An Elevator Ride With Anna Wintour
On the pleasures and pain of being yourself even when you cannot afford to be
Every truly great magazine has a fiction department. Over the decades, writers from Gustave Flaubert to Joan Didion to Harriet Beacher Stowe have published their work in magazines, whether as serial or standalone stories. Typically situated deep in the features section, after you’ve marinated (best case scenario) in everything from hot people wearing beautiful clothes in gorgeous yet vaguely anarchic locations to brilliant essayists casually dismantling the pieties of the day, fiction is deeply of a piece with the purpose of a magazine.
Why the assonance? Because magazines are fundamentally both escapist and inspirational: they serve as portals to other lives and ways of being, which you might osmose and adopt. And this need not be a literal process. When I was reading a Vogue feature on Marrakesh from my teenage bedroom in Missouri, there was simply no way for me to hop on a plane to Morocco afterwards, no matter how much my heart quicked at the mosques, markets, and deserts. But what the feature did do was allow me to return to my regular environment knowing myself a little better on the level that is worth knowing: what moved me, what shook me alive, what I could feel in my body. We are not often encouraged to know ourselves this way, because what it can lead to is our realizing that we don’t want to do things the way people around us are doing them. That there is instead an internal barometer worth striving to inhabit.
And this is fundamentally the plot of most great fiction: a malcontent; an outsider; dispossessed in some way yet still living (often in extremis) by their own barometer. No one wants to read about someone walking around pleased with their status quo. Those are the characters we hope to see slip on banana peels. Instead, we want to dip into the consciousness of someone telling the truth to themselves, and by extension us, and then endeavoring to live in an uncommon yet vital way: Honestly.
One of the primary ways I have tried to live honestly is by writing fiction. In fiction, you are allowed to say what you want - the quiet parts, the urges; the truth - under the guise of it not being you, but instead your character speaking. In turn, readers can identify with a character’s call and response to her desires; and often do so with a level of intensity that is inversely related to how much they would have to feign disagreement in a non-fictive capacity. For example, I once wrote a character saying the following: “My real dirty little secret is this: I needed cash to be pretty.” She’s talking about beauty treatments, and every woman reading this knows what I’m talking about. Indeed, this line is often circled, underlined, and exclamation pointed by readers. And yet in regular conversation this admission violates many norms: pretending we woke up like this, pretending we don’t care, pretending the beauty myth supersedes the ego, the id, and the romance of artifice itself. Fiction says you can be more honest than this. You can exhale.
Over the past few years, I have been working on a novel that due to a number of unforeseen circumstances has taken longer to reach its final form than anticipated. I am back in the saddle working on it now, and wanted to share - with the blessing of my wise and wonderful agent - exactly one excerpt I have been greenlit to publish here.
This excerpt takes place near the beginning of the novel. All you need to know is that Victoria Mast is twenty-two, and experienced a profoundly disruptive physical trauma when she was sixteen that has left lasting scars. She lives in New York, works at a magazine, and is in such dire fiscal straits she is “stealing toilet paper and dodging severely delinquent debt collectors and patrolling Craigslist-gigs-nude for any that allow balaclavas or niqabs.” Victoria has also just finished putting herself through college at an Ivy League university, meaning she also has $224,592.52 in student loans.
Nevertheless, Victoria wants to live by her own barometer. She doesn’t want to pretend to be something she doesn’t identify with: a management consultant, a participant in the victim/survivor industrial complex, or a good girl, cowed by circumstance into sitting out dinner, sex, New York, purpose, or joy. So she takes her dream job at a famous magazine in which “topless supermodels share real estate with philosophers and secretaries of war,” despite the fact that it pays virtually nothing, which means she has to both live and sleep in the common room of a lean-to apartment underneath the Queensboro Bridge with a girl she met online.
The excerpt begins the morning after Victoria has met a dashing twenty-six year old named Leo with a Bugatti watch and an “authority figure vibe” who she hopes can save her from the trauma and precarity that has marred her adolescence. Here she is on her way to work at the magazine after having texted with Leo to set up a first date.
I hope you enjoy what I can share of this novel for the time being. Fiction belongs in magazines because it offers a glimpse of the rare but possible. I like to think of Victoria as rare but possible too.
An Elevator Ride With Anna Wintour
The next morning, I ride the elevator with Anna Wintour. This first and only trip, we take alone.
Anna is wearing a leather dress, alligator boots, and a burgundy coat, and she looks up from her Blackberry as I enter to see if I’m worth knowing. The optics are limp and unpromising. I am an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair, and my interns have Birkin bags, and my colleagues have trust funds and dry cleaners and exclusively immaterial anxiety disorders; they shop in suede and silk and indigo denim and are named Bramble and Artemis and some of them even have washing machines. I cannot compete, and have stopped trying. The vibe I am going for is too cerebral for showers and bras; it is dirty, polyurethane, occasionally-shoplifted civil disobedience from the capitalistic patriarchy; and its foundational garments are the semi-translucent legging and the pilling sweater, which is what I am wearing as I step into Anna’s elevator, tracking a bit of mud in on the rubber horseback riding boots that - due to the low, low price of rubber - I wear as boots boots.
