R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

The flowery response that I had planted in my memory for this very occasion— “I want to make everything more beautiful!” —had utterly wilted in my head. “I majored in art history,” I said, “with a minor in classics. For a short while I had hoped to be an artist, but. ” Here I had been prepared to tell an amusing anecdote about the first and only drawing class I had ever taken, wherein my depiction of a bowl of oranges was mistaken for a grassy knoll by my professor ( “A nice landscape, Mr. St. James, but did you mishear the assignment?” ). In this very instance, however — when the only interest Sabrina Walker seemed to have in me involved my relation to an invisible timer in her head — self-deprecating humor seemed decidedly the wrong note. How could I possibly reveal to her now the intimate admission that all I’d ever wanted was to work at Régine , the dream-world that for years had made my life bearable?

She was glancing once more into the folder at my résumé—out of boredom, perhaps, or a renewed sense of duty — and chewing her gum with slow deliberation, each bulge of her jawline like the agonizing crank of a medieval torture device.

“I want more than anything to work here,” I ventured, suddenly changing my approach. It was now or never; if she wasn’t swayed by my background or my résumé, then my only hope was to impress upon Sabrina the sheer intensity of my passion. “Everyone I know from school — they’re all off to law school, consulting firms. They think they’re going to help the world, and they are, I guess, but to me — beauty is more important than all those things. When people are sad, lonely — they don’t look to their lawyers or consultants.” I pointed to an issue of Régine that was laid out neatly on the cream coffee table. “They look to art, fashion — they escape into pictures. Working here, making the world beautiful, more bearable for those people — it’s my dream.”

The effect of this appeal was a momentary pause, then the completion of Sabrina’s transformation into a smoldering piece of dry ice. “When you refer to beauty,” she replied dully at last, “you mean our Beauty section? Like makeup, and skincare?”

I let out a little breath — the gasp of a little part of me, dying. My voice almost cracked, “Yes, like skincare,” just to save us both the trouble, but this seemed like an awful offense to the most sacred things in my life. “Not like beauty products . ” I croaked. “Like — I don’t know. beauty. It’s so much bigger than makeup — bigger than fashion.”

“ Bigger than fashion.?” Disapproval decorated every syllable. “Then what are you doing at Régine ?”

“I–I want to be a fashion editor,” I replied, as the desperateness of my situation set in. “I just — I have so many ideas, so many worlds in my head. The only thing I want is to work here — to make them come to life.”

“That’s ambitious,” she replied, with a skeptical arch of her brow.

“I know it won’t be easy,” I rushed in, trying to predict her thoughts. “I’m prepared to work my whole life — just for a chance — but that’s all I want, to be here.”

Revealing in full her assessment of the situation, she looked like she was preparing to step around a puddle that was forming on the floor. “I’ll be honest with you, Ethan,” she said slowly, “because you seem like a smart boy.” She observed me closely, as though she had earlier allowed a preconception to define my outer edges and was now filling me in. Her eyes passed with measured intensity over my suit, my shoes, my shaking hands, and when I thought she had finally met my gaze, I realized she was squinting at my unruly hair. “We hire two kinds of interns here. The first kind is what you’d expect anywhere, really — went to a decent college, usually majored in fashion or communications. We’re very fair, and we’ll take them from anywhere.” As an aside—“Well, no state schools, but anywhere else, as long as they’re competent.”

She absently folded down the corner of my résumé. “They put in their time — a semester, or a summer — hard work, but in the end, they’re grateful. I don’t have to tell you that, for a career in fashion, Régine is the best name anyone can have on their résumé. They put it on the top in bold letters, and when we send them on their way, they end up in retail management, or public relations. Normal jobs, you know — and for the rest of their lives, they get to tell people— they were here .”

Sabrina’s Chanel bracelet clinked as her hand paused over the page, and a moment was granted for my consideration of this generous scenario. She flapped my folder open and closed. “If what you want is what I just described, then by all means — I’m happy to end this interview, and I’ll see you on Monday.”

I stared at her. I wasn’t here because I wanted a line on my résumé, or a recommendation for a job in retail. I was here because I wanted everything . “What is the second type of intern?” I asked.

Sabrina permitted herself to flap open my folder one last time. Then she shut it, the breeze stilled, and she returned to her previous pose: hands clasped in a kind of prim finality. “Well, some interns we intend to bring on staff. But they’re a very special case. ”

As Sabrina trailed off, I felt a blaze of irritation. In exactly what ways was I not a “special case”? Hadn’t I gotten into an Ivy League school from the middle of nowhere, with zero advantages and almost every obstacle stacked against me? Didn’t she realize I was the definition of a special case? I glared at her, and in the next second she rather suddenly filled the silence. “Did you know we’re the only Hoffman-Lynch publication that doesn’t accept applications through Human Resources?”

I shook my head, suspecting that Sabrina had already delivered this conciliatory speech to a number of intern rejects before me.

“It’s true,” she continued. “We only hire from within. We used to work through HR, up on the seventeenth floor, but they kept sending the wrong types of people — HR handles all the magazines at Hoffman-Lynch, twenty-something titles, but some of the other magazines aren’t as. discriminating as Régine . You understand, I’m sure — the qualities Régine seeks in a staff member are very hard to determine from a résumé. We can’t just get anyone off the street, who can technically do a ‘job.’ The perfect candidate has certain other qualities — they look Régine , they act Régine —they know Régine because they are Régine . When they leave the office after a day at work, people need to be able to say, ‘That’s a Régine girl’—or boy, in your case. They have to be a person we can groom . We take them on as interns — special cases, you know — and when a position opens, it belongs to them. Because they belong. ”

Sabrina’s hand fluttered open, like she was demonstrating for me the way her own delicate fingers belonged —or, perhaps, inviting me to appreciate her ring of diamonds encircling a shiny emerald. Draping one forearm over the upholstered arm of her chair, she dangled her hand over the adjacent glass side table. Her wrist was moving lightly in a circle, as if she had picked up a martini glass by its rim and was swirling around an olive inside. “I’d be happy to see you in the first category,” she conceded at last. I realized I had been holding my breath. “We’d give you this opportunity, as a minor endorsement of sorts. you’d work hard, and then we’d send you on your way. I’m just. ” She kept toying with the invisible glass. “For some reason, I’m just not so sure. that you fall into the second category.”