Some Personal Lore
#Y2K, #miumiu, #soho, #hamsters, #farrahfawcett, #lucien
One of the writing exercises I’ve been using along my laughably arduous path to writing my book has been to simply write out memories, and if you know me in real life you know that this is a massively lazy cop out because I LOVE talking about memories, especially if they are heavy with lore. I get this from my father, who could not once manage to suppress his urge to tell me about “what had happened” on whatever street corner we were passing at that moment, and while my stories are (on balance) less exciting than his, my daughter has inherited the same attentive listening that I had as a child, and she knows that an easy way to stroke my ego is to display any visible interest in whatever I’m telling her.
She’s also enough of a preteen now that she is, just like the rest of us, awash in the Y2K nostalgia ether, or what could more crudely and honestly be referred to as The Days Before iPhones. When my dad was telling me stories about his younger years, the differences between the 70s and the 90s were minimal. Cars got smaller. TVs got more channels. The internet was invented, but it didn’t follow us around. When I tell stories to my daughter - and increasingly to anyone under age 30 - there’s so much qualifying. Well first, you have to know that I had a Nokia brick that looked like a portable land line and had no camera. What is a land line? We used to have phones in our houses and they had additional boxes attached to them that were called answering machines, and the answering machines contained tapes to record spoken messages. What is a tape? Etc, etc. It can get long-winded.
We also live in a neighborhood that I spent a lot of time in in my youth, so memories are around every corner, and on days when there is tension from a disagreement or she is very tired or is laying the groundwork to ask me for something big later in the day, she will simply ask me what happened here, mom? as we walk through the neighborhood, stroking my ego and buying herself five to ten minutes of monologue track she can dissociate to. I understand what’s happening and I don’t care, I love talking too much.
I’m using this newsletter space for some writing exercises here and there, and so today you’re getting a memory.
When I was 18, I had to find a way to pay for my own college education, and I had really no idea what I was doing and I had no one to advise me. I stumbled backwards into luxury retail, which was very lucrative employment for a teenager, and had the added bonus of expecting me to work on weekends, leaving two entire weekdays free to cram with college classes. I started with a very relaxing job at Alberta Ferretti’s shop on West Broadway where my boss let me do my coursework on the sales floor on quiet days, but a few months into my time there I was recruited to work up the street at Miu Miu, and I kissed my relaxing West Broadway life goodbye for the promise of better commission checks.
Miu Miu in the 90s and early 00s was a completely different brand than it is today. We were the younger, punkier, “diffusion line” of Prada, and the large, Rem Koolhaas-designed Prada store across the street never let us forget it. It was much less expensive than it is now, even with inflation considered, and though we sat under the corporate umbrella of Prada USA, Connie Darrow (who was recruited from Barneys by the Bertellis to carve out Prada’s American business as President) hardly ever paid us any attention. Conversely, at the Prada stores, they lived under her constant militant eye, ever-remerchandising, ever-scrutinzing the placement of a single piece of pebbled leather luggage in the store window.
The most resonant interaction I remember with Connie Darrow was when we began receiving the Fall 2004 collection in stores, and one shipment included a few units of a fur coat that was marked HAMSTER on its origin information tag, which was stitched into the seam and impossible to remove. Ms. Darrow suggested simply folding the tag over so that the fur origin would not be visible. When I opened the jacket, which was unlined and had visible furwork seams inside, my colleague and I jumped backwards and shrieked - the inside of the coat looked as if an entire Habitrail of hamsters had been stitched together. Folding the tag over would have been a lost cause to anyone with eyes. We left it undisturbed and sold all three of the coats within the following weeks, hamsters be damned. They were $3,000 and I remember thinking that was the most expensive thing that could ever exist.
In the olden days, celebrities did not all have stylists, and brands did not all have deeply-staffed celebrity relations departments. The single human manning the Prada celebrity relations department was the legendary Leslie Freemar, who would show up breathless and chic and kind on our doorstep once in a blue moon to guide a celebrity through the collection during store hours in regular fitting rooms. But more often, because online shopping did not in any way exist for clothing, celebrities would just come in on their own accord, out shopping in Soho with their friends like normal humans.
Long before everyone had a camera phone in their pocket and the Kardashians socialized the concept of alerting photographers in advance to their whereabouts, there was an enormous business for actual paparazzi photos, the old school kind that the hyper-posed street style photos of today are based on. Soho was filled with middle aged guys on bikes wearing backwards Kangols and cargo vests toting backpacks filled with telephoto lenses, huddling in the corner awning of Fanelli’s to see if they could catch a celebrity arrival at The Mercer. When I would step out of the shop to spend my lunch break at the counter at Dean & Deluca (RIP, I truly had no idea how good I had it), one of them would often sidle up to me on my walk and ask me if I could give them a call when celebrities showed up in the store if they cut me in to their photo payout, which was sometimes around a thousand dollars for a good image. This happened so often that we received notices from Prada corporate not to engage with the paparazzi (or face disciplinary consequences). Proud to say I never once called one of them, despite the constant stream of celebrity arrivals at the store, from Salma Hayek (one of the nicest most humble people I’ve ever met) to Lucy Liu (who bought one of my favorite ever pair of shoes), to Rachael Ray (very chatty) to Adam Sadler, who sat on our couches staring miserably into the mid distance (no iPhone) for a half hour while his new wife tried on shoes.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten in my life was from Tina Ling, my assistant manager there, who would see me getting stressed out or perfection-obsessed and say, flippantly, “it’s just fashion”. Tina always told us not to intervene in case of a shoplifter - it’s not worth potentially getting hurt - but Tina was also born and raised in Queens and one time after witnessing a couple of middle aged women swipe handbags from our shop floor, she took off out the door and ran around Soho on a blazing crowded Saturday, checking all the surrounding shops until finding the women at Barneys Co-op (RIP) on Wooster and loudly humiliated them in front of the other customers and the sales staff and god until they gave her the bags back. Tina “It’s Just Fashion” Ling marched back into the Miu Miu store sweaty and triumphant, holding the two recovered handbags, which were each $495 (RIP).
