| A decade ago, at the end of 2009, I got laid off. Because it was the fourth round of cuts, "not my fault," and "had nothing to do with talent," I got lots of good references, a new job within a month — one that I had wanted for a couple of years! — etc, etc. But it still hurt very badly because I liked the work and thought I was good at it. Or at least I thought I was trying harder than anyone else. The next 10 years proved out that if the economy is good and I try really, really hard and I work really, really hard and I don’t give up, I succeed. The job I have now didn’t exist a decade ago; most of my colleagues from that era are no longer journalists. I stuck with it; I was rewarded. I’ve never liked the concept of luck. But now I'm in my late 30s, realizing what a lot of people smarter than me have long understood. When actual, adult life sets in — parents getting older, people having babies, divorces, mortgages — it’s not so easy to perfectly map out your course. Failure, or however you want to frame it, feels bigger when you’re older, and is bound to happen in one area of life or another. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the fashion industry. There have been dozens of brand bankruptcies and retail closures in the past decade, but this fall marked the end of two stores that were important in my professional and personal life. One was Of a Kind, an online outfit that sold an extremely specific range of accessibly priced products designed by independent brands. I met the co-founders, Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, in 2011 or 2012, and we quickly became friends. Such good friends that I haven’t written about them in years, but I often culled story ideas from their experiences. In 2015, Of a Kind was bought by home goods store Bed, Bath and Beyond, which closed it down this fall in an effort to appease activist investors. (Bed, Bath and Beyond, cultural gem it may be, has not figured how to stand up against Amazon.) Of a Kind was growing and the overhead was low, but it was small and would cost a lot of money to scale. So that was it.
Meaningful only to those of us whose lives were affected both by retailers: some of Of a Kind's products are now on sale at Barneys New York on Madison Ave, which is currently liquidating its own inventory post-bankruptcy. (The firm that is liquidating Barneys is taking advantage of its massive store footprint in order to throw off product from other places.) I started looking into Barneys’ troubles at the beginning of 2019, although I didn’t initially think bankruptcy was likely, if only because the company’s debt load was so much lower than that of many of its competitors. But Barneys had other problems, and by July it was clear that those problems would not be solvable in its current iteration. I wrote about why that was the case, but also about why I thought it was time for Barneys to go. It’s easy to make an argument that Barneys — and the dozens, maybe hundreds, of retailers drowning in debt and operating via a model that no longer works — should close. And that a store like Of a Kind, which was challenged by the same macro issues but growing in a responsible — dare I say sustainable? — way, should be spared. But the truth is that the outcome of these things is nearly impossible to predict, and definitely impossible to control. Control? Control! “You don’t have control,” Claire said on a recent podcast. She and Erica did everything they could to make it work: they built personal brands, they maintained integrity, they weren’t greedy. But sometimes, doing everything right, and working really hard, doesn’t mean you’re going to get what you think you want. The key, I've decided, is to be grateful for what you do get.
(A Bit of) What I Wrote in the 2010s:
There was so much! Some of it was bad. Most was okay. A few things were good. These are the threads I remember best. (Some of) What I Wrote in 2019: What I'm Thinking About While on Vacation: - Old Céline is still everywhere.
Who (and What) I've Loved Reading and Listening to Over the Past Year, Because the Past Decade Is Too Daunting: Editor Hall of Fame:
(A big thanks to these people.) - Leah Chernikoff at Fashionista and Elle, for always pushing further than she really needs to
- Julia Rubin at Racked for being interested in the stories others (often wrongly) overlook
- Britt Aboutaleb at Yahoo! Style for her enthusiasm and ambition
- Nicole Phelps at Style.com for giving me a chance to learn how to do a thing most fashion writers never get to do: criticize clothes!
- Meenal Mistry at the Wall Street Journal for her reliability and allergy to bullshit
- Vikram Kansara for his constant encouragement and making me a better thinker
- Imran Amed for caring so much about everything — including me!
- Dan Frommer, my proofreader, my husband, my best friend, greatest love and coworker, for having the confidence in me that I myself often lack
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