Some time in the aughts, I made a hard and fast rule for myself: no more service journalism. Now, I’m suddenly back at it for New York Magazine’s The Strategist section, and I’m really enjoying the gig—and feeling good about it.
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Back in the 2000s, I was trying to establish myself as more of a serious journalist, the kind who covered important issues like gentrification and green-washing, and also as a personal essayist.
Before that, I’d spent much of my career saying “yes” to whatever assignments came my way in order to stay afloat, and to keep myself on editors’ lists. Frequently that meant writing about fashion, health, beauty, and home furnishings in a way designed to help readers decide which brands to buy products and services from.
I felt embarrassed by that work, and ashamed that those were the kids of assignments I was mostly offered, especially when I did them for women’s magazines with retrograde names like Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal.
It felt shallow to me, and too closely tied to my work writing for trade publications such as Body Fashions/Intimate Apparel, Women’s Wear Daily (WWD), Home Furnishings Network, The Daily News Record (the menswear version of WWD), Fashion Jewelry Plus!, Accessories Magazine, and others—a nine-year rut I’d gotten myself stuck in from 1987 to 1996.
As a reporter on the accessories beat, my first of several jobs at WWD, I sometimes got to write in-depth investigations of issues like the proliferation of counterfeit accessories sold on the streets—reporting on who was making and selling them, how luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Rolex were fighting back, and how law enforcement was handling the matter. Those were satisfying to work on. They felt like they mattered.
But more often than not, I was tasked with writing “In the Markets” reports on what styles of things manufacturers were featuring for the next season. The shorthand we used in the office was “ITM.” As in, “Sari, for next week, can you do an ‘ITM’ on some of the accessories firms now producing vests?” Et voila:
For those pieces I’d ride the subway from Union Square (WWD was on East 12th Street back then) into “the market,” aka the accessories district in Manhattan, which, at least in the late 80s when I started at WWD, was along Sixth Avenue in the 30s, just east of the regular garment district on Seventh Avenue. There, I’d visit the offices of various brands, talk with their media reps, and pick up their samples that fit into whatever trend I was covering.
While I was in the neighborhood, I’d probably also hit up a sample sale that I’d read about in Elysa Lazar’s The S&B Report and waste my hard earned money on whatever was the least ugly, most affordable item on offer. There was something about taking cash out of an ATM, then putting yourself in a room filled floor-to-ceiling with “bargains” that made you feel like you had to leave with something.
Then I’d head back to the office and deliver the samples to the art department, where veteran illustrators like Steven Stipelman, Robert Passantino, and in this case Robert Melendez, would draw renderings of one or more of those pieces.
I found those assignments tedious, and also meaningless. I gathered that industry people reading the paper might have gotten some ideas from them about coming trends. But their greater function seemed to be placating the brands that were covered, who sometimes advertised. I hated that.
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In the early aughts, I found a way to merge service journalism with memoiristic writing. I reached out to an old WWD colleague who was now the Editor-in-Chief of Time Out NY, and I pitched her some reported personal essays. I’d tell a little bit of my own story, then bring in the voices others with related stories, around a topic for which there were products or services available. I wound up writing a number of these for the magazine’s “Chill Out” section.
I enjoyed working on those pieces, and was much prouder of them than say, the article I wrote for Women’s Health magazine about clever dieting tricks like placing lower calorie foods in the front of your fridge and cabinets so that they’d be easier to grab. I was sad when that gig ended, after Time Out became more of just an entertainment listings rag.
Soon afterward, New York Magazine revamped service journalism, and made it more compelling and useful. I credit my talented former WWD colleague and dear friend Janet Ozzard with the first phase of that. She was an editor there, and I don’t think they were calling the section The Strategist yet, but it was the same idea. She and her team made the magazine’s fashion, beauty, and home furnishings coverage so appealing, I’d pore over it, online and in print. They reframed service journalism as a kind of problem-solving, and that made it seem, at least to me, so much more respectable and valuable.
Janet gave me a few assignments when she was there—for example, a roundup of fashionable bras for markedly busty women like me, who wanted prettier underthings than the utilitarian harnesses that once dominated that part of the market. It was a chance to disseminate helpful information that I, and people like me, could use, and I felt very good about it. (And it tapped some of the knowledge I’d accrued at Body Fashions/Intimate Apparel, the first publication I worked at when I was just out of college.) That work shifted my attitude about service journalism, at least for outlets like New York.
And so I was happy when Ailbhe Malone, an editor at The Strategist, reached out to me last winter to see if I was interested in writing some pieces for that section. The angle she was interested in was which things, in any particular category, appealed to me now that I’m living in a 60-year-old (wrinkly, lumpy, arthritic, [although she didn’t say those things]) body, and also trying to finally learn to dress like a grownup. Basically, the Oldster angle.
It was another opportunity for me to merge personal essay writing with reporting from a more practical angle, a mix I can now really get with. And because I’m encouraged by my editors to be truthful about what works and what doesn’t in the products I try, I don’t ever feel like I’m shilling.
So far I’ve written about:
I’ve got a couple of other pieces in the works for them, and I hope I get to keep going with this. I really like this gig. And I’m glad I changed my mind about this type of writing.
Where to find my other work:
Thanks for this explanation of your article writing history, riveting. I’ve loved your Strategist pieces.
Your sneakers story spoke to me, a non-athlete still carrying trauma from PE classes. I kid you not—40+ years later, my stomach is starting to spasm just thinking about it.