I was distantly acquainted with some of that crowd, and there was an incentive from editors at the time to be provocatively glib because the conflict and outrage sold papers, when those were still a thing. Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write. Internationally, Toronto was a relative backwater full of people who had come from other relative backwaters to reinvent themselves in the reflected images of magazine covers. The article in question was written by someone trying to become the reflection they saw. This was in a time when Sex in the City represented feminine success, and many women I knew would follow magazine and newspaper columnists as a kind of rage-read, and I think they related to those figures in fairly complex ways. Vogue at the time functioned as a kind of ministry of desire that told women what they wanted. However, that no one seems to have written critically about this doesn't so much ignore a decade when womens' media dominated the culture, as it mercifully overlooks its excesses. Having known several fashion editors and writers, their craft is a narrative of cohering symbols of power and desire, and the art is walking a tightrope above a pit of firey cringe. This article was definitely one of those cringe-hell fails that wise old-timers use to scare interns over drinks.
If you took the series Mad Men from the 1960s era, transplanted it to the late 90's and made it about women working at fashion magazines and relegated to the style sections of newspapers, you would get a fairly nuanced view of how, like we take for granted the influence of advertisers on our thinking, we might also understand what the women shaping narratives of desire in the 90s did. Terrible article, but maybe enough time has passed to look at what all that really was.
What, are you just making this up?
This has got much worse, and spread to politics and public life as a whole.
People experience shock in various ways and not everyone tries to make everything directly about whatever is happening; most of America at least pretended to plug away at their jobs that day.
Someone who survived being stabbed multiple times during a robbery told me, at the time, they didn't even know they'd been stabbed until they got home. I think it had been dark (possibly pitch black), amongst other things.
So yeah it's possible to go back to major historical events and find immediate responses that don't age well. I would argue it's not worth dredging up decades later with an eye toward public persecution - which is front of mind in any twitter thread.
There are so, so many accounts of 9/11 that focus on the facts and the immediate tragedy. But I'm willing to bet that 9/11 impacted industries and people significantly even if they weren't directly involved.
I have little to no interest in fashion, but I'd find an article on the impact of 9/11 on the fashion capital of North America a much more interesting read than another collection of facts.
She just didn't care. Her focus was on the fun events that she had planned to attend and absolutely nothing else.
> so bad at her job
Her job was as a fashion journalist. Not a news reporter, not a war correspondent, not somebody who was remotely trained or prepared to deal with a situation like this. How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bosses saying "hey, you're an IT person, can't you just do (this thing that is not remotely related to your skill set)".
It's irrelevant whether you or anyone else here thinks fashion is valuable, or interesting, or worth writing about. It is relevant to question whether all "journalists" are, or should be, interchangeable in the eyes of people working in a completely unrelated profession.
Falling back to ingrained habits is quite a normal response to stress. It also is part of why after an emergency landing aircraft passengers may pick up their luggage before getting out of the plane.
I think that also could explain the martini drinking in the limo. That might be the ‘program’ fashion journalists always run when in long limo rides.
As to the entire article: It’s not brilliant writing, but she mentions what she did, show some compassion with the victims, realizes that he drinking wasn’t very appropriate, and concludes that fashion may never be the same.
I don’t see that as being reason to vilify her.
That may even have been the brief she got from her editor.
There's plenty to say about the impact on fashion in the wake of 9/11, but there's nothing really to say regarding the day of the attack itself. I don't think that the fashion of the victims in the hospital would have been an insightful thing to write about.
She doesn't write about the fashion of the victims at all. Rather she talks about about the trauma. She talks about how the delays for fashions show. Hints at controversy with some designers dropping out and hosting their own releases.
She's writing this article on September 20 so it's not like she can talk about long term effects either.
Edit: Reread your comment and I realized I misunderstood. I think we're in agreement that there wasn't any immediate effects to the fashion industry that she could write about. Although... Now I'm curious what the long term impacts actually were
In my mind it's interchangable whether that report on Ukraine counts as world news, war, current affairs, or politics. I assumed this was the 'journalist' skill set in action.
But perhaps being fashion editor is no better a current affairs reporter than the crossword setter or cartoonist would be.
I do think it's an interesting case in the level of acceptability in the actions and admissions of semi-public figures like journalists. Today there's lots of commotion about people posting their hot takes on the Queen's death, a lot of which obviously regrettable. There's lots of events over the last few years point to a high level of self and contextual awareness being necessary to keep your job in semi-public roles.
Yet, in 2001, days after September 11, you have a journalist that published, after I presume being edited and approved by multiple other people at the paper, about celebrating with Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo ride driving away from the terrorist event (I'm I reading that right?). And nobody during the editing process thought, hey, this is a pretty inappropriate thing to publish?
Such a completely different world.
The reporter could've left out that they were toasting Sour Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo, but she didn't, so we know they weren't somberly drinking from whiskey bottles. That might be the craziest part to me. They could've not included the limo ride or passed it off as something else, but it's explicitly pumped up as something luxurious.
To an extent I agree with you but as one tweet in the thread notes she sat in a hospital and spoke to survivors but didn't actually recount any of their stories. That feels like kind of a journalistic failure to me.
But this is the wiki entry: “Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[11] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet "the alcohol" is universally accepted as good grammar.[12]”
