The fashion director and chief fashion critic of "The New York Times" details her career path from studying history to becoming one of the most important voices in the business.Author:Tyler McCallPublish date:Apr 22, 2019Updated onApr 19, 2019In our long-running series, "How I'm Making It," we talk to people making a living in the fashion and beauty industries about how they broke in and found success.
Perhaps it wasn't the future Friedman had planned for herself, but it's worked out well for her: After a two-year stint at InStyle UK, Friedman became the first-ever fashion editor of the Financial Times in 2003, where she edited Style pages and the Luxury360 vertical, wrote a weekly column and created the paper's annual Business of Luxury conference.
I did that for three months, then I went to Vanity Fair and started working in magazines. I jumped around a lot. I mostly did culture, started writing at The New Yorker, where I went after Vanity Fair, with Tina Brown, and then went to Vogue as a contributing editor, but really wasn't doing fashion and beauty. It was mostly art stuff — same at Elle. Then I moved to London and started doing everything because I was freelancing.
But I also had to overcome [preconceived notions] — particularly because it was 2003 when I went to the FT; I was the first fashion editor they had ever had. There were lots of people who still worked there who thought it was an idiotic idea to have a fashion editor, who were shocked when we started doing reviews of fashion shows in the first section.
It was a really scary thing for me to do because I'd never done all fashion before; I knew a fair amount about it, but not that much, and I was starting something from scratch. But that turned out to be an incredible boon, because I really could invent it.
I think my vision was mostly to try and figure it out! In the beginning, it was really trying to understand the newspaper better, understand its readers and how best we could serve them, and discover all the amazing people who are here, and then to see how we could integrate fashion better throughout the paper — which is something that had happened, but I think it picked up speed and it's something I'm really proud of.
Whereas I feel like it's my job to not make it personal, but to try and understand what the designer is saying about women, in my case — men in Guy [Trebay]'s case — and their particular place in the world at this time, or where they're going and whether it's going to help them or not help them, be effective or not effective, and if it makes sense in the context of what that designer or that brand has done before and just to describe that. Those are my criteria.
I think the other side of the democratization of fashion, which is something I'm really interested in, is what it has done to the cycle of fashion, because I feel like a lot of that comes from the rise of fast fashion and mass fashion — which, in many ways, was a great thing. I genuinely believe it came from a very good place, this idea that everyone should have access to style, all the time, no matter what the price point, no matter what social caste you're in or economic strata.
In fact, one of my favorite stories that Harold Koda told me once is that they measure the decibel levels in different departments at The Met and the Costume Institute always has the highest amount of talk, because it's the one exhibit that every visitor feels they can legitimately have an opinion on, whereas Kandinsky or Renoir, they tend to stay a little quieter.