A Night of Hellish Debauchery During Milan Fashion Week
Hitchhiking, fist fights, and a boss three sheets to the wind—this is Anthony's Fashion Horror Story.
The fashion industry is known for its volatile creatives and unshakable self-seriousness. If you ask anyone who’s worked in fashion or at a magazine if it’s like The Devil Wears Prada, they will likely tell you that’s a G-rated shadow of their lived experience. With our generation’s waning patience with abusive workplaces and megalomaniac bosses, these stories from our collective past are taking on a new light. Often dismissed flippantly as part of “paying our dues,” fashion veterans and current employees alike are re-examining their experiences with newfound clarity. Somehow, even in this relatively progressive era we’ve entered, the fashion industry remains one of the last bastions of unchecked and wildly inappropriate behavior. From former fashion interns to magazine assistants to models, we’re compiling an oral history of fashion workplace experiences in the series "Fashion Horror Stories."
In our fourth installment of "Fashion Horror Stories," we sit down with Anthony, who worked for two popular magazines in the early aughts. From debauched Fashion Week nights in Milan to magazine bosses from hell in New York City, here is Anthony’s story:
How would you describe the work environment in fashion in the early 2000s?
“Back then, being in fashion was all about endurance. How well can you keep your alcohol? How do you use drugs to combat the effects of alcohol? How much coke can you do if you start to black out so you’re able to walk out of the place you’re in? And, on an average day, how much verbal abuse can you take before breaking? I do not mean the entire fashion industry of course, but certainly the circles I operated in.”
What examples do you have of this behavior in action?
“I have a story that touches on all of that—it all took place in one night in Milan during fashion week.
“Back when Milan used to have all the shows, your day would start at 8 a.m. and go for a full 24 hours. I was working for a magazine at the time, and we were invited to a dinner by a fashion brand client (I can’t mention the name). The dinner was at a family-owned restaurant that was a legendary go-to place post-shows. It was a very long, arduous dinner, as per usual. You’re sitting there jet-lagged for about five hours. Everyone at the dinner was drinking and also on pills. We would share pills—mostly downers like Xanax, Valium, and painkillers. Half the people were doing coke and were constantly migrating to the bathroom. At the time, I was a giant abuser of alcohol. There were huge carafes of limoncello in front of us, and I’m not kidding, I drank four of them—not because I wanted to, but really because if I did not, I would pass out. The drug and alcohol use was so over the top that somebody, one evening, passed out at the table, and her face landed in an arugula salad. She lay in it for so long that it left leaf marks on her face when she finally came out of her blackout.”
Did anyone check on her?
“People would poke her or say, ‘Oh, she’s really tired.’ She wasn’t tired. She passed out on a salad.
Oh my god.
“The next thing I remember was this entrée that came out—some giant white baked fish the owner’s daughter made and insisted on serving to me herself. Like she REALLY made a point of presenting it to me with such pride. At that point, I’d had all four carafes of limoncello, some wine, and two kamikazes. I looked down at the sizzling big fish with its eyeballs bulging out of its socket, and then I smelled it—I immediately got up and ran to the bathroom to throw up.
“We ended up leaving the dinner shortly after. As we were walking out of the restaurant, somebody smashed the door in a client’s face. It almost broke her nose—there was blood coming out, and it was swelling up fast, so you could tell she was going to have a black eye. She said she was going back to the hotel, and everyone said, ‘Okay, bye!’ and just left her there.
“The next party was at a man’s apartment, and the floor was lucite, so it was completely transparent. If you were on the ground level, you could look up and see everything upstairs—up women’s dresses, people doing coke off the floor, everything.
“The next destination was a party at an airplane hangar, which was an hour and a half outside of Milan. Everyone was there, and the party was out of control. It was in the summer and seething hot. People were shooting each other with water guns, and everyone was soaked with water, sweat, and alcohol. I had to leave to meet up with my boss from hell—this was before cell phones were more ubiquitous, so I had to find a way to get from the airplane hangar to some stupid fucking disco in the outskirts of Milan. The other people I knew left without me, so I had to hitchhike.
