Let’s go back to the beginning of your career. I know—because I’m nosy and also have known you for a long time—that you started at W Magazine in the accessories department, but I have no idea how you ended up there. Talk to me a little bit about those days.
Not to cite other podcasts on a podcast, but when I was kind of thinking about how I got to where I got. It reminded me of that question on Las Culturistas: What moment in the culture led you to realize that culture is for you? My moment was LC [Lauren Conrad] walking into the doors of Teen Vogue in the L.A. office. From that moment on, I was like, “This is what I got to do.” I don’t know why. It didn’t look particularly fun. Well, it kind of did. At the time, it seemed glamorous and it was just like, “This is what I have to do. I don’t really understand it. I don’t know what they’re doing, but this is what I’m going to do.”
Reading The Devil Wears Prada also in that time period, I was like, “I need to be that. I have to be rolling a rack of jeans somewhere in a glamorous office while wearing tight pants. That is what I need to do.” That is kind of a very superficial way of how I got to where I am in that I just was mesmerized by that world and I had to be a part of it. I didn’t really understand it, but I had to be a part of it. I just really aggressively went after internships, because I just was like, “I guess that’s how you do this. I’m going to be an intern like LC.” You had to work your way up, because Teen Vogue was not going to have me immediately. My first internship was at Life & Style Weekly.
