Reporter’s Notebook: Intern Inside Fashion Week

By DEANNA NUCCI

One of New York Cities most anticipated and largest events of the year, Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, attracts designers and brands from all over the world, presenting this year’s fall fashions to buyers and the media.

Fashion Week , launched Feb. 12,  is the ideal platform for designers to showcase  versions of the latest trends, not to mention the immense amount of work that goes into making this event happen.

Models and designers take the cake for having some of the craziest hours and stressful of works days during the week. However, in a media event this large, you cannot forget us interns who are hired for doing the jobs that most people don’t have time for.

Although interns as emphasized by Leslie Yazel, WSJ’s Personal Journal Deputy Editor, are “assistants to the assistants to the assistants.” I had a taste of what she meant in saying this when I interned myself for The Royal Obsession Magazine during this years New York City fashion week.

A great part of the job required interns be on call at all times. When the editor sends you out to report, you may be 20, 30, or 40 blocks from where you are supposed to be next,  but you better make it there at your given time.

Sadie, a fellow TRO magazine reporter who only identified herself by her first name, said that “you do have to wake up really early and stay out really late, when you are sent to an after party at a nightclub, but I am used to it because I am also a bartender, and it is kind of the same hours.”

Unlike Sadie, those of us who were not used to being awake at, say 3:15 a.m., and being on your feet until 2 a.m. the next day, felt the pressures of street reporting for the magazine.

Interns succumb to all sorts of pressure when signing up for the job. If you have never seen the Devil Wears Prada, I recommend you do, to get a full experience of the life of an assistant. Although, Andrea Sachs was a paid assistant to her editor Miranda Priestly, the coffee-jolted, errand runner is a good depiction.

As for the life of an intern may not seem to be glamorous, the perks are definitely worth it. At the Lincoln Center, I witnessed a taping of E-News,  met a few celebrities and designers, and I was able to enjoy a few minutes of the shows in between interviews.

As an intern for TRO magazine, I was required to do mostly street-like reporting outside the Lincoln Center, and other studios hosting shows. The week of the 12th proved to be one of the coldest of this years winter, hands shaking, snow falling, all while stopping fashionistas who had traveled from all over the world, in their tracks and get their 101 in personal style.

There was definitely pressure to look fabulous during the week. I will admit it was very hard to do that in the very freezing 15 degree weather.

Sadie and I had agreed that we wanted to look presentable, but not in a way that was too simple because we were going to be around a lot of celebrities, editors, and future employers. Unlike we reporters, who were told to dress as stylish and professional as possible, many interns face very strict restrictions given on what you can and cannot wear.

Other restrictions include who you can and cannot communicate with, where to stand or where not too, and guidelines on what buildings you are allowed to enter. The latter posed to be our biggest struggle as reporters without media access. Many a time we were turned down because video footage was not permitted in certain areas and there were harsh restrictions.

A reporter who identified herself as Krissy,  noted that “as reporters we have to be a little feisty. When I doubted if I could report in a certain area, I did until someone told me not to. That is what being a reporter is all about, and believe it or not I got some of my best interviews in those places.”

I agree with Krissy’s attitude, in that being an intern is all about proving you are hungry enough for the job, that afterwards you may be hired. Interns mustn’t be unaccredited for all the work that they do complete.

As a reporter I may not have been in the prettiest or warmest scenarios, but interns like me are responsible and deserved credit for some of the most tedious of jobs.

Whether it was that an intern was cleaning, rushing, freezing, and running on a sixty-minute nap, without their work and drive these tasks would never be completed and able to make a production.