Tales from the Back Row 1 Bloggers mastering the lame flamingo Landing a job as a full-time fashion writer was a glamorous dream I never expected to fulfill. Especially after I got fired from my first job. I was an editorial assistant at Jewcy, a website about Jewish stuff that was supposed to reach cool young people but ended up not reaching a large audience at all and shut down before being relaunched by people who could find an actual audience for the thing. My job involved sitting in a cramped office, filing invoices, and assisting someone who was sort of weird and not particularly warm. This was New Media 101, and I got the $400-a-week paycheck, benefits not included, to show for it. I''m pretty sure that even though this was the kind of real, high-value work college is supposed to groom you for, I made less than I did at my high school hostess job at a Tex-Mex chain. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who was fired from Harper''s Bazaar, once said everyone should get fired once because "it''s a great learning experience." I agree: you should get fired once because it is a great learning experience.

For instance, if you didn''t grow up buying full-price Pucci like a socialite, you might have to learn how to live on the same amount of money your employed friends spend on lattes. It also, theoretically, teaches you how not to get fired again. There''s a good chance that getting fired will be the best thing that ever happened to you. No matter how excited I''ve been to quit a job and move on to the next, I''ve always been terrified to quit. When I hostessed at that local Tex-Mex joint, the restaurant manager knew I would quit when I left for college, yet still I was nervous to tell him I was leaving. Having the unpleasant "I quit" conversation feels like telling someone, "No one likes you." So a boss asking you to leave a job--and it''s probably one you hate; most people who get fired don''t love the thing they''re getting fired from (How could you? They''re firing you!)--only saves you the extreme awkwardness of actually quitting. It also forces you to find something better as quickly as possible, instead of pussyfooting around about your job search because you''ve settled into a routine of G-chatting for six hours a day and doing work for just two, while making enough money to afford Bravo, possibly also HBO.

I was pretty lucky because after I got fired from Jewcy, I assisted, reported, and wrote five-sentence-long magazine articles as a freelancer for several months, and then New York magazine hired me to start its fashion blog, the Cut. This was the terrifying beginning of my career as a fashion journalist. I should say this job didn''t just fall from the sky and into my lap. That''s just not how opportunities work, unless you are Paris Hilton in 2005 (which is not an advisable situation anyway, since you''d have to go everywhere wearing a neon loincloth and clear stilettos). I had been running around Manhattan asking celebrities awkward questions at cocktail parties as a freelance party reporter for New York magazine. Picture a girl in T. J. Maxx trying to interrupt Elle Macpherson''s conversation in the middle of the private lounge of a $500-a-night hotel.

(Macpherson must have sensed my deep longing to interview her about summer flings, the subject of the film we were feting, because as soon as she finished with her conversation, she turned and fled.) I had been doing this for nearly a year, so New York magazine had a sense of my skills. Also, I had a competing offer to run another fashion blog, which I told them about in hopes they''d offer me a full-time job. Voilà. As soon as someone else wanted me, they decided to consider me for their top-secret fashion blogger position. Pro tip: the best way to make someone want you is to make someone else want you more. Just hours after I told my party-reporting editor about the competing offer, the editor of NYmag.com called me and said something like, "We want to start a fashion blog.

Do you want to try out to be our fashion blogger?" He may as well have asked me if, moving forward, I''d like to get around town exclusively by unicorn. Oh! Oh! Yes, I do! I do I do!!! I could not believe that I had been offered a full-time job at NYmag.com, a highly respected publication. I was so afraid of becoming a failure that to have any work, much less an absolute dream writing job at the only magazine I was dying to work for, felt unreal. Even if I would be blogging about fashion. "I would be interested in that, yes," I said into the phone using my spa voice. I happened to be rushing through SoHo to crash a friend''s midmorning kickboxing class with an expired guest pass. I felt like one of those highly enviable ladies who run around wearing yoga outfits in the middle of the day because instead of office work, they take barre class and buy kale at Whole Foods.

But now, with an audition to become New York magazine''s first fashion blogger, I turned right around and climbed back up the six flights of stairs to my apartment to hunker down with my cat and The View (poor man''s barre class) to start working. * * * At this point in my career, I felt fairly confident in my fashion knowledge because I had interviewed Tim Gunn a few times and had seen every episode of Project Runway. This--along with searching "fashion" in Google News--surely gave me the credentials I needed to complete the writing samples I had to turn in as my tryout for the role. I would later learn I knew absolutely nothing about fashion. Or blogging. But somehow, I faked my way through the interview process well enough to get a job offer. I tried to be all calm and cool about it when I got the call. "Oh, thanks so much," I said, reverting to spa voice.

"Can I think it over and call you back?" Then I called my parents to shout, "OH MY GOD I GOT IT! THE JOB EVERY GIRL WOULD KILL FOR! [INSERT MORE THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA REFERENCES]!!!!" This was a dream. The royal wedding of jobs. All those awkward celebrity encounters had finally gotten me somewhere! And also: fuck that dickhead who fired me! Something like three minutes later, I just couldn''t take it any longer and lunged toward the phone. I had this odd feeling that if I didn''t say yes it might go away. "I accept!!!" I told my future editor, now on the edge of hysteria. I''ve since learned that job offers ­aren''t like people you''ve slept with or cupcakes--they do not just disappear. I couldn''t wait to tell the people I was working with at Condé Nast Traveler, where I had recently accepted a freelance three-day-a-week job assisting the sole web editor, that I had to quit to go become NYmag.com''s first fashion blogger.

The vocally fashion-­obsessed editorial assistant who sat behind me and acted like I didn''t exist would be shocked. The glee this filled me with was almost enough to counteract the nervousness I had about my writing abilities: how was I ever going to be as good or funny every single day as the existing and enormously talented NYmag.com blogging team? I started my coveted fashion blogging job at NYmag.com in February 2008, right before Fall Fashion Week. "What an exciting time to start!" everyone said. Well, no--what a terrifying time to start. I had two days to learn everything about fashion, and blogging. I can''t even memorize a Britney Spears song in two days.

People who wrote for the internet, referred to broadly at the time as "bloggers," were just beginning to earn legitimacy in the fashion world. On January 31, 2008, the New York Times published a story about the rise of beauty bloggers, boldly stating, "the cosmetics industry has stopped seeing bloggers as bottom feeders." (Of course, this feels hilarious now that beauty vloggers are millionaires . ) The same was true for some fashion bloggers. The term can apply to all kinds of different people, many of whose worth was debated intensely. Fashion bloggers are like the global warming of the fashion industry--their impact only selectively acknowledged despite their undeniable existence. At this time, a debate was raging in the fashion industry about a blogger''s place in the industry. Did they deserve the front-row seats they had started getting? Most famously, Bryanboy sat front row at a Dolce & Gabbana show with a laptop, which really sent people into a frenzy.

But not long after that, when then thirteen-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson sat front row at the Dior Couture show (wearing a gigantic, ­view-­obstructing bow on her head, no less), the raised eyebrows turned to outright vitriol. Industry lifers couldn''t understand how a teenager could burst onto the scene with a website, a dream, and a cute outfit and be awarded status they believed it should take decades to earn. Yet, you can see how easy it is to get confused about bloggers, firstly because it''s confusing that taking photos of oneself wearing clothes now translates to, for a very lucky few, a lucrative career path. But this is only one kind of fashion blogger, for a few varieties exist: 1. Journalists who happen to write for blogs. This is my category. I''m a journalist whose medium happens to be the internet--a "blog," or "vertical" (fancy name for "section of a website that probably has its own tab at the top").