My Career So Far

Mapping my career in fashion from being a baby intern until now

Friday was my last day at Tory Burch. For the past 3.5 years I’ve been working full time as the head of influencer marketing while being a full time influencer myself. As I step away from the role, I’m feeling sentimental reflecting on how things have turned out 100% better than I could have ever dreamed for myself when I moved to New York City 13 years ago. It’s been a really long journey — some experiences being pivotal to my growth and some so bad that I have tried to shake them off and not let them change the way I view the industry. So here’s a brief history of how I got here - from the very beginning!!!!

The Very Beginning

I came to New York City from Indiana to go to school at Parsons the New School for Design with lots of “big” ideas for my life here. I would have a group of girl friends like in Sex and the City. I would intern/assist a famous fashion designer like Jenny in Gossip Girl. And I would work at a fashion magazine and wear slip dresses with a trench coat and kitten heels like in 13 Going On 30 (my favorite movie). But once I actually got here I struggled to make friends and find my place. Every day I felt emotionally drained trying to process everything I saw in the city — it was very overstimulating compared to the suburbs so I distracted myself by working. By the second semester of my freshman year, I stacked all of my seminars and studio classes into two days from 9 AM - 10 PM so that I was a more appealing candidate when I applied for internships. I got my first internship at Valentino as a showroom intern not having a clue what it meant. What it meant is sitting in the back of a closet steaming clothes and dressing models for press previews and private very important clients. The internship was a blur. My memories were: getting locked in the stairwell on my first day and crying in that same stairwell when my manager asked me to change because I wore a skort which was considered unprofessional. I witnessed two girls (who were my age) spend thousands of dollars in personal orders on the upcoming Valentino collection. I finished those months of interning with no new insights except that I definitely did not want to be a showroom intern again. I moved on to an internship at Karla Otto. More familiar with what to expect, I was comfortable and made my first friends through the camaraderie of how ridiculous our tasks were. We would stay at the office until 10 PM cleaning the walls with magic eraser and we were constantly getting yelled at by WorldNet and FedEx because we would beg them to wait as we taped up boxes of samples that needed to be overnighted to an extremely urgent important shoot. Everything was always code red #1 priority panic.

In the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I began assisting various stylists. It was similar to my internship at Karla Otto in that everything was an emergency, we were always stressed trying to secure looks from designers. Oftentimes the super super priority looks that we begged for were edited out in seconds and sometimes we would call looks in just to fill the rack so that optically “it looks better” when we’re on set. I loved being on set for shoots and seeing how the photographer, make-up artist, stylist, models all worked together (and their many different personalities) so I started looking at the mastheads of magazines. After many emails to many publications, I finally got a response from an editor at NYLON Magazine.

my NYLON internship ♡

When I reflect on my career trajectory I can pinpoint this internship and working for Marissa Smith, the fashion editor, as one of the pivotal moments of my career. I believe that our first bosses set the tone for how we eventually manage our own team and set the expectations for what kind of conduct is normalized for the rest of our careers. The fashion industry in particular isn’t always the most generous when it comes to sharing information or bringing up the next generation so I still feel incredibly lucky for my experience at NYLON and the team that showed my younger self that it’s possible to be really cool, clever, and nice. Marissa mentored me even after my internship ended. It was an incredibly empowering feeling knowing that someone you respect and admire is willing to stand in your corner when you’re starting off in the industry with essentially nothing. It gave me the confidence and motivation I needed to continue putting myself out there.

After NYLON, I interned at Harper’s Bazaar in the fashion closet. We packed trunks and did “market research” which just means going through every current season fashion show and printing all of the looks with trench coats (for example) for the editors to review. My most vivid memory from this internship is getting kicked out of the fashion director’s office for pronouncing Loewe incorrectly (I had no idea and took a wild guess and said lew-way). I was so embarrassed and humiliated.

My First Job

My senior year of college, Marissa introduced me to Bethie Girmai, the style editor at Refinery29. While working as an intern on the styling team I also began assisting the fashion editorial team, writing and building articles in my free time. In 2016, it was one of the coolest places to work — everyone was young and the energy was optimistic. Refinery29 was leading the digital media landscape and had also just launched 29Rooms, an experiential space with Instagrammable rooms in Brooklyn. I knew I wanted to land a full-time job there by the time I graduated, but when my internship ended there weren’t any open positions. Feeling defeated, I went to LA to hike with my dad. I think about this hike a lot because I wasn’t sure how the news would be received and I felt ashamed of myself for not having something lined up. But he was understanding and supportive, assuring me while we hiked through the Sierra Nevada mountains that things would work out and to keep pushing ahead. He sensed that I was already giving myself a hard time so there was no need to add on to it. I’ve turned to my dad many times in my career since then, usually when I’ve felt lost and need a new perspective.

