I’m currently the Style Writer at InStyle.com. When people ask me what I do all day I always say I write about the things you don’t need but should buy, which is often why I’m the friend everyone insists on shopping with. Who needs a conscience when you have me telling you to just get it?
Aside from always encouraging shopping and mentally writing off all the Galliano Dior I can’t afford on my The Real Real wishlist as a business expense, I spend my days at InStyle writing about celebrity looks for Look of the Day, which is exactly what it sounds like. At one point in time I was a biology major, and I finally found a use for the math classes I never wanted to take in the first place by adding up all of the designer pieces someone like Rihanna or Hailey Bieber is wearing and comparing it to the average person’s rent. It’s not great for morale but does make a good headline. For better or for worse I now have an encyclopedic knowledge of celebrity style, which is how I notice something like Gigi Hadid wearing an unseasonable pair of Ugg boots on the exact same date in the middle of April in New York for two years in a row (yes, she did that).
I also use my job as an excuse to justify my shopping addiction by sharing what I’m currently buying or what the current ‘It’ items are, in hopes that strangers on the internet will tell me I have good taste thus justifying everything. I’m also not particularly good at keeping a secret, and I like informing everyone about the emerging designers and pieces that are about to break the internet or quite literally shatter, like Coperni’s viral glass bag.
Before that I was the founding commerce editor at Glamour.com where I was tasked with starting a shopping vertical from scratch. I’ve written about why one earring is better than two, comparing my loss of a beloved $125 gold hoop to a sticky Brooklyn dance floor to that of Kim Kardashian’s $75,000 diamond stud to the Tahitian ocean, and interviewed a handful of jewelry designers on my hypothesis. I’ve explained how hiking in Tevas makes me cry (I am a NYC native unfamiliar with the nature) but seeing Sandy Liang style her dresses with them makes me want a thousand pairs. I’ve also reported on strange trends like the prevalence of shrimp in design and how it relates to my boyfriend’s cherry allergy.
I started my career in fashion journalism at Coveteur, where I invited myself over to people’s homes (with their permission), walked through their massive walk-in closet the size of my apartment, rearranged all of their rare prized possessions for Instagramable vignettes, and asked them fifty questions about their shopping habits, under the guise of being a fashion editor. There I interviewed Stella Bugbee about why your kitchen cabinets are actually meant for Manolos and not pots, and I had Alexa Chung agree to officiate my wedding. I spent a lot of time writing up emerging designers before other outlets like fellow Queens native Colin LoCasio, fellow former math and science major Kim Shui, and fellow lovers of gold bathrooms Piotrek Panszczyk and Beckett Fogg of AREA.
Questionable fashion choices are of particular interest to me, like wearing Timothee Chalamet’s face on your body or using a pair of Acne boots as a purse. I also love talking about the way people actually interact with their closet, like Ashley Olsen’s confidence in putting her $39,000 The Row Crocodile backpack down on the NYC sidewalk in the middle of a global pandemic. I’m interested in how clothing makes us feel (even if it’s regret) and what that means, so I enjoy writing in the first person and telling people on the internet more about my life than they asked for while interrogating trends and style news. I’ve admitted in writing that the Sambas resurgence makes me so overwhelmingly nostalgic for high school soccer practice, and how my current boyfriend’s opinion on overalls nearly caused me to burn my favorite pair I own, all in the name of journalism. Oscar De La Renta also sang to my mom once too, which is worth noting as having a famous designer serenade me is a career goal I’m constantly striving towards (Donatella, your move).
Prior to being a fashion writer and editor, I mistook my life-long desire for a Pug (a dream now fulfilled) as a desire to be a veterinarian and originally double majored in Biology and English at UPenn. I wasted two years crying over molecules before deciding to pursue my other life-long dream of being a writer, which ironically involved even more crying over sentences with words (I am a Pisces). When I graduated I thought maybe I’d want to write screenplays, which is how I somehow ended up working in production design for indie films and TV pilots for two years, most notably making a “delicious” (his words, not mine) spicy pepper sandwich once for Robert DeNiro (my current career highlight, obviously).