Annemarie Iverson - In Fashion: From Runway to Retail, Everything You Need to Know to Break Into the Fashion Industry

The brightest star of the fashion constellation,

Liz allowed many of us to shine in her orbit,

her sparkle, elegance, and warmth forever inside us.

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I first met Annemarie Iverson at my then-offices at 757 Fifth Avenue in the early 1990s. She was working in creative at Revlon, which held the license for my fragrance Tatiana, and had accompanied one of its suits to the meeting. For my part, I was thinking to restart my fashion company, bringing everything Id once created back together again. It was clear to me thenand I probably communicated it rather directlythat Annemarie needed to find a way to get herself out of Revlon and more directly in fashion, so to speak.

It didnt take long. A year or so later, Annemarie rode with me to my country house to interview me for a fashion feature shed started writing for New York Woman magazine. It was called In Her Closet.

Then, coming full circle a few years later, Annemarie, now the fashion and beauty news director of Harpers Bazaar, attended a fragrance launch in my then-new Twelfth Street showroom. We were both on our way.

I started doing runway shows on Sunday evenings at the start of fashion week, and Annemarie was usually there. I ran into her at the Couture in Paris one January: The very American optimist who was taking on the fashion world had married a handsome Italian banker and was pregnant with her second son.

Her path intertwined over the years with many others, as well. Through a combination of Midwestern pluck and sheer dumb luck, Annemarie has found herself in the presence of other fashion icons, people like Diana Vreeland, Jackie Onassis, Yves Saint Laurent, Liz Tilberis, and Gianni Versace. Not to mention, my peers, Calvin, Ralph, Karl, and Donna. This access bestowed on Annemarie a rich understanding of the global fashion milieu allowing her to take on in In Fashion a topic enticingly impenetrable to many: How to get your start in the Fashion Industry.

In Fashion is a chunky, humorous, insider-y, but ultimately accessible, manual that will help focus and guide the next generation of young people dreaming of entering this world. My story is embedded herehow I became a designer nearly four decades ago and how I made my return just one decade ago to become an even larger force in fashion thanks, in part, to my role as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA)but there are also the stories of window dressers (visual merchandisers), public relations people, department store fashion executives, and editorial and celebrity stylists here. Through targeted and amusing dossiers of people in these roles, Annemarie plots out lots of different career pathswhere they started and how they arrived in the world of fashion.

The point is that there is likely to be a mentor here with whom each reader can relate. Highlighted throughout are the hot twenty-first century jobs (in public relations, online fashion journalism, accessories design, visual merchandising, retail fashion management), where to go now for the best start to your career, and up to the minute advice for navigating in fashions ever-changing landscape.

In addition, Annemarie charts out the precise educational path you should follow: If you want to be Vogues next cover hairstylist, for example, there is no compelling reason to go to Harvard or Brown or the University of Geneva. If you want to be the next me, however, it wouldnt be a bad idea. While fashion is big business and involves big brands, it is also craft, handmade and artisan; at any given moment, fashion pivots around a handful of key individuals, but it also touches everyone. Fashion is everywhere, but the heart of fashion is centered in a few fashion capitals of the world. Also, while fashion itself is highly accessible today thanks to the Internet, fashion careers are not. In Fashion understands all that.

Almost every day, I receive letters from students all over the world looking to apprentice with me. I try to hire as many of them as I possibly can. The United States has this amazing institution called the internship that gives young people practical skills and something on their rsum to help them get their first job. In fact, I created the DVF studio in the Meatpacking district in Manhattan as a creative lab in which young people could learn.

But first you must know what to write and to whom to send the letter. I believe this important book will inspire and help young people do just that, to find their way or feel invited into the world of fashion: With In Fashion and your own passion, discipline, and persistence, you can find your way.

From the time I was four or five growing up in deep, dark, desolate Wisconsin, I collected those annoying blow-in cards from magazines that all arrived from the same placeNew York City. I filled Stride Rite shoeboxes with my cherished postcard-size offers from Good Housekeeping, the rare Glamour that fell into my hands, House & Garden, Mademoiselle. It was my crude attempt to connect with the fashionable world.

I found Vogue at the Port Edwards two-dryer hair salon. I used these pages to instruct my mother how to knit and sew a collection of couture Barbie doll clothes. She did so, amazingly well. I still treasure these tiny creations. Nail enamel, makeup, hair color, according to this same good conservative mother, were not for ladies. But I instinctively ignored her. I knew I belonged to a different world, one where style and color and elegance mattered, where women were fresh and sleek and well groomed all the time.

I secretly groomed my inner city girl and, eventually, found my way to that magic world of magazine chic where beauty closets bulge with (free!) lipsticks, miraculous mascaras, and weird gadgets that promise to eviscerate cellulite; where models, writers, and photographers roam the halls looking fabulous and original; where editors go click, click teetering on the most dangerous never-worn-out or soiled shoes; where fashion closets spill out the dresses and shoes and bags that are the bright new vision for next season and for how we want to look now; and where sleek publishing executives package and sell everything editors touch and photograph and write about as the latest, best, and brightest. This is a world where you, like me, might find yourself in the same room with superstars like Kate Moss, Calvin Klein, Tom Ford, Courtney Love, Hugh Grant, Sting, Madonna, and Robin Williams or legends like Yves Saint Laurent, Jackie O, Diana Vreeland, or Princess Diana, as I unexpectedly did. Strangely, the superstars inspired less awe in me than the people with and for whom I worked.

I finally did arrive at the epicenter of the magazine universe, but getting there was not easy or obvious. What has motivated me to write In Fashion? To help others as clueless and unconnected as I was find a more direct path while making sense of my twisted journey.

I have experienced more and I have done more than I knew to even expect of myself. I was wooed. Courted. Hired. Lauded. I hired, lauded, congratulated, promoted others. Early on, I was dubbed by