There’s an interesting post on the Beauty Banquet blog about Bitchy Fashion, where Anne shares examples of fashion snobs. And apparently, the way that the fashion industry is portrayed in the movie The Devil Wears Prada isn’t far from the truth.
I’ve never really been involved in the fashion industry so I can’t comment on that. However I have come across other industries or specific companies where the general attitude of workers within that industry/company was not something I felt comfortable around.
In one instance, I was writing freelance articles for a popular women’s magazine. When speaking with an editor one day, I told her about the bad day I’d been having. It was one of those days where one thing after another goes unbelievably wrong… like something out of a comedy show. I wasn’t telling her because I wanted to whinge… I was telling her because in hindsight (late that afternoon), it was hilarious! So funny in fact that she wanted me to write about it.
However, she wanted me to add this and change that… but it was still to be portrayed as a ‘real-life, true story’. Some of the things she wanted me to say I’d done were things I would never, ever do. When I mentioned that, her response was that “…you should never let the truth get in the way of a good article.”
Well, that sort of summed up my experience with them. I was trying to report ‘the facts’, yet they were constantly asking me to exaggerate and push the boundaries of ‘truth’. I never wrote that story… and I never wrote anything else for them. I decided that I couldn’t lie for the sake of readership. Creative writing would be a different story (pardon the pun), but when reporting facts, I want to stick to the facts.
Although writing for this magazine would look good on my resume, I wasn’t prepared to fit in with the general mentality of the staff that I dealt with. I sometimes wonder… if I had kept writing for them, would I have begun to adopt their attitudes? I think probably not. Knowing me, I suspect that I would have been the quiet rebel… the one who tried to show everyone else at that company that integrity and honesty will work wonders too.
Whatever industry you’re in… here’s to your success in business,
Donna-Marie
