Real-Life Fashion Editors on Madame Alexander’s Fashion-Editor Dolls
Couture doll maker Beatrice Alexander Behrman is long gone, but her cheeky spirit lives on at her Harlem doll factory, Madame Alexander. We were recently notified of additions to the company’s collection of so-called fashion-editor dolls, pictured above, which prompted us to check in with some real-life fashion editors for a reality check. After the jump, Linda Wells, editor-in-chief of Allure, Eva Hughes, editor-in-chief of Vogue Latin America, and Cleo Glyde, style director of Marie Claire present their reviews.
intel
Jane Pratt Spurns Hagiographers, Disses AtoosaJane Pratt can’t seem to take a compliment. Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are the authors of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, a just-published 128-page mash note to the dearly departed title founded by the precocious Pratt in 1988. They sent a galley copy to Pratt and might have hoped for a few kind words. Didn’t happen. “There has been no ‘good job,’ or ‘I love the book,”” says Jesella. “She spoke to our editor. And she did have a bunch of [factual] changes that we eagerly changed. And then there were some matters of, um, opinion. Which we did not change.” But Pratt did make one thing clear when she was interviewed for the project: She — and not former Sassy intern and Seventeen topper Atoosa Rubenstein, whom the authors dub “Jane Pratt #2” — was the younger editor-in-chief. “[Pratt] would note that she was only 24 and Atoosa was, what, 26?” said Meltzer. And another onetime Sassy editor is quoted noting that Rubenstein “was rejected for every position” she applied for at Sassy. Now you know. —Emma Pearse
in other news
Forget the Columbia Course; Aspiring Editors Should Work on FarmsVenerable Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon received major treatment in The Oregonian last week (sorry for the delay, but it is Oregon, after all), and the mildly fawning look at the boot-shod margin-scribbler and his high-toned stable of writers and friends — Sonny Mehta, Gay Talese, T.C. Boyle, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney — duly documents his rise from a childhood on a mink farm to publishing powerhouse. The editor is famously beloved by his writers, and the profile kicks off as Fisketjon receives the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for “discovering, nurturing and championing writers of fiction” and then goes on to make much of the fact that a simple farm boy has risen to become heir to that famous editor. Here’s a brief Oregonian description of those early days:
The mink ranch always came first. It was labor-intensive, and Fisketjon was the laborer from the time he was 4, feeding, checking and cleaning up after hundreds of aggressive animals that love to eat and bite the hand that feeds them.
“It was hard work,” Fisketjon says. “Our ranch bordered on a park, and I remember looking out and watching my friends play while I was shoveling mink [manure].”
Nurturing a pack of needy animals, trying to keep them from biting the hand that feeds them, shoveling their shit endlessly. Shocking he works well with writers (and with Sonny Mehta), ain’t it?
Is Gary Fisketjon the Best Editor in America? [Oregonian]