Jennifer Dziura writes life coaching advice weekly here on TheGloss, and career coaching advice Fridays on TheGrindstone.
It’s Fashion Week again? How often is Fashion Week? Like every 9 weeks? That’s like the gestation time of a ferret. This is ridiculous. Last time EIC Jennifer Wright apprised me that I should try to write something fashion-related, I came up with Bullish Life Fashion Week Edition: What Modeling Taught Me About Men, Money, and Life, and even Bullish: What I Learned About Business from Being a Low-Rent Model on sister site TheGrindstone.
My lifetime contributions to the fashion industry will undoubtedly be nil, despite my ownership of somewhat extreme quantities of clothing (see also Bullish: A Metaphor About Shoe Shopping That Is 100% Relevant To Hard-Nosed Business Thinking).
I wrote in Bullish Life: Gentlewomen Don’t Crash Diet about my 80/20 principle of beauty. You can achieve 80% of your maximum beauty potential in 20% of the time (exercise, wash your hair, wear some makeup that’s pretty much what you look like), but the other 20% of your maximum beauty potential will take 80% of the time (exfoliate body parts no one cares about! take fish oil capsules! soak your nails in lemon juice! lose that last 3 pounds!) I am the sort of person who routinely breaks the “Don’t wear everything the mannequin is wearing” rule (you’re supposed to buy one thing the mannequin is wearing, but then add your own spin). Fuck that! You know who dressed that mannequin? A professional. I am getting free professional advice by dressing myself exactly like that tiny headless body in the window. If it weren’t for mannequin-dressers, I never would have thought to wear a little belt over a cardigan. Sweet.
Anyway, enough about me. I did some poking around and discovered a few surprising career philosophies from the fashion world.
