Guest Speaker 4: New York Times fashion editor
Main takeaways from listening to the world renowned fashion speaker talk.
This is the fourth part to a five part series of the things I learned from guest speakers during my fashion merchandising class at Parsons.
For all of the previous guest speakers I have kept their identity and secret and have only gone by their job titles, but this is an extraneous case because there is only one fashion editor at the New York Times. And her name is Vanessa Friedman.
It has come time to impart on you all the wisdom I learned from the coolest woman to ever walk the streets of New York City. My idol, the woman who, when I saw her name on the list of guest speakers for this course, I almost cried.
The thing that might surprise someone the most about a fashion editor is how much Friedman spoke on politics and philosophy and the economy and all those other things that the general public think that fashion-people are not well-versed in. Friedman told us that if there was one thing we all took from her being there, it’s that fashion influences everything, it’s one of the greatest soft powers in the world.
You can talk about anything through the context of fashion. In the technology sector, Steve Jobs was always photographed wearing a black turtleneck or Mark Zuckerberg’s gray t-shirt, or the way the general public started noticing when Elizabeth Holmes started dressing as a culmination of all the major male founders. Although all of these people did amazing (or scandalous) things in their fields, in the end, their inventions made them a household name, but their repetitive fashion choices made them a face you would recognize. A caricature of sorts, like Charlie Brown with his signature striped shirt. Artificial Intelligence has made a major boom lately in all aspects of the world, but there has yet to be a major face that goes along with the AI inventions. Until Jensen Huang showed up in his leather jackets. No matter where he is or what he’s being photographed for, he’s wearing a leather jacket. Where Sam Altman looks generic and has no identifiable features, Huang has a leather jacket and has therefore become a part of pop culture and not just AI. While it may seem as though Huang is rejecting fashion because he wears the same coat over and over again, in reality he is leaning into the power of fashion to create a manifestation of himself. I, for one, do not believe this was done by accident.
Of course fashion holds the same power in politics. Some of which for the same reason as tech, major politics adopting a uniform of sorts. We have always known that politicians are very aware of their image and that the way you look affects the way that people perceive you. As politicians trying to hold a position of power, they want to control what the general public thinks of them as much as possible, and a majority of that falls into the hands of professional image makers.
A major example of this is John Fetterman who is a Democrat serving as the junior senator from Pennsylvania, but even when he was running for office he did not dress the conventional way we see politicians dressing. He traded in the suits and ties for Carhartt shorts and hoodies. This made him appear more relatable to the public and therefore convincing people that he felt their pain even though he went to Harvard Business School. The public thought, “He looks like me, I’m going to believe him, I like him.” There’s no doubt that Fetterman’s clothes were used as an asset in the election that eventually got him the seat at senator. But even if it wasn’t a strategized move, the conclusion remains the same, everybody thinks about fashion all the time. Because even by deciding that you do not want to think about fashion, like Fetterman is projecting and how some of the tech giants say they don’t have time in the morning to pick out something new to wear, you are still making a fashion statement.
Fashion journalism isn’t about looking a public figure up and down and deciding if you like the aesthetic or not. It’s about looking at what the person is wearing, and then figuring out why they are dressing the way that they are, and what message they are trying to get across by wearing such garments. Whether those public figures are the politicians and tech giants already discussed, or celebrities, influencers, or simply your professor commanding a classroom.
As Friedman is a very opinionated woman who has the education to back up those theses, I wanted her opinion on the oversaturated world of influencers. She believes that most of them are trying to yield their powers too soon, and trying to make products to sell very soon after getting famous because everyone is afraid that the tide will change and they will fall off, so they feel the need to cash in while they can. This results in a lot of badly manufactured items with horrible quality which then makes the audience upset with the influencer. She recognizes a change in the way brands use influencers, as they are starting to take note of the difference between talent vs aesthetic talent and are leveraging talent instead of just living an aesthetic life. Lately, this has been translating to beauty brands wanting to have female athletes advertise their product. If a girl can put on a brand’s mascara before the game, play 40 minutes, and come out of the game still with flawless eyelashes, the general public can rest assured that the mascara will sustain their work day.
Overall, the influencer market is extremely oversaturated. Everyone wants to get famous, and everyone feels like if they just hit the algorithm correctly once, they will be famous by the end of the week. Social media is so different than it ever has been before with Tik Tok where one video could go viral and someone’s life could completely change. It is so easy to recognize the patterns in what’s going viral and for creators, or wanna be influencers, to just post along with the trends to get followers. But that becomes incredibly boring very fast. Instead of chasing the trends and hashtags, influencing should be more about the unique thing that you can bring into the social media world and what you can do that others cannot.
Of course the main question permeating through my mind throughout the whole two hour long talk was, “Okay, so what do I do if I want to be the next Vanessa Friedman?”
The main thing she said was to utilize your age, leverage the things that you know that the employers don’t, and the younger generations’ proclivity for anything technological. This also expands to the fashion industry in general, because nobody knows what people your age are shopping for and wanting more than people living on college campuses or attending high schools with hundreds of people their same age. Friedman says, “I want them to tell me what I don’t know.”
Being young in this huge technological era also means that very soon in the future, young people will be expected to know all the different kinds of mediums when it comes to storytelling – writing, podcasting, making videos, photography – and to get noticed by major media groups, you need to do all of these as much as possible to show you have a diverse portfolio that could be of assistance to a company. Within these mediums, the content needs to show that the producer is naturally adept at connecting the dots between things, like historical events or between different industries, especially things most people wouldn’t think to connect.
The biggest point she made about fashion journalism is that your work becomes meaningless if you tell everyone they’re great, so you must learn how to critique in an unbiased way that doesn’t come across as just being rude. Friedman claims she has critiqued many people in her years of writing, and none of them have ever been mad (rather, none have held a grudge longer than a week) about the things she says, because they are rooted in fact and delivered objectively instead of trying to rail into the person. If you don’t critique people, then your words won’t matter as much when you call others great.
She ended the session by giving us her email and telling us that she always welcomed hearing feedback on her pieces, especially from Gen Z where the young college students can provide her with a different outlook or more input. She probably shouldn’t have told us so freely to contact her, because she’s going to have a lot of emails from me in her inbox in the coming months.
Yours truly,
Calihan