a blog for the beleaguered
“Karl is like a dad. I’ve known him since I was 16 – I would do a lot for Karl. I was once on his plane flying to China. He wouldn’t stop talking. After a while, I said to him, ‘I have to sleep now Karl.’ When I woke up 10 hours later he was still talking to some poor assistant!”
- Diane Kruger, actress and former model, to Tatler magazine (via SassyBella)
The British Trade Union Conference has suggested that stiletto heels should be banned at workplaces in the United Kingdom. While I’m not more on Team Ballet Flat than Team Stiletto, I’m not usually interested in creating office dress codes. This one, though, is kind of interesting – the proposal isn’t about telling women how to dress and imposing gender norms on them, it’s about, oddly, making them comfortable.
From their proposal:
The motion, tabled by the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists, states: “Congress believes high heels may look glamorous on the Hollywood catwalks but are completely inappropriate for the day-today working environment.
“Feet bear the brunt of daily life, and for many workers prolonged standing, badly fitted footwear, and in particular high heels can be a hazard. Around two million days a year are lost through sickness as a result of lower limb disorders.
“Many employers in the retail sector force women workers to wear high heels as part of their dress code.
“More must be done to raise awareness of this problem so that women workers and their feet are protected.”
While I don’t think banning high heels outright is necessarily the way to go, I do like that they don’t put all the blame on women – I have several female friends who work in offices where high heels are mandatory, and this is a ridiculous, outdated idea put in place by male bosses who want women to conform to a certain visual standard. I think the Congress makes the excellent point that this silly request from some companies is actually really harmful to womens’ health in the meantime.
Remember when Kanye West was going to intern at a fashion company in London so that he could then start his own fashion line? I thought it was just another celebrity vanity internship, where he would pretend to intern for two weeks and then claim he had so much industry credibility.
However, it seems that Kanye actually got a real – or semireal – internship not at Gucci or Prada but at The Gap. The Chicago Tribune reports:
According to published reports, West, who is known not just for his music but for his cutting-edge style as well, has been interning at The Gap headquarters in Manhattan. He’s apparently working side-by-side with pal designer and creative director Patrick Robinson, who was reportedly hired to spruce up the label.
Sources say West is taking the internship seriously, too. He’s apparently been putting in late night hours – including staying in the office until 2 a.m. It has been speculated West is looking to launch a line of clothing for the Gap, but so far, those reports have not been confirmed.
As a former Gap employee – I spent the summer before college folding shirts and helping tween girls pick out an outfit to wear to ‘N Sync concerts – I welcome Kanye to the folding board club.
If you’re a diehard Devil Wears Prada aficionado and you thought that assistant life couldn’t possibly get worse at Conde Nast, think again. A spy tells Gawker.com that the publishing behemoth has come up with some ‘creative’ ways to try and keep the assistants hard at work:
So now we have incentives to be good assistants because there is an assistant of the month prize of $500. I’m going to be the model assistant, lol. A couple of those and mama can buy herself a chanel bag or some loubs!
That’s great for the lucky assistant who gets recognized that month, but when everyone is making close to a poverty-level wage it really doesn’t help. How many assistants do they have at Conde, anyway?
While the assistants are toiling away in hopes of winning a bonus, it seems like the interns have finally had enough. A sign was posted in the breakrooms informing Conde employees they will have to wash their own dishes instead of the interns doing it for them. The whole note is here, glorious, and totally worth reading, but here’s my favorite part: “I know, I know: you went to Vassar, you have a rich husband, you’ve never washed a dish in your life.” I want to hire whoever penned that note to run this blog for me when I go on vacation. Call me, intern!
“The people I chose to run my new store in London are nice. I cannot work with b*****s, I can’t, I can’t. Maybe I am too sensitive, I get blocked. There are some people who don’t give a damn. With me, I find that if there is no energy flowing or no connection, I can’t think. Talent is amazing — I love it, appreciate it. I respect talent a lot. But if you ask me, ‘Talent and b***h, or less talent and good?’ I’ll go with less talent.”
- Lanvin fashion designer Alber Elbaz, via New York magazine
Celebrities’ kids – they’re just like us!
Case in point – Tallulah Willis, youngest of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis’ three daughters, will spend the summer interning at high-fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. That’s normal for a college student, right?
Well, it is. Tallulah, however, is fifteen. And her mom appeared on the cover of the magazine recently. Oh, and her stepdad occasionally pens columns for said magazine. Gosh, what a coincidence that lil’ Tallulah beat out all those older kids who study journalism in college to get the coveted internship.
