Tales From ‘Mademoiselle’: ‘Self-Starvation Was a Competitive Sport’
NYMAG.com’s THE CUT, September 2008
Valerie Frankel, former editor of now-defunct Condé Nast title Mademoiselle, just released a book about the pressure to stay slim in the world of magazine publishing. In Thin Is the New Happy, Frankel writes she snorted “hillocks of cocaine” to help fit into a size 8 — sometimes at the workplace — and that she did “more blow in my first two years at Mademoiselle than in college, when I lived with a coke dealer.” She adds human resources told new hires to “represent the magazine in [their] personal appearance,” and the office motto of sorts was “get thin or die trying.” [Read more...]
The influx of Stella McCartney-clad hipsters in Manhattan’s Alphabet City might have appeared, back in the neighborhood’s pre-affluent era in the 80s and 90s, like poorly cast extras on the set of The Warriors. A veritable ghost town, Alphabet City, referred back then as “the wild wild west,” was a place where drug dealers defiantly engaged in public sales, boarded up buildings were converted into crack sanctuaries and echoes of crowing roosters and growling pitbulls were the daily soundtrack. It seems near impossible to picture such a tableau today.