The shop closed at 7, and one Tuesday evening Tina and I were the only two people working, aside from our security guard, Mike. The phone rang (there was no online shopping and women would call from around the country each day having seen a shoe in a magazine and ask to place an order over the phone and they would have to fill out a form and fax it to us to do so and if we made them wait too long while we checked for whatever they’d asked for they would bark I’m calling long distance(RIP)) and I answered, and before I could finish my standard greeting I heard someone friendly-shouting:
Hi I’m a producer on a brand new reality television show called Chasing Farrah that’s recording right now and we are in the car with Farrah Fawcett and she wants to come to the Miu Miu store can you confirm that we can film inside the store????
This was a huge taboo in The World of Prada, and Tina had to call the corporate office (everyone had left for the day), and our chic one-woman celebrity relations department Leslie Freemar was gone, and Prada Italy was asleep, and the answer was no, they couldn’t film in the store. We called the producer back, and they decided to come anyway. Farrah really wanted to go shopping.
Fifteen minutes later our security guard let Farrah Fawcett and her friend in and locked the door behind them. Her camera crew stood very conspicuously in the large front windows of the store next her gigantic limousine SUV, trying to capture video of Farrah shopping, but their presence tipped off the paparazzi that usually hung out on Mercer, who all came over and whipped out their telephoto lenses and stood in the windows too, totem pole-style, and this spectacle alerted all of the pedestrians on the street that there was something interesting (or maybe not interesting but just not boring) happening in the shop, and they too tried to stack on top of the paparazzi and then also catch a peek from the steps of the J.Crew shop across the street (RIP) and the doorway of Jerry’s (RIP). Within a few minutes there were a few dozen people gathered around, waiting for I don’t know what, and the front of the store was a strobe of photo flashes every time we came near.
Farrah Fawcett was one of the nicest people I have ever met. She was 57 then and still wore the same Charlie’s Angels feathered hairstyle that she got famous in, and had a distinctly LA style that was not popular in New York at the time: self-aware tight clothes, super tan skin, teeth bonded and blindingly white. She walked around the shop with me pointing out what she liked and asking me what I thought, and then she let me deposit her in the dressing room while I went to grab everything she had asked for. When I came back with my arms full of the clothes and shoes she had selected, she had already undressed, and Farrah Fawcett was accidentally the first pair of cosmetically enhanced breasts I’d ever seen in my then 19 years of life.
She chose a bunch of platform shoes and some bright orange crochet sweaters, all through lots of conversation peppered with smiles and gratitude. She smiled constantly, looked me in the eyes, asked me what I thought. We were well out of the way of the cameramen, alone with her friend in the fit cabin. She could have treated me poorly - and anyone who has ever worked in sales can tell you many people would - but instead she was warm and relaxed and gracious. When I brought her final purchases out to the register, Tina told me that she would finish ringing everything up for me because I had gone over the limit of Prada-approved overtime and I had to leave. I bade farewell to Farrah Fawcett and asked her to come by again (she never did) and she said she would see me soon (we never saw each other again, she died a few years later, RIP) and I grabbed my things and went to the front of the store to leave.
Even now, more than twenty years later, I am terrified of being in front of a camera. It’s been this way since I was a kid, I have never been able to stand in front of a camera and look normal, even after years and years of casual phone camera exposure. In 2004 I think I had maybe six photos of myself total, I was convinced I was a hideous monster and the idea of someone taking my picture inspired abject fright in me. If you see lots of selfies from me now on my social accounts it’s partially an attempt at exposure therapy because I would love to be normal for pictures before the age of 60, instead of collapsing upon myself like a dying star when faced with recording my existence.
At this point, a huge crowd had gathered for reasons I still don’t totally understand. The camera crew with their multiple videographers were closest, and then a dozen paparazzi surrounded them, followed by fans and regular nosy people from the neighborhood. As I walked toward the front of the store to leave, where Mike the security guard was waiting, flashes started firing in anticipation of Ms. Fawcett potentially being behind me, and Mike noticed the immediate fear that registered across my face, totally uncomfortable being the center of attention even accidentally. Mike was himself a girl dad. He met me at the locked front door and said with a wink don’t worry girl we gonna make this fun, then he unlocked the door and forced it open against the crowd of people standing on the other side, using his deepest scariest most authoritative voice to yell STEP ASIDE, STEP ASIDE. He reached back up the steps to offer me a hand to lean on as I stepped down through the crowd, and the paparazzi (who were constantly trying to get on my good side in case I could be a source) started firing their camera flashes at me. ARE YOU A CHARLIE’S ANGEL? one of them yelled as I came down the steps, giving me the full celebrity harassment treatment. Mike ushered me through the crowd like I was Rachel Marron being rescued by Frank Farmer, throwing some elbows for dramatic effect, then winked again and returned to the door.
Once I cut through and got to the corner I lit a cigarette (RIP) and walked across Houston to Lucien, where in those years I spent about as much time as I did at school or at work. I was younger than everyone I knew and constantly self-editing so that I didn’t sound like a little kid around them - as I threw myself into my seat and ordered my steak au poivre, they asked me what had happened that made me so late, all I said was ugh I got held up at work, when what I actually wanted to say was: I’M A CHARLIE’S ANGEL.
This is so good, and I love the photo of Baby Anja! Hope you’ll share more memories.
ok I devoured this. More memories please!