We Aren’t Hating on Anne Slowey Because She Engineered Nina Garcia’s Sloppy Exit from ELLE. Or Because She’s Unprofessional. It’s Because She’s An Embarrassment
Posted by The MILF
Never in a million years would I anticipate cheering for a Fifth Avenue fashion editor over a vintage-hording features editor who lives in the East Village. But the Nina Garcia-Anne Slowey grudge match playing out via Garcia’s much-praised “Project Runway” role and Slowey’s upcoming, parody-ready “Stylista” venture, is a shoe-in for Garcia — and the shockingly obvious bias toward Garcia in Maureen Tkacik’s super-juicy story for New York is all the evidence you need.
Why? In Magazine Land, the fashion editors are the shallow girls inordinately obsessed with stuff (and rich men and Republicans), while the features editors are the smart girls who voice semi-sincere guilt over putting aside major educations and feminist principles for glamorous fluff jobs. The fashion girls get free stuff; the features girls don’t (or not much). It’s a total one-way jealousy factory. So for a writer like Tkacik (and her editor at New York) to brazenly cheer for a girl on the other side, tells you not only how sucky “Stylista” appears to be in leaked clips but also something of the industry’s impatience with an eccentric who is not endearing, much less original.
Then there’s Slowey’s cluelessness about how things work. She should know that the pretty, materialistic girls get the mainstream face-time, while the brainy “word” girls are meant to be satisfied with the type of insidery fame bequeathed by a byline. That she’s attempted to upend the ship — and seems poised to fail so spectacularly — is less about schadenfreude and more about botching it for other aspirational word girls. Gah.