“I ended up getting picked up by a man who had a thick accent and his Italian was worse than mine. He spoke no English. The ride was terrifying. He kept pulling over to the side of the road to do coke off a cassette case. He was chopping it up with a credit card and snorting it with rolled-up Lira while trying to stick his hands down my pants.”
How did you get out of that?
“I ended up having him drive me to my hotel—the only way he would bring me to Milan is if I gave some indication that there was a possibility I would invite him to my room. It was about three o’clock in the morning, and I was heavily under the influence, and very vulnerable. When he pulled up the U-shaped driveway of the Principe, I ran into the hotel, called security, and said, ‘Get that guy!’ I made it up to my room after that.
“The Principe used to be the place everyone stayed during Fashion Week—before the owner (Sultan of Brunei) came under fire for making homophobic remarks—but at the time, the magazine had booked the entire floor. One of our visiting clients was staying on the same floor, and she was the single worst influence on somebody like me because she drank as much as I did and somehow had more endurance, which is scary. When she heard my door open, she came waddling out of her room in a bluish-green, velvet mumu nightgown with a giant red taffeta head wrap. She said, ‘Anthony, Anthony, I didn’t know you were back! I’m going to be right over.’ I was like, ‘Fuck. Get me out of here before she gets over because I’m never getting rid of her.’
“She comes in, and we end up smoking pot and drinking champagne. At this point, it was about 4:15 or 4:30, and I knew I had to get to my boss. He was such a nightmare that I knew if I didn’t go, I would probably get screamed at for days, and he would never forget about it. I knew I had to get to that party before he left. Thankfully, the mumu woman passed out against my wall, turban and everything, and a cigarette burned almost all the way down with ashes all over herself. She was snoring, so that was my sign to slip out.
“I got a cab to the other place by five in the morning. My boss was dancing with these two women dressed almost exactly alike. They both had shaved heads and were chained together with one’s nose ring connected to the other’s lip ring. They would walk arm in arm to make sure someone didn't separate them. My boss, who is a gay man, was flirting with them, which was perplexing. I could tell he was agitating them with his advances, so I kept trying to separate them and apologize to the women. My boss started screaming at me, ‘You always ruin everything! Why do you have to ruin everything? Every time you show up, you ruin all the fun, fucker!’
“With my three-year-old level of Italian, I was able to talk to the women, and they told me they’d almost started a fight with him. One of them had a pocket knife, and she said she would stick him with it if he tried anything else. Lo and behold, he comes back and starts getting all over them again. The women started hitting and punching him while keeping their heads close together because the chain between their heads wasn’t very long. They pummeled him until I got him outside to the parking lot. He had no idea where he was—I didn’t know what drugs, if any, he had taken then, but I could tell his sense of space, time, and clearly, any social graces had been gone for hours.
“Back at the hotel, I got my boss up to our floor, and I couldn’t quite get him down the hall to his room, so I was like, ‘Fuck it, you’re sleeping on my floor, and when you wake up tomorrow, you’re going to have a real big headache.’ I opened the door to my room and totally forgot about the mumu woman who was passed out against the wall. I could tell she had woken up several times because there were new drugs and cigarettes out—one had rolled out of her fingers and burned a cigarette shape into the carpet. I put my boss on the floor beside her, put a pillow under his head, and went to bed. My wake-up call was at 8:30.”
It’s interesting, I’ve interviewed enough people for this series that there’s a pattern with these bosses. These unhinged, verbally abusive bosses go from being total tyrants in the office to drugged-up, unhinged babies at these parties. In those moments, there’s a sort of role reversal where you suddenly need to take care of them—mostly because you’re afraid. You find yourself caring for these out-of-control fascist babies, and the power dynamic gets subverted. Boundaries disappear, and there’s this bizarre combination of fear and fucked-up intimacy.
“It was exactly that. Everything that happened in that one night, there were pieces happening every day. So many people were abusive, and it would never fly now. At the time, I didn’t even know it was abuse because it pre-dated the conversations people have now. Back then, people were just acting ‘outrageously’ or were ‘really hard on their staff.’ We didn’t have words to call them what they were: a psychotic fucking narcissist.”
How did you get out of this dynamic with him?
“I got recruited by another magazine and left—that next job is another Fashion Horror Story, but I will get to that.
What is he doing now?
Now, he’s selling real estate in Ft. Lauderdale.