fashion week envy
the tension between me and the sandy liang PR list...
Happy Saturday! We made it. Didn’t this week feel long? My plan for enjoying today: cook clam linguine, start reading a book (why we swim by bonnie tsui) I picked up at a local “free little library” box down the street, organize my horrific pile of messy clothes, look for the good deal outerwear on japanese ebay (more on that soon).
It’s gonna be a back-to-back newsletter weekend.
today’s piece is about fashion week envy and my brief existence on the sandy liang PR list
tomorrow is an interview with
of The Cakewalk and of Market Appointment on their best fashion week stories over the years!! Asking Anna Wintour for a picture, the political chess game of who gets seated next to who, the reality of events when you’re *not* a nepo baby or condé darling…it’s a funny, chatty read—the “beach read” of fashion week stories if you will.
If I were to offer one piece of advice for pursuing a career that’s fashion-adjacent, it would be to learn how to deal with envy.
This industry practically runs on taunting that little green-eyed beast within us, and its whispers heighten into screams during fashion week (or fashion month, more accurately).
wrote about it in this week, where she dissects the smoke and mirrors of PR: “While there are a dozen think pieces surfacing about the death of NYFW […] the envy of it is as alive as ever.”I believe the envy deepens the closer you fall into the gravitational pull of the fashion world. Before I ever pursued a career in fashion writing or content creation, fashion week was just so…abstract. It was completely irrelevant to my life. I would click through some Vogue slideshows at work on a new tab next to my Excel tabs, nibbling on a Mendocino Farms sandwich, entertaining myself through the boredom of my office job. Fashion week had no overlap with my reality. The desire to be at those events never entered my consciousness.
Fast forward through my career arc and suddenly, the separate spheres of my reality and fashion week started to overlap a bit. Fashion week went from abstract to concrete. I started getting a few email invitations from small designers to things like presentations, press appointments/viewings, vague parties—it was all completely foreign to me. Sometimes, Instagram DMs asking “will you be at fashion week? would love to have you at XYZ event.” The first time it happened, I thought it was SO cool. Someone wanted me at an event? The rush of external validation at receiving these emails for the first time made me giddy. I’m not sure that I genuinely wanted to attend these events, but I know that it felt good to be chosen.
The first (and only) time I received a small PR package from Sandy Liang circa 2022, I was over the moon.
This was during my peak infatuation with the brand, when I wanted sooooo badly to be invited to a show. My elation stemmed from the high of feeling noticed by a brand I adored, not because I particularly loved the purple cotton tank top that fit strangely over my boobs and ballet shoe keychain in the PR package. I don’t know what “earned” me the PR. And I don’t know what makes the PR packages stop.
Since then I’ve written about how my complicated relationship to the Sandy Liang brand has changed. The politics of a PR list are fickle and flighty. I try not to think about it too much—there’s no point in doing so.
But I don’t foresee being on the Sandy Liang PR list again anytime soon (or ever),