I Want to Be Her!

How Friends & Strangers Helped Shape My Style

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• Publisher: Abrams Image
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781613123881
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

I Want to Be Her! is part memoir and part illustrated fashion guide, written by one of fashion's most accessible, trusted, and inspiring writers. Andrea Linett, the cofounder of Lucky magazine, shares her personal story of growing up and finding her way to fashion, and the figures who guided her along the way. Through short descriptions and memories, we meet 50 women across five eras of her lifesome passing strangers, some casual friends, some close confidanteswho each made a lasting impression and helped her form her own personal style. In addition, each woman is captured in an illustration by Linett's longtime collaborator, Anne Johnston Albert, and fashion tips accompany each entry.Praise for I Want to Be Her!: ';The book is beautiful. Who would expect anything less?' The New York Post';Andrea Linett... is no stranger to noticing great style: In her new book, I Want to Be Her!, she recalls in amazing detail the well-dressed ladies who have helped shape her personal fashion sense.' Time Out New York';If you've ever fallen in love with a stranger's cool, je ne sais quoi style or subtly copied the way your girlfriend dressed on your last girls' night out, you'll love Andrea Linett's new book, I Want to Be Her! How Friends & Strangers Helped Shape My Style.' Glamour.com';You'll walk away with handy tips to help define your style, too.' The Plain Dealer';From her addictive and captivating site, I Want To Be Her, Linett now presents a beautiful, printed tome of the same name.' Refinery29

THE MAGAZINE
YEARS
or
Finding My Real Style

The summer after I graduated from college, I got a part-time job with an exercise-equipment company, offering free trials on lat machines over the phone to gym teachers in high schools. (“May I speak to Coach Kowalski, please?”) The rest of my time in Boston was spent with Holly (who actually had a real job as a law intern), sunbathing on her roof, slathered in pure coconut cooking oil. She still refers to that time as the summer I was the color of a penny.

At the end of August, I moved home and started scouring the New York Times help-wanted section for jobs. My mom bought me some pumps and lent me a skirt and blazer, and off I went to the city on my job search. One interview was for a position as an assistant at the advertising agency Kirshenbaum Bond (I didn’t get it), and I tried a couple of other agencies where a whole lot more of nothing happened. After a few dispiriting weeks, I spotted an ad for editors and writers for a new teen magazine called Sassy. Could this be the very magazine I had subscribed to years earlier, which had folded after about three issues? I was obviously not qualified to be a writer or editor or anything close to that level, but I answered the ad anyway and took the bus from Summit to Sassy’s Times Square office. There I met with Tina, a super-conservative office manager in a pinstriped skirt suit and a full face of makeup, complete with layered shades of purple eye shadow. Looking back, I’m guessing she couldn’t have been more than twenty-six, just a few years older than me, but at the time she seemed really old. She explained that no, this was not the same Sassy; this one was in fact based on the popular Australian teen magazine Dolly and was headed by a twenty-five-year-old named Jane. Tina let me know about an opening for a receptionist and asked if I would be willing to take a typing test, and even though I only cleared about thirty words a minute, Tina said the job was mine. I was over the moon.

I read the copies of Dolly that Tina gave me cover to cover and immediately started trying to dress like the models in the fashion spreads (which were way more progressive than those in American magazines, especially Seventeen and YM, which suddenly seemed sooo uncool). It was all about over-the-knee socks, bubble skirts, and baby-doll dresses, and that’s exactly what I started to wear. Every morning, I rode the bus with my dad in to Port Authority (his office was in the Grace Building, down the street from mine) and took the short walk to One Times Square, where I sat at my desk, right by the entrance to the elevator, smoking Marlboro Lights and drinking Diet Coke. In the early days, I greeted all the potential writers and editors on their way in to interview with Jane and became friends with most of them once they were hired. I spent hours gossiping with one of the writers, Christina Kelly, at my desk, often picking up the phone and hanging it right up if we were in the middle of a story—they’d call back, I reasoned. Sometimes the fashion department would ask me if I wanted to get prices and store information for some of the clothes during my lunch break. I was beside myself—I was actually getting on the inside of the secret workings of the magazine machine!

After only six months, I was promoted to fashion/beauty assistant (even though Tina tried to block it), and that’s when everything changed. Suddenly, I had the most fun job I could ever have imagined. While my friends were working in corporate offices, wearing gray flannel suits and button-downs, I was in ripped jeans and Doc Martens, going on shoots, traveling, and meeting models and celebrities like Joey Ramone, Liz Phair, and Kim Gordon. After a while I earned the title Fashion/Beauty Editor and was responsible for writing the popular beauty-advice column, “Zits and Stuff,” as well as shooting my own fashion stories and covers (even the now iconic one of Kurt Cobain and the then virtually unknown Courtney Love). Soon my father joked, “Who gave you this job? It’s like you made it up!”

