The ELLE Experience

Walking into Hearst tower, on the 57th street of Manhattan, I am stupefied.

I’m twenty-five, the editor of a major Hearst publication, and I’m elegantly ascending the 600 foot tower’s geometric glass escalator, wearing 2,000 dollar Dolce & Gabbana pumps and carrying a Prada tote.

Then someone tells me to get out of the way, and I’m shocked back to the reality where I’m nineteen and wearing my first pencil skirt on the way to my dad’s event.

I’ll take what I can get.

Earlier this year, I got exactly three minutes and 17 seconds of limelight in Elle Magazine’s video “Congressman Adam Schiff gets a Makeover from his Daughter”— found on Facebook and Twitter. The first thing to mention is probably that my dad is a member of Congress representing California’s 28th district. If you follow politics, you may have seen him on the news as the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, but if you don’t, you might have heard of “sleazy Adam Schiff” from President Trump’s twitter account (an endearing story for another time). In either case, my dad met with the former editor of Elle Magazine a while ago to discuss paying a visit to the Hearst tower to speak on our current political climate. Being a classic father, he mentioned his daughter’s interest in fashion writing, clearly, to which they responded that we should film a fun video at Elle so I could get a look around. Now, if you’ve seen the video, you probably know that it’s not exactly a résumé builder, seeing as I most closely resemble the cliché sarcastic daughter rather than a polished up-and-coming adult, but nonetheless it got me through the door of Hearst tower and valuable face time with many of the publication’s editors.

Upon arrival, my father, his staff and I were met by the editors-in-chief of Esquire, O Magazine, and Marie Claire as well as several heads of departments in those magazines and in Hearst’s general group. Starstruck as I was to be sitting with my father at the head of a table with some of the most successful people in the media and journalism industry, I tried to “play it cool,” and feign a semblance of some knowledge about the issues my dad discussed. Even though I’ve lived in the political sphere since I was two, you’d be surprised at how little of a knack for politics I’ve managed to develop. Nonetheless, sitting in a swivel chair in a room with a window for a wall, overlooking the entirety of Manhattan, I felt like I’d become Carrie Bradshaw incarnate.

In a much more real sense, it was more of a “take your child to work day,” but even still, not every daughter is lucky enough to be featured in an Elle Magazine video with their father. As much as I may make jokes at my own expense, the experience was fantastic. After my dad’s roundtable with Hearst, we were taken to a different floor of the tower, the Elle Magazine division, to film “Congressman Adam Schiff gets a Makeover from his Daughter.”

We came prepared. In this video, we had planned for me to bring several real life pieces of my dad’s go-to casual wardrobe to inform his constituents exactly who they were voting for— or in other words, expose Adam Schiff for his Abercrombie & Fitch graphic tees and millennial Nike sneakers, as picked out by my 15-year-old brother. While many of the Elle and Esquire employees who produced the video were shocked, some even in disgust, at my father’s lack of a fashion sense, the video itself testifies to the much-need transparency which journalism provides. The truth is out, and as I’ve tried to tell my dad, so are plaid flannel jackets.

“Sorry, it’s going to be a no from me Dad.”

The room the video was filmed in was fairly large and seemed to resemble a recording studio, with a big grey screen put up in the back like one you would take your class picture standing in front of. There were about two cameras pointed at us, and after every take we would fix our hair and clean the lint off the clothes, and prepare what we were going to say next using just a rough script.

The two Hearst employees featured in the video were Jay Fielden, the editor-in-chief of Esquire who popped in briefly at the end wearing the coat I told my dad to get rid of, and Nick Sullivan, the fashion director of Esquire who played a sort of “Tim Gunn role” in helping my dad choose from the line-up of Paul Stuart suits. Unfortunately, the gorgeous suits were not freebies, but later in the weekend my dad and I were able to visit the newly-renovated Paul Stuart storefront on Madison Avenue and look at more beautiful thousand-dollar suits we can’t afford.

The video took around an hour or less to film, and everyone at Elle and Esquire were unbelievably friendly and personable. Before we filmed the final segment of the video, Nick Sullivan actually explained a brief history of the pattern of one of the Paul Stuart suits, and I don’t know that I have ever been so impressed by someone’s fashion intellect— although I’m sure the british accent helped.

In totality, my day at Hearst was fantastic. Even though I felt a little like Andrea Sachs from “The Devil Wears Prada” pre-transformation, it definitely gave me a look inside the industry that I would never have had otherwise; I hope to make it back to that exquisite and prodigious tower one day, maybe without my dad this time— no offense Dad.