How reality TV shaped the idea of fashion as a bitchy, hostile industry

For a generation who dreamt of working in fashion, the reality TV shows of the mid-00s were a guidebook to the ins-and-outs of the industry. There we were: young kids, working out exactly how we were going to break in, analysing every moment of The Hills and Kell on Earth, and taking Rachel Zoe and Kelly Cutrone’s every word, every action, directly to heart.

Who can forget the time in The Rachel Zoe Project when the office flooded and some stuff got a bit wet and she went off (off!) at her assistant? Or the moment Janice Dickinson took what she thought was ‘a vitamin and a sparkling water’ (actually a sleeping pill and a glass of champagne) on Finland’s Next Top Model and ended up calling a group of young, aspiring models ‘stupid bitches’ who will ‘never make it’? How about on Kell on Earth when Cutrone’s assistant Andrew S tells the office: “Pharmaceuticals really help in People’s Revolution. If I offer you an Ativan, just take it!”

We sat and watched Cutrone – who followed up Kell On Earth with a book called If You Have To Cry Go Outside – and those like her teach us ‘how it really is’ in fashion. The book, to be fair to Cutrone, features some good tough love advice, but it presupposes that being treated like shit is non-negotiable. “In an industry like fashion, people always behave badly around you, but if you resolve to become a spiritual warrior, you learn to laugh and laugh,” she writes. Elsewhere: “If you’re crying, and if you’re having a bad day, and you’ve been knocked around, the best thing to do is to come back... If I stopped this business every time someone was mean to me, or I felt bad, I wouldn’t have been in business for more than a month.” 

As for the advice peddled by the shows? Take the pills, never sleep, be utterly brutal (and brutalised) were the main takeaways. “Who gives a fuck about her fucking opinion,” asked Cutrone, when she was on The City as Whitney Port’s PR, defending her after Olivia Palermo said her new line, Whitney Eve, was shit. “Who gives a fuck? No, she’s dead. She is fucking dead! I’m gonna fucking come up like a shark underneath a glass-bottomed boat and fucking whip the shit out of her,” she continued. 

The scenarios ranged from the major to the minor, but there was always drama. From week to week on The Rachel Zoe Project, Zoe would alternate between favouring Taylor over Brad, and Brad over Taylor, sending each assistant ricocheting into emotional oblivion because they couldn’t work out what they’d done wrong. And on America’s Next Top Model, with every passing episode, there would be another reason Tyra Banks was disappointed in another girl. And there we all sat, taking it all in, agreeing with the shark attack death of Palermo and judging ANTM’s Tiffany on moral grounds because she decided she didn’t want to be a fucking model or all of the shit that apparently came with it. 

Although these programmes were places to, apparently, nurture young talent, we lived for Michael Kors’ savage takedowns on Project Runway – takedowns that saw young, aspiring designers fall off the fashion radar quicker than metallic pleated skirts. And not only that. The irony is that these shows got you to side with the bad cop – agreeing that the corn dress was in fact grotesque, and Austin deserved every harsh word that came his way. (Shame on you Austin! Fucking shame on you!) As Heidi Klum’s immortal phrase goes: “in fashion: one day you’re in, the next you’re out,” and our tween selves couldn’t have agreed more.

“I devoured these shows and made them my bible, I learned lessons from a falsified reality and applied them to the way I would move through the fashion industry. I think that’s why I put up with so much racism” – Anonymous

The dynamics depicted in these shows: assistants weeping, Rachel Zoe hospitalised with stress-induced vertigo, nobody ever receiving praise or pay or holiday, led us watching to believe that this is how to run a successful fashion business, or how to get ahead in the industry. It’s a cycle of bullshit that self-perpetuates – being mistreated breeds further mistreatment, as well as the idea that those who come after you should suffer like you did if they want to get somewhere. But what if that ‘somewhere’ is just the power to treat anyone in a supportive role with less fondness than the office dog? (That isn’t even a metaphor – I’ve seen office dogs treated with more respect than those at the bottom of the ladder.)

“I was punched in the face, twice, by my boss,” a friend tells me. “And I just took it.” Another, who is now an editor, recalls that he’d had to stay in hospital for three days because he’d been dizzy at work for a week. “They told me I was severely exhausted and extremely dehydrated,” he explains. “And then, when I got out, I was sent to Paris for a pick-up that very same day. You have to laugh, really. I just kept thinking – am I on Punk’d?”

“I devoured these shows and made them my bible, I learned lessons from a falsified reality and applied them to the way I would move through the fashion industry,” another friend explains. “I think that’s why I put up with so much racism toward me in the industry, why I call my friends and laugh at the madness of this supposedly glamorous