Sassy was no ordinary prissy teen-girl’s magazine. It was hip and funny and real. Now everything is written the way Sassy was, but then, it was unheard of. It was a major sign of the times, spanning generations and cliques and becoming a cult favorite of bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana. Think about it—you’d never see Kurt or Courtney (or Johnny Depp) on the cover of Seventeen in a million years. It was such a great place to be that I stayed for seven years, until its last owner, a conservative man who simply didn’t know what to do with the magazine, sold it to Peterson, the publisher of Guns and Ammo and Young Miss. The whole staff was let go, so I quickly reinvented myself as a freelance stylist and writer, working on music videos and step-by-step exercise shoots for fitness magazines and beauty articles—pretty much anything that paid the rent.

In 1996, Harper’s Bazaar was looking for a fashion writer; a friend of mine knew the fashion features director really well and recommended me. Having only worked at an edgy teen magazine, I was terrified to even call about the job, but I did. They asked me to do a writing test, and I spent an entire weekend in East Hampton writing and rewriting maybe six fashion blurbs, including one on the history of the Birkin bag (which was not as ubiquitous back then), and another on how chunky belted cardigans were great because they were so Rhoda Morgenstern. No one was more shocked than I when I was actually called in for a meeting. On the day of my interview, I figured I’d wow them, so I opted for a little-boy’s white T-shirt from JCPenney (they fit the best), my go-to Daryl K gray-pinstripe skinny pants, and square-heeled silver vintage sandals, circa 1963. I thought I looked great until I got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor and saw all the girls who worked there, rushing up and down the halls with their perfectly blown-out hair, sleek pencil skirts, and ladylike Manolos. They were the kind of women who actually knew how to use concealer and looked good in every trend. It was like grade school all over again; I just didn’t fit in. I’m still scratching my head about this one, but somehow I got the job. This simultaneously elated and terrified me.

Harper’s Bazaar was definitely not Sassy. Not even close. Back then, no one wore jeans to work, and I actually got in trouble for wearing denim to a fashion show. (It didn’t matter that they were my favorite Daryl Ks, and I had an agnés b. menswear-style coat over them—I might as well have been in Sears Toughskins.) My boss reprimanded me in front of everyone at the show, declaring, “We don’t wear combat boots at Harper’s Bazaar!” I was actually wearing cute red wedges—albeit vintage—but she saw what she wanted to see. (What about all the chicly disheveled French editors across the runway?)

Another time, our very cool editor in chief, Liz Tilberis, asked me if my fur sweater was Dries Van Noten. “No,” I replied, feeling proud of my distinctive fashion sense and assuming she would too. “It’s vintage!” The boss was there to witness the interaction; she was horrified and said I should have just lied and said it was Dries. I didn’t get it. I mean, really—wasn’t it cooler to have personal style and not only rely on designers? Somehow, though, I made it through, and even though I wasn’t exactly raking in the dough, I ended up loving the job and everything that went with it—covering fashion shows in New York, Milan, and Paris, and editing big features.

Then in 1999, my friend Kim called me to ask if I would leave Bazaar and help her on a top-secret magazine project for Condé Nast. The only thing was, she couldn’t tell me any details, and asked if I would please just leave my job and come do this. Even though the beloved Liz Tilberis had recently died after a long battle with ovarian cancer and I knew a new editor was bound to come in and clean house, I just couldn’t make a move without all the facts. When she finally told me it was a magazine about shopping, even though the project was only to create a prototype, I left skid marks on the light-gray carpet on my way out of Bazaar.

The funny thing about Lucky (which at the time had yet to be named—Mine was under consideration until we realized it was kind of obnoxious) was that back then you had to be a certain kind of girl to work at Condé Nast. And let’s just say neither Kim nor I was that kind. Kim was a hip entertainment journalist specializing in rock stars, and it was pretty much a freak accident that I was at Bazaar. We never dressed up, never wore the latest runway trends, and never ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Childhood or Grown-ups Get All the Good Clothes
• High School or When Will I Be Free?
• The Hamptons or How to Dress As Though Life’s a Party 24-7
• College or I’m Coming Out!
• The Magazine Years or Finding My Real Style
• Afterword