first time that morning. This was something she could do. This was where she shined. She had spent years wooing advertisers from the biggest fashion houses in the world. She had hosted cocktail dinners for billionaires and visiting heads of state.
She started off with one of her favorite quotations from OscarWilde—“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months”—and then made one of her stock jokes: “Mr. Wilde would have to rethink his words knowing that I am allowed to reinvent it every single month.”
She usually got a few chuckles from that. Now there were only blank stares. Briefly frazzled, she looked down at her notecards and launched into her explanation of the history of
Glossy
, racking her brain for a way to win this crowd. What did she have in common with them? Who did they care about? Reading rooms was something she typically excelled at.
“I met Steve Jobs a couple of years after he released the first prototype of the iPhone,” Imogen started winging it. “He told me that it would change my life. As a late adopter of the technology I wish I had a chance to tell Mr. Jobs that it truly has. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be so talented at flinging angry birds at feral pigs.” It worked. The crowd laughed, all thanks to Alex. He had ad-libbed the joke the night before when she bemoaned having to get onstage at a tech conference: “When in doubt tell them an Angry Birds joke. They love Angry Birds.” Thank god she’d married a man who spent time defending millennial repeat offenders.
“Thank you, Imogen,” Eve said, walking in front of her, eager to replace her applause. “If Oscar Wilde were alive today he would recognize that we need to reinvent fashion about every six minutes online.”
The crowd loved that. More claps followed by hoots and hollers.
Eve pulled out the weighty September issue of
Glossy
, all 768 pages of it.
“This is a lot of paper. A lot of trees,” said Eve, who had never once expressed any kind of interest in the environment, with faux earnestness. Imogen saw former vice president Al Gore’s head nod in agreement from an offstage Skype feed apparently piped in from Antarctica.
“Reinventing fashion every six minutes is exactly what we intend to do. And we will do it in an entirely eco-friendly way.”
With a grand flourish, Eve tossed the magazine into the air behind her, barely missing Imogen’s face with its erect spine.
“Next month
Glossy
will be the very first traditional fashion monthly to go completely digital. Stories will update in real time. Want amazing coverage of the Academy Awards’ red carpet? We’re streaming it, as it happens. Want to see what Kate Middleton wore to the prince’s birthday party? We’ve got you. You have exactly fifty milliseconds to capture someone’s attention online. Our content is so good we can get someone in half that. But that isn’t what we came here to tell you. That’s not exciting. That doesn’t disrupt anything. Blogs have been doing that for years.”
At the word “disrupt,” someone shouted, “Hell yeah!”
Even though Imogen had heard Eve practice this spiel last night, it all still sounded foreign.
Glossy
’s new business model and Eve’s brainchild was a grand mission to create a perfect marriage of fashion and beauty editorial plus e-commerce. The site would essentially mirror the pages of the magazine, except all editorial would now be packed with product placement and branded content. As someone lost themselves in the arresting photographs, they were also just one click away from buying the full look.
Some of the content would still be beautifully packaged photo shoots straight from the pages of a magazine. But there were new elements. Lists, lists, lists. The whimsy-loving eighteen- to thirty-year-old demographic devoured them. The site BuzzFeed had first capitalized on that fact, and now everyone was just copying it: 11 FASHION
She started off with one of her favorite quotations from OscarWilde—“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months”—and then made one of her stock jokes: “Mr. Wilde would have to rethink his words knowing that I am allowed to reinvent it every single month.”
She usually got a few chuckles from that. Now there were only blank stares. Briefly frazzled, she looked down at her notecards and launched into her explanation of the history of
Glossy
, racking her brain for a way to win this crowd. What did she have in common with them? Who did they care about? Reading rooms was something she typically excelled at.
“I met Steve Jobs a couple of years after he released the first prototype of the iPhone,” Imogen started winging it. “He told me that it would change my life. As a late adopter of the technology I wish I had a chance to tell Mr. Jobs that it truly has. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be so talented at flinging angry birds at feral pigs.” It worked. The crowd laughed, all thanks to Alex. He had ad-libbed the joke the night before when she bemoaned having to get onstage at a tech conference: “When in doubt tell them an Angry Birds joke. They love Angry Birds.” Thank god she’d married a man who spent time defending millennial repeat offenders.
“Thank you, Imogen,” Eve said, walking in front of her, eager to replace her applause. “If Oscar Wilde were alive today he would recognize that we need to reinvent fashion about every six minutes online.”
The crowd loved that. More claps followed by hoots and hollers.
Eve pulled out the weighty September issue of
Glossy
, all 768 pages of it.
“This is a lot of paper. A lot of trees,” said Eve, who had never once expressed any kind of interest in the environment, with faux earnestness. Imogen saw former vice president Al Gore’s head nod in agreement from an offstage Skype feed apparently piped in from Antarctica.
“Reinventing fashion every six minutes is exactly what we intend to do. And we will do it in an entirely eco-friendly way.”
With a grand flourish, Eve tossed the magazine into the air behind her, barely missing Imogen’s face with its erect spine.
“Next month
Glossy
will be the very first traditional fashion monthly to go completely digital. Stories will update in real time. Want amazing coverage of the Academy Awards’ red carpet? We’re streaming it, as it happens. Want to see what Kate Middleton wore to the prince’s birthday party? We’ve got you. You have exactly fifty milliseconds to capture someone’s attention online. Our content is so good we can get someone in half that. But that isn’t what we came here to tell you. That’s not exciting. That doesn’t disrupt anything. Blogs have been doing that for years.”
At the word “disrupt,” someone shouted, “Hell yeah!”
Even though Imogen had heard Eve practice this spiel last night, it all still sounded foreign.
Glossy
’s new business model and Eve’s brainchild was a grand mission to create a perfect marriage of fashion and beauty editorial plus e-commerce. The site would essentially mirror the pages of the magazine, except all editorial would now be packed with product placement and branded content. As someone lost themselves in the arresting photographs, they were also just one click away from buying the full look.
Some of the content would still be beautifully packaged photo shoots straight from the pages of a magazine. But there were new elements. Lists, lists, lists. The whimsy-loving eighteen- to thirty-year-old demographic devoured them. The site BuzzFeed had first capitalized on that fact, and now everyone was just copying it: 11 FASHION
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