working at Prada
http://jezebel.com/gossip/i-work-retail/the-devil-wears-prada-because-prada-is-hell-288327.php
I WORK RETAIL The Devil Wears Prada Because Prada Is Hell
[Welcome to our second installment of “I Work Retail,” in which we
investigate the very peculiar torture of selling designer goods. The
anonymous author, C, worked at the Soho Prada flagship store, the
site of a five-alarm fire last year. She saw symbolism in that, and
shared with us this cautionary tale.]
In the literary phenomenon that was The Devil Wears Prada, the devil
denotes Anna Wintour, and the point of wearing Prada is that she’s
some divine style setter or something. Well, I worked at Prada, and I
am here to set the record straight. Both Anna and the Devil do wear
Prada; the problem is that no one else does. They buy the bags, sure,
and sometimes the shoes; and most commonly they buy the fakes. But
Prada clothes are worn by few besides lesbian art dealer types –
which is how a cynical vampy goth-type like me ended up working there
– and Anna Wintour, who I once had the privilege of coming in three
hours early to wait on.
She arrived at 8 a.m. and bought a wool sweater, some socks, and
ordered twenty white T-shirts and maybe a skirt. And by “bought,” of
course, I mean she did no such thing; all her clothes were always
free — Sarah Jessica Parker, meanwhile, justified merely a 30%
discount — which may have been why she did not treat anyone too
horribly. It was difficult to see her as the devil, when the real
satanic force in the room was standing right next to her, ushering
her through the store while managing to avoid making eye contact with
any of the people who worked there. It was Connie Darrow, the CEO of
Prada USA and the most miserable person I have ever had the
displeasure of knowing. Next to her, Anna was snooty and
overprivileged but essentially harmless, like a poodle somehow
captured in human form.
So anyway: Connie. A Barney’s veteran who had been kissing rich bitch
ass since the eighties, she’d been at Prada since the mid-nineties
and was not exactly humble about this fact. The first time I met her
was on my third interview with the company, an adventure which took
me to their odd lab-like US headquarters in a desolate part of
Midtown next to the Hustler strip club. I had lied on the requisite
personality test in which they determine whether you are masochistic
enough to handle high-end retail, and passed the credit check they
used to sort out where my finances stood on the trust fund to junkie-
likely-to-steal spectrum. I was almost in.
Connie stood about 4′11 in Prada jazz shoes. She was dressed in a
full Prada skirt embroidered with glass beads, Prada knee socks, a
Prada blouse, a black mink cape and a diamond-encrusted Fred Leighton
tiara. Fred Leighton was allegedly a friend of Connie’s, and that
shit had to be worth a hundred grand, which is tasteful attire, when
you are interviewing someone you’re planning to pay $18 an hour –
though it makes more sense when you remember the company had sunk
some $30 or $40 million into building the temple to consumerism I was
about to call work.
The interview was filled with little gasps and “ohhhh’s.” Connie
tried her best not to look at me directly. “I see you have tattoos,
do you plan on getting more?” she wanted to know. (I had a small one
on my wrist.) “No,” I replied. “Do you speak Italian?” (Errrr, they
didn’t teach that at my high school?)
High-end retail is always somewhat soul-killing and ruinous of your
ability to do anything else. I had moved to New York at eighteen to
go to college for creative writing, but I was broke and met a girl at
a hostel in Queens I briefly lived in who got me a job at the boho-
chic shop Calypso, and from there I worked at another high-end
Italian designer store, where my assistant manager then quit for
Prada, so I had been around enough to recognize a few critical
problems. For one, there are so many rich assholes you are required
to be excessively, absurdly nice to, that you treat normal people –
your significant other, say — like total shit, just because it’s so
much easier that way.
All day long, you smile at the grayed sixtysomething rich guys as
they escort their dewy faced young girlfriends into the high-tech
dressing rooms for a little pre-splurge BJ action. You smile at
fourteen year olds carrying handbags that could pay your rent for a
semester. You smile at tourists who mistake Prada for a cultural
attraction — it did, after all, used to be the Guggenheim — and the
other tourists who mistook their fake Prada bags for real ones they
could bring in for repair. And you smile as Kimora Lee Simmons
DEMANDS that you furnish her with a skirt two sizes too small for he
and throws a tantrum when it doesn’t fit.
And then: you go throw up, or do a line (coke? heroin? whatever
works, hon!), or go into the backroom and jerk off to gay porn (like
my bisexual assistant manager, who was, incidentally, sleeping with
too many of our co-workers to really justify needing porn.) Two other
salesgirls in women’s ready-to-wear had teeth that were brown from
all the puking. I personally turned into a cokehead.
But Prada was worse than most high-end retail jobs because the
company was in trouble. It had pissed away millions on fixtures like
automatically fogging-up dressing room doors and a huge, pointless
ramp that looked like a skateboard half-pipe, just as all the cash
the company made off those damn mini-backpacks was starting to
subside, when September 11 happened and slowed down shopping even
more. The rumor was that the store’s extravagance was a product of an
illicit affair Miuccia Prada was having with its architect Rem
Koolhaas, but it was also a symbol of dotcom era hubris. Connie
seemed to deal with these facts with a combination of tactics: denial
and self-destruction. She set my department’s goals around $75,000 a
day — impossible at the time — and then proceed, in a fit of mad
“inspiration,” to shut down the section while she ordered in tea and
scones and ruminated about how best to rearrange the place. Nothing
ever worked, of course; no one downtown felt like coughing up five
figures on a beautifully made dress that didn’t really fit that well.
The shoe department fared slightly better, but was hugely territorial
about their sales. We were told to skip lunch — not that anyone
really felt like eating, what with the coke and the crystal meth and
the eating disorders.
On the best day of work at Prada, some hipster skater kid came in and
slid down the half-pipe. Someone called the cops. My assistant
manager was fired over the porn, and I quit shortly afterwards.
Connie was ousted in 2005; her “personality” was cited in the trades.
Then in 2006, the store burned down. No, really. I cannot say I was
sad about it.