The film features Andrea (Anne Hathaway), the new assistant to Miranda
Priestly (Meryl Streep), a terrifying Wintour-esque editor of a fictional
magazine called Runway. And, as Andrea quickly learns, a lot of the pressure
of working on a glossy is to look glossy yourself, at all times. A magazine
friend of mine, after seeing the film, noted the bit "where the editor is
about to arrive and everyone is panicking and changing out of their comfy
shoes into their heels. I do that every single day!" It's not compulsory to
dress up - but you can almost hear the black marks being chalked up against
you if you don't. (I once went to work in trainers and jeans and the art
editor exclaimed dramatically, "Oh my God - what on earth's wrong?").
The onus at all times then, is to look - as Anne Hathaway does - as though
you have walked straight off the pages of the magazine. If you don't, you're
not really eligible for a job. On one high-fashion magazine, an intern who
had been working full-time for 10 months - unpaid, of course, as there is
virtually no way you will ever get a job on a magazine without a long stint
of slavery first - was turned down for a salaried position because she had
the misfortune to be a bit plain. I was told that she wasn't really their
type of girl: meaning, she didn't dress like them and she didn't look like
them so - even though she had been looking after her own set of pages for
months - they would never actually pay her to work there. Another young
woman I know of - who has since defected to the publishing world - was told
that she really should think about wearing more make-up, "because you don't
even wear foundation, do you?"
From
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1869586,00.html


Baltica

If there is a female who deserves recognition please post a paragraph about
her.

Total number of women recommended for iconic status since September 2000 = 2.

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