Chapter four: "Bed Checks" with Mr. Big.
Plus, "Ya gotta take the F--KING L.I.E."
Welcome to my late 90’s life, when I worked for Ron Galotti and Anna Wintour at Vogue.
If you are a new subscriber (and thank you for that!), you can catch up below on the first three issues of Core Curriculum: Everything You Need to Know I Learned at Vogue.
Chapter one: Mr. Big, “boa wearers”, and my epic Vogue makeover.
Chapter two: Beware! Judgement Zone ahead!
Chapter three: 4:00pm in the Vogue Room, alongside Anna Wintour.
If you are just joining, during my time at Vogue in my twenties, in the late 90s, I was in over my head, I knew it, and no one could make it better for me. I had to solve the situation on my own, to take the power back for myself.
So I paid close attention to everything happening around me. And through my own observations accidentally uncovered Vogue’s secret formula for success in fashion- and everything else.
In Core Curriculum, I share everything I learned at Vogue to strive, survive, and thrive.
Welcome!
Life at Vogue in the late 90s meant adjusting to publisher Ron Galotti’s strange quirks.
Ron — the real life inspiration for Sex in the City’s Mr. Big — believed that his direct reports were motivated by “fear and greed” to keep their jobs. So he paid them well. And then lorded over their entire existence to make sure they were always winning more more more advertising dollars for Vogue.
Ron placed a sign-in sheet at Vogue’s front reception desk every morning. On which everyone who worked on Condé Nast’s 12th floor had to write their name- in the exact order of their arrival to the office that day.
People arrived at dawn, hoping to be the first (second, third, or fourth) person to sign “the sheet”, and everyone who arrived after these early birds could see exactly who had beaten them into the office that morning.
There were only about fifty of us who worked on the twelfth floor, so Ron’s tracking felt very public.
[But who was the only person to beat everyone else into our office every day? Why it was Ron.]
At the gong of 9:00am every day, Ron’s assistant Renée collected “the sheet” from our front desk receptionist Silvia- and delivered it to Ron’s office for his review.
Arriving at, say, 6:30-7:00am to sign “the sheet” meant you had a shot at having your name appear in one of the top spots.
So an 8:30-8:45am arrival time obviously placed one in the category of “straggler.”
An 8:58am arrival time was duly noted, and required penance in the form of a crack-of-dawn entrance the following day. An entire week’s worth of “straggler” arrivals required making it to one of the top spots on the sheet for the entire following week (to avoid a summoning by Ron, for discussion on the subject).
Claiming a top spot inspired silent envy among one’s co-workers for the day- and the rare good word from Ron.
And Ron was famous for his 8:59am “bed checks.”
He would walk up and down our 12th floor halls, and peek his head into each individual office, to say a quick hello. This was Ron’s way of taking “attendance,” to confirm that his entire team was present and accounted for, and ready to win the day.
Yes, it did feel like being dropped back into the second grade.
And if one had a client appointment outside the office — a breakfast meeting or a business trip — it was necessary to alert Ron’s assistant no later than the night before. Missing Ron’s morning bed check, without advanced explanation, was a fireable offense.
The Lesson: You too will need to adjust to your boss’ individual quirks, so you must figure out what they are and ASAP.
Arriving extremely early was Ron’s thing, so survival at Vogue demanded that everyone within the organization follow suit accordingly.
Pinpoint the power players.
Anna Wintour held the world at her feet (and still does), which was a tremendous source of pride inside Vogue. But what was perhaps not as well known to the outside was that Ron Gallotti was Anna’s boss too.
So Ron made sure everyone on the inside knew he was in charge.
This brash bruiser certainly stood out in this most rarified of settings: Vogue’s Editorial Offices on Condé Nast’s 13th floor. Where reports soon spread of Ron’s dropping in on them unannounced to do “desk checks”.
Editorial assistants traded tales of returning to their seats to find a balding brawler standing over their desk waiting for them- without any personal introduction- demanding an explanation of their previous whereabouts. Plus the details of their Fashion Editor boss’ comings and goings too.
Just as they were (hopefully) considering a call to security to report an intruder, Ron would apparently scream at them, “Don’t you know who the F--K I am?”
[A few years before becoming Publisher of Vogue, Ron had been fired from Condé Nast Traveler, for throwing a chair at an underling in a state of rage. He enjoyed lightheartedly reminded us ongoing of this during my entire time at Vogue.]
So it took just one brush with Ron for anyone at Vogue to understand that he was in charge. And even Anna deferred to him in our presence.
The Lesson: The people who run the place, even beyond your own boss, need to be identified by little old you, oh say, immediately.
Figure out who is who, and take note of how each individual interacts with the others. And whether you like it or not, acknowledge these people as players when you are in their presence.
Make sense of silly stories.
Ron told colorful stories to make an important point.
In one of our weekly Monday evening meetings in The Vogue Room, we gathered while in the throes of selling the September Issue of Vogue.
Anna was there to walk us through a ”dummy”/in-progress copy of the magazine- a series of print layouts containing fashion and features that she would soon publish in September Vogue.
Ron, as usual, was obsessed with blowing Vogue’s advertising competition out of the water i.e. Harper’s Bazaar and Elle. So he gave us one of his many motivational talks.
Since it was summer, Ron had weekends in the Hamptons on the brain, so he drew a parallel between the different highways that one can take to get to the Hamptons. Ron likened the fashion houses, beauty companies, fashion retailers, technology brands, and all other advertisers to people getting in their cars, to best find their way to the Hamptons.
Arriving in the Hamptons was meant to signify “success” for us.
Ron told us, “You can take the Cross Island Parkway” (Elle Magazine), you can take the Northern State (Harper’s Bazaar Magazine), or you can take the Long Island Expressway (Vogue). It’s an obvious choice guys.
The L.I.E. has the most lanes, gets you there the fastest, and everyone gets to see who else is driving on it. And everybody who’s anybody knows that ya gotta take the F--KING L.I.E., to get to the Hamptons”.
The message? Go out and tell your clients not to advertise in Harper’s Bazaar or Elle, and tell them to instead put every penny of their marketing budgets into September Vogue to ensure a successful fall selling season for their fashion/beauty/retail/technology business.
Our mission was to make the world-at-large see advertising in Vogue as the super highway for maximum financial success, and elite brand association.
The Lesson: People are often not straightforward when telling direct-reports what to do.
In the situation above I sat there in the Vogue Room, wondering why Ron kept talking on and on about highways and the Hamptons. Didn’t we work for a fashion magazine?
I had to replay Ron’s words in my head multiple times, to figure out what exactly we were being told to do. Yet having finally made sense of his thoughts, they remain crystal clear to me now, and even all of these years later.
Maria Devaney graduated from Georgetown University in the 1990s, and would like to thank fellow alum Condé Montrose Nast who graduated in the 1890s, from the same institution. Maria would also like to thank Franny Nast, Condé’s aunt, for funding his college education when his parents could not. Condé went on to become President of Georgetown University’s entire student body, the same position for which (former U.S. President) Bill Clinton also ran in the late 1960s- and lost.
After Georgetown, Condé worked for a college classmate’s father in magazine publishing, then broke off on his own in 1909 to acquire an obscure society publication called Vogue- which Condé built into the media empire we know today.
“Everything You Need to Know I Learned at Vogue” began as a private letter to Maria’s (then small) daughter Margaux, and evolved into a four-year, on-campus workshop for students of The Georgetown Scholars Program (GSP) at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.