But wait! It seems that fifteen year olds are too young to work for free. (Really, isn’t EVERYONE too young to work for free? I digress.) Lest anyone get in trouble with the law, a Harper’s Bazaar spokesperson told Page Six that “Tallulah is a guest of Harper’s Bazaar, shadowing our editors for a couple of weeks.” If you’re not familiar with PR-speak, allow me to translate: the editors are doing a favor for her celebrity relatives, and Miss Willis will certainly not have to stoop to actual intern tasks like fetching coffee or answering telephones. Perhaps she caught the intern bug after her dad did a gofer stint on Letterman?
What’s the over/under on when she’s going to do a “cute” Sean-Avery style photoshoot of her pretending to do filing?
As I’ve said before, women have it way harder than men when it comes to appropriate office dressing, especially in the summer. In addition to figuring out hemline length and strap thickness, there’s one more element to summertime business casual: cleavage.
If you’re on the flatter side, like me, it’s a lot easier to get away with wearing lower cut tops at work, since it’s incredibly unlikely you’ll have anything to expose. But if you’ve been blessed with a fuller figure, you have to be extra careful about what you wear. It’s sad but true – even though you didn’t ask for your boobs or ask everyone to base their opinions of you on said boobs, they will. People will talk to your breasts instead of your face and, at work, when you’re doing everything you can to be taken seriously, a button coming loose at an inopportune moment could be the kiss of death. Depending what industry you’re in, cleavage can go either way – I’ve known women who work at restaurants and get better tips if they show more skin, as well as women in fashion who hide their breasts when the gamine look is back in style.
Based on my own entirely unscientific survey, cleavage was fine if you had a male boss and totally verboten if you had a female one. Do any of you have such stories to report about your own boobs or someone else’s in the office?
Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld may be one of the most admired fashion designers in the world, but it sounds like he isn’t terribly nice to the little people. Arnaud Maillard, who worked as Lagerfeld’s assistant, has a new book coming out – Merci Karl! is a dishy expose that, so far, is only available in France and Germany. [US publishers, this is a potential gold mine!] BlackBook spoke with Maillard about the tome:
He dumps people at the drop of a dime,” [Maillard] adds (though this doesn’t come as much of a surprise for those who have seen Lagerfeld Confidential, where Lagerfeld himself readily admits to his fickle nature with regard to friends and associates). While Lagerfeld “can be very generous … he can also be merciless. I’ve seen him simply stop talking to people, stop acknowledging their existence,” Maillard continues. Of Lagerfeld’s collaboration with H&M, which Maillard says his assistants worked on non-stop for three months, the Kaiser spent “two half-days … on the drafts. Then he got millions from the Swedes.” As for his assistants: nada.
Jen Perkins is the founder of one of my favorite jewelry stores, the Naughty Secretary Club. Turns out the name isn’t a coincidence – Perkins was a secretary when she started working on jewelry in her free time. Eventually, the side job became a full time one, and she hasn’t looked back since. We talked about how assistants with creative dreams can make them happen and pay rent in the meantime.
How long were you an assistant, and what kind of work did you do?
I was an administrative assistant for close to 3 years at a telecom company in Austin. I didn’t do much of any work, hence why I was naughty. I had the occasional phone to answer or fax to send but for the most part I made jewelry at my desk, worked on my website and made copies of my husband’s band fliers when no one was looking.
What’s your worst assistant horror story?
While I was an assistant I had two bosses and most of the time not one at all. The first one was very stern and serious and the second, who I am still close friends with, was very laid back and fun. Once when the first boss was sneaking out of the office I jokingly said to her “where do you think you are going” and apparently she was going somewhere she shouldn’t and I had busted her because she tore me a new A-hole when she returned. Needless to say I toned the sarcasm down after that because apparently she could not take a joke.
When it’s cold, it’s easy to look more formal at work. You’re already all covered up and wearing thick, non-transparent fabrics. But with summer coming (or if you live in someplace other than the Northeast, summer might be there already), you start trying to walk that line between cute summer attire and proper work dress. You can always throw a cardigan over your sundress or stick flip-flops in your bag while you sport loafers at the office, but … what about shorts? One article examines the trend-that’s-now-too-longstanding-to-be-a-trend:
In May 2006, when shorts first started making their way into city offices in the US, The New York Times’ Ruth la Ferla put it down to an easing of workplace dress standards.
“Dress codes these days are as elastic as a bungee cord, expanding to accommodate all manner of once unthinkable workplace infractions,” she wrote. “This year that increasingly flexible standard has stretched to encompass shorts, of all things.”
La Ferla too had waved them off as a passing “infraction”. A faux pas. One that we’d all laugh about later. She too was wrong.
As for your office, my general attitude about dress codes is “wait and see.” If someone higher up than you can get away with wearing shorts, then you’re good to go. Otherwise, you can try wearing a pair but keep a pair of pants in your bag just in case the office manager gives you a dirty look and you feel like you might be veering too far on the side of informal. Just, whatever you do, don’t wear a skort. No one can pull that off.
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