Refinery29 era Michelle

By some luck, things actually did work out! I came back to New York City and joined Refinery29 as a freelance social assistant. It wasn’t exactly the role I wanted but I just needed to get my foot in the door. I struggled in the job — fielding annoyed text messages at 11 PM because I forgot to add a period to the caption of the latest post and sometimes absentmindedly posting my own content on the R29 feed. I wasn’t very good ☹. I continued to write on the side for the editorial team and after 1.5 years a position opened and I moved over to the fashion team.

Working Woman

As the Associate Fashion Market Editor at Refinery29, I felt that I was finally making a move towards my dream. The job was demanding — our quotas required us to write at least 2 articles a day. Digital media was constantly shifting with new priorities and strategies and I saw colleagues get laid off every single year as budgets diminished. Driven by the constant anxiety and fear of losing my job, I tried to find skills that would make me irreplaceable. I wrote a column about trying various trends for a week with original photography shot by my then finance boyfriend with a DSLR camera that we borrowed and definitely did not know how to use.

I left Refinery29 after 4 years to work at Teen Vogue as the Fashion and Beauty Editor. Lindsay Peoples was the new editor-in-chief and the magazine was entering a new era. I shed the mindset of being an intern/assistant and began to feel more comfortable asserting my own personal style and voice in my writing. Thanks to Lindsay’s trust, my work finally reflected my perspective and I gained the confidence to try new ideas. I began pitching, styling, and writing a beauty and fashion story every month. Once we batched two shoots in one day since budgets were nonexistent. Starting uptown we shot a story about color blocking and then at sunset, we piled into a tiny boat with just the photographer and model and shot another story about evening dresses. I also loved this knitwear story I styled and wrote where we ran around Prospect Park with the models, changing looks on-the-go. These shoots were so much fun and were proof that sometimes you don’t need a huge production to make something amazing. I learned what it takes to actually execute an idea.

me as the Teen Vogue Fashion & Beauty Editor

During the pandemic, Lindsay left to helm The Cut and there was a controversy around her replacement and some mildly racist Asian tweets from 2011. Being one of the only Asian staffers, I felt the pressure to say something even though I really didn’t know what to say or where I stood. I had mixed emotions and was more disturbed by how Conde Nast’s leadership handled the situation. I no longer felt the inspiration and excitement for the new vision for Teen Vogue and I knew it was time to leave.

Working 9-5! Corporate!

At the end of 2022, I went back into the office and started my position at Tory Burch. Similar to my role at Teen Vogue, I had a lot of freedom to build something new and own the influencer program. I was casting, producing and art directing social shoots with influencers, and concepting dinners and trips. I loved strategizing and thinking through how to optimize content capture at events, the biggest being the fashion show where we launched a series of franchises that we successfully re-created every season. We were tasked with balancing marketing priorities with building a narrative that positioned Tory Burch as younger, cooler, and more culturally relevant through casting and social. While cleaning out my desk last week, I found relics from the beginning of our influencer program: The Connect Four from our first trip upstate, holiday wrapping paper from our shoot with Nara Smith and Orion Carloto where we made in-store content actually engaging, sunglasses from our St. Tropez trip where I was in a complete state of chaos for four days stressing over content capture and coordinating the logistics. We also launched an annual Friendsgiving with a White Elephant gifting that was scaled globally across Europe and Asia. And an annual lunch inspired by the Romy bag with an intimate group of writers, chefs, and artists that was also scaled globally across Europe and Asia.

I feel so much pride looking back at everything I’ve done during my time at Tory Burch — I jumped into the role not knowing much about marketing strategies, metrics, etc and learned how things worked along the way. I gained a new confidence in myself and gathered enough information to form a new dream and vision.

working 9 to 5

Next Stop

I finally felt ready to leave Tory Burch when I realized I am burnt out creatively. I’m so focused on just finishing the tasks that I don’t know how to even enjoy them anymore. I miss the blank quiet time where I could just let my mind wander. I’m realizing that my idea of success has changed since I started in this industry. As much as I still want the big title and validation from the industry that I’m useful and smart, success now means freedom. To work on my own schedule and be curious and try things without the pressure of monetizing it.

I’m ready to explore and have decided to take the rest of the year to learn the things that I told myself I didn’t have time for while working at Tory Burch. I’m taking a 10 week color theory course and bought colored pencils so that I can learn to draw. I started fermenting my own sweet rice and it’s delicious. I’m running and playing tennis again. I feel inspired to learn more about shooting video and color grading. I need fix my film cameras. I have a growing list of movies I want to watch. I finally feel like the sky is big and open for me to just see what happens 𓆉 Thank you!!!