, on my way into work.
My fashion knowledge itself was gleaned almost entirely from reading my sister’s copies of Vogue and Elle (until she moved to Milan to work for Marni and I was reduced to buying my own glossy magazines) and absorbing, by some kind of accidental osmosis, the information that she brought home from NCAD, where she was studying for a degree in Fashion Design and Art History.
As it happens, it didn’t much matter in the beginning, when I was writing about what I thought was “fashion” but was, in fact, “shopping”.
I wrote detailed blog posts about which high-street stores were ripping off which high-end designers this season. Phrases like “Chloé-inspired” and “echoes of Chanel’s spring/summer catwalk presentation” shot out of my keyboard with aplomb.
Eighteen months in to writing the blog, titled Fash Mob – a play on words in an era when the flash mob was still relatively shiny and new – I decided I should go to London Fashion Week, ostensibly so that I could better write about catwalk trends.
In reality, I wanted to dress up and get papped by street style photographers; post selfies from the #FROW at Paul Costelloe (Irish journalists seemed, quite rightly, to be given preferential seating); hopefully spot Alexa Chung or Susie Bubble or Hilary Alexander, all fixtures at the biannual sartorial showcase.
In a career high, I ended up in the second row at the Mulberry show in Claridge’s – someone on their PR team clearly thought I was higher up at The Irish Times than I was – directly behind Michelle Williams, Elizabeth Olsen, Leigh Lezark and Azealia Banks (this was before the whole Aer Lingus debacle). I felt, for the first and only time in my life, like I might be a B-lister.
That this took place on the same day I would be bumped from the front row to the fourth at the Topshop Unique show – to surrender my seat for Peaches Geldof, no less – did little to dampen my delight.
I thought about all of this yesterday, as I waited to be seen at my OB’s office. I was wearing a pair of dog hair-covered leggings (there is no lint roller strong enough to repel this dog’s fur), an oversized pink linen shirt that really, really needed an iron, and my mint green Crocs, complete with novelty jibbitz (a heart on my left foot, a cactus on my right).
This was not, to be clear, a “look” of any sort. It was a comfortable ensemble that I had put together very strategically, with both comfort and boob access in mind.
I no longer read fashion magazines. They make me feel bad about myself – about my body, which is not the type of body designers design for; about my finances, which would not facilitate the purchase of “one decent investment piece” each season; about my career, for which I have no five-year plan, despite having bought approximately 12 different career-focused planners with that exact goal in mind.
I still like fashion – or, I should say, I still like shopping. I don’t really care about what’s new, per se, or “on-trend” (a detestable phrase, honestly). I make purchases using my magpie brain: colours and textures that appeal to me on a kind of primitive level, because they catch my eye or because they look comfortable, or because they fit, somehow, with the vision of myself I have in my head (or on my Pinterest board*).
And honestly? While I miss the free swag – a pair of €200 jeans here, a voucher there, a full set of high-end lipsticks with an RRP of €300+ – I don’t miss the events, or the fashion weeks, or spending every day looking at photographs of women whose bodies seemed to me then so much closer to the “ideal” than mine.
I was incredibly fortunate to be able to write about something that I was, for a time, so passionate about – and I am glad, too, that I was able to move on when the blog was shut down, when the fashion pages I had started to write for the paper were cut.
Now, it seems a bit like a distant dream – and, I mean, looking at me now in my Crocs and threadbare leggings, you’d never know.
*Looking at it now, this needs an update; for reasons of comfort, I no longer favour the combo of skinny jeans and tailoring, and I am more interested in colour and pattern than I was when I started to put that board together. I’ll get around to redoing it some day. Maybe.