If you lived in New York City in the 1990s and 2000s, as I did, there was no better person to be than a fashion girl. Slim, well-dressed and chain-smoking, she worked at an elite fashion house or glossy magazine. It was not necessarily an easy job — the pay was terrible, the hours were long and the stress was off the charts — but it had some great perks: the clothes, the access, the parties, and the awe and admiration of men and women everywhere. That includes me, who spent those years huddled in the stacks of the university library with my moth-eaten sweater and matted hair, quietly sobbing to myself as I worked through another proof by a long-dead Russian mathematician. Glamorous and exciting, I was not.
The purpose of this reverie is not to win your sympathy, though I’ll take it, but to mourn the era of the fashion girl, and the economic and cultural world she inhabited. I am not alone in my nostalgia; it helps explain the popularity of Love Story, a TV miniseries about the ultimate fashion girl, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, who once worked for Calvin Klein. Bessette Kennedy was well known, in part because John F. Kennedy Jr. married her, but she was mysterious and elusive in a way that she wouldn’t be today, because she put her talents toward the brand rather than herself.
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Arnaldo Magnani/Getty Images