Anna is doing this thing with her eyes that is the optical equivalent of putting in headphones. The elevator television is playing an advertisement for a colonic spa, and she is watching so I don’t talk to her. But there’s so much to say.
The door closes, and we begin lurching upwards. A spray of fur around her collar is tickling her chin, and I want to tell her Vogue’s thesis that what you like actually matters is the iOS I have staked my life on and please could she offer some words of encouragement? Because there are lists I have made to solve for $224,592.52 and Craigslist-gigs-nude, and that instead of consultant - McKinsey?; communications manager - Google?; talk therapy? the lists read james baldwin negronis silk hip-hop whiskey harvard calla lilies tolstoy ayahuasca matcha nude photos santa fe drug dealer red lipstick (write a novel?) ecstatic dance a people’s history of the united states sex toys cherry blossoms the paris review; and that these things I have read about in Vogue are what make me believe I might become a person who creates earth-moving-bettering things instead of a person who kinda sorta wants to die.
We are approaching the cafeteria floor and I am concerned she will get out. I have slept in this sweater and while it doesn’t smell horrible it also doesn’t smell great. The colonic spa has become a “discreet digital consignment platform” with a Bugatti and a wad of cash exchanging hands, and as Anna turns to look at me, my gratitude for the anorexia that makes the whole thing go, translating my dirty fraying stress telomeres into a simple lack of serotonin or shits to give, feels utterly debased. The doors open onto a guy in a Kafka Convention t-shirt. He is holding a container of mac and cheese in one hand and his Wired badge in the other, which he fixates on as we begin moving up again.
Hey Anna? I really need you to know some things. Like it’s only in movies and theory and shadows that teenage girls take out loans worth more than their parents’ houses and then live on sixteen hundred dollars a month in New York. That the mid-century memoirs of women who lived as themselves on the cheap are lacking in credit card minimum payments of $600 a month or student loan payments of LOL and as a rule feature sugar daddies called boyfriends or premature cohabitation with starving artists who turn out to be a real bad idea. I want to tell her being who you are is expensive, and I make $24,000 a year. And the question people have for me - you can ask them, they are everywhere: on the Internet, at the dinner table, in my head - that they never have for you or Artemis is who exactly I think I am demanding a life that is in any way shape or form related to myself. This is America, Anna, and existential succor is a luxury good.
We are almost at the Vogue floor on twelve. Some dried mud falls from my left boot onto the floor, and I feel this capture her interest. A laugh betraying everything rises in my trachea.
The mud is from a little architecture walk I took myself on before work in the park around the New York Public Library. i don’t know how impressive an article about kate moss’ drug dealer - thx! - i like dinner, and also drinks - my abandoned responses to Leo’s message go, as I scuff about the mucky lawn with an acrid cup of coffee from Pret burning my gloveless hands. Intensity of sensation is what I am after: cold air sharp in my lungs; sooty limestone hulking into grey sky; romantic intrigue and nausea. That ethical shaming thing republican goons in triple-ply cashmere do when you need something you can’t afford so badly you buy it anyway - she went out and bought an iPhone, Karl, and now she’s saying she can’t afford her own health insurance - is so powerful I’m starting to believe it, and my credit is all used up anyway, so I am trying to bone up on the free needs, like this walk.
Or like sex. I can’t even get myself off right now because my bed is in a living room and my shower is a moldy stall and it is again filmic and unreal, the idea of knuckling yourself up for a few seconds with the gods when your roommate might physically bang the apartment door open onto your bed at any given moment, or you are crammed into a cement straightjacket trying to get clean while evading the wet creep of a mildewing curtain. I decide on let’s as a worthy first sentence for a response to Leo and toss my Pret cup into a recycling bin. It’s time for work.
And now, Anna and I are reaching the Vogue floor. The sensation of this elevator ride has been the one where my tongue is suffocating me slowly as the world whites out. Vodka-flavored water is advertising on the television. Anna finishes with the boots or the dirt or both and sets her shoulders back as we arrive. In our final reflection in the steel doors, we look mutually ambivalent. And then she’s out.
let’s, I message Leo back. you free tonight?
Victoria’s List, September 2023
If Victoria was a. real and b. making her list in September 2023, here’s what I think she might be into these days as life-affirming and worthy of her magazine’s pages:
IN NEW YORK
Jacques Bar at The Lowell Hotel on the Upper East Side is at once opulent and tucked away, extremely refined and extremely louche. I went for dinner last week with a friend and the bar was teeming with diplomats, real housewives, businessmen, and stunning escorts. It was a Wednesday at 8PM, and everyone was lit off of dirty martinis from thin-lipped coupes. The walls were gold; the florals were pink; the burger was a perfect ten. Vibe-wise, imagine a house party on the Orient Express, which means that perfect strangers - in our case, two UN attachés and an Irish hotelier - sometimes pull up their tiny velvet chairs to your table and make friends over further martinis. 10/10 recommend for a night that simply couldn’t happen in Ohio.
Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook is the apogee of Brooklyn as a concept. It seems impossible that this clapboard, cash-only, jam-band bar on the waterfront at the borough’s edge still exists in an increasingly corporate and homogenized New York, but the fact that it does gives me a feeling when I’m there that is like a church. There is an old truck outside, and ten dollar Old Fashioneds, and a band of guitars and banjos and harmonicas that grows and shrinks impromptu with the hours like a lung. A friend and I went on a crisp afternoon last weekend and again actually met people. There were zero TikTokers. Red Hook is full of single family homes and breweries and crab shacks and randomly a Tesla dealership. It feels lawless, with family values. For more, see (IDEAS) below: living like the world does not exist.
FICTION
Katherine Faw’s novels Ultraluminous and Young God are like nothing I have ever read. They are full of prostitutes and foggy blue mountains, heroin and five star hotels, murders, bombs, and a prose so omniscient and alive it’s lightly strangling you; all to the effect, somehow, of My Year Of Rest and Relaxation meeting Blood Meridian. Faw’s voice is simply brilliant. Because brilliant voice originates from a place that is primal and associative - a call and response to the world that has been metabolized by its own meter - which is then yoked to language that is original, surprising, and close to the bone: I’ll let Katherine show you what I mean, from Ultraluminous:
“I thought of the burning sun and true happiness and how sad I was. I thought of the Sheikh, who disappeared to marry a virgin his mother picked out. I thought of my mother, who went nowhere, whose brilliance had dimmed and gone out by the time I knew her. I thought of all the rich men who paid to fuck me, who had the money to buy a girl too beautiful, too young, too sparkling, like the laws of the universe didn’t apply to them, to act like a fantasy and not a person, a thing they could leave on the floor of a hotel room when they got bored like anything else they once had to possess. I thought of how I could be bought.”
Yes, chef.
FASHION
Carolina Neves’ Elizabeth necklace is almost too special to be borne, and not just because of its name. I was lucky to meet the lovely Carolina on her swing through New York this month at Kirna Zabete, who stocks her in the city. I tried on this incandescent string of tourmaline on a dreary Thursday morning and felt like a Byzantine princess, lit from within.
IDEAS
Someone once explained mass fascination surrounding the Olsen twins as derived from their ability to live like the world does not exist. What this means at its core is non-participation in inanity. A non-comprehensive list of things that are currently inane include overconsumption of social media, constant connectivity, passive complaints, feckless swiping, eternally extended adolescence, and ad hominem participation in micro-trends as a cheap substitute for identity formation. To live like the world does not exist isn’t to eschew this list exactly - that would be the opposite of the point - but rather to ignore anything that feels bad in your body and doesn’t compute with your soul.
Living like the world does not exist is actually what the neighborhoods I mentioned earlier, the Upper East Side and Red Hook, have in common. While on the surface one is polished and the other rugged - one all about limestone, silk, dover sole; the other clapboard, flannel, and bourbon - to my mind they have more in common than either does with more superficially similar zip codes. Neither has been swept away by temporal noise, and to visit is in an important sense to time travel to 1997. The shops are mom and pop rather than Warby Parker, brunch is not a verb, and fewer girls populate the street corners getting their best angles. People generally hold open doors, have families, and don’t wear leggings as pants. It almost feels as if someone using a pay phone might pop up in your peripheral vision. And no one is a Luddite or cosplaying. They simply looked around at the rest of it and said no thanks.
Contrast that with Williamsburg - the Soho House of neighborhoods - or all of downtown Manhattan, which seems to be in a particularly debased moment right now; as if populated by and for the bottom quartile of a sorority. Shops have hashtags in their signage while customers photograph their food at the counters. Girls wear things the Internet told them to while complaining about the fecklessness of guys from dating apps and ignoring large groups of single men at the tables directly next to them. Everyone is extremely busy, although most of the time they can’t say with what. I opened Instagram the other day to find someone talking about how “all of a sudden people have realized long hair is cheugy” and found myself longing a phonograph and a Charleston partner.
I studied history, and am aware that there have always been Luddites and reactionaries, along with inane people and trends. And some things about modernity are amazing, like the Real Housewives, and easy access to sushi. But let’s not pretend that “Tomato Girl Summer,” believing in nothing, and living for the ‘gram are long-haired hippies protesting the war or Bianca Jagger at Studio 54. No. Among a certain sublet of laterally-mobile millennials, the atmosphere is a counterproductive eagerness to keep participating in a romantic-professional-social rat race they actively dislike.
This mode of being requires forgetting a core truth of life, which is that it ends. There’s actually no time to live ridiculously. Instead, let’s all turn off the Internet and smile at beautiful strangers; disdain popular opinion and screen our dates for feeling; and whenever we’re about to buy something hivemindish, buy a dirty martini or a stock instead. No one should live as if they are running out the clock, which at its core is the modern metronome. Let’s all be adults is I suppose what I’m saying. It is oddly much more fun.
Until next time,
Elizabeth