Let's talk a little bit about your career as a stylist. Tell me a little bit about some of those early days of your styling career. What was your day-to-day like?
I'll give you the short version. I always wanted to work in fashion. I loved Vogue, InStyle, Cosmo, all the magazines. I was obsessed. I would buy them every month, and I'd look at all the imagery. At the time, it was before Rachel Zoe made our job more public and more notorious about what styling actually was. I'd look at the pictures, and I knew I wanted to work and be involved in making those beautiful images, but I didn't really understand what that job actually was. While I was at university, I began to write like a crazy person to Condé Nast, which is the publishing house that has Vogue and GQ and Vanity Fair and all those magazines, and I would just write once a year to their personnel department saying I want a job. I was still at school, so I had literally nothing to offer them, but I was pretty consistent about it. I kept doing it. In my final year of university, I actually got a letter from them—which was so surprising—asking me to come in for an interview. The job itself was called media sales. I was like, "Whatever, I'm going to work at Vogue. This is the best!" Everybody at uni was like, "Oh my god, she's got a job!" I literally was going in there thinking I was going to sit there like Anna Wintour, you know. But the job actually ended up being sales, like selling advertising space. The tiny little ads that you get at the back of the magazine, which is called the classified ads, that was what the job was. I was the world's worst salesperson. But what it did do was put me in the building. I was working in Vogue House in London, and I was able to then understand what the different positions were within the magazines. I very quickly understood that I was in the wrong place. I was in the right place and the wrong place at the same time—in the publishing side when really what I wanted to be was in the editorial side. I ended up leaving that, and through a contact I made while I was working at Condé Nast, I managed to bag myself some work experience. The first place that offered me work experience was GQ magazine. It took about a year and a half, but I ended up at GQ as the work-experience girl, and then I was the intern, and then just as they were about to say, "You can't intern for us anymore," because legally it was only a six-month placement, the fashion assistant left, and they gave me her job straight away. But I was the super intern, and I would go in on the weekend to do returns. I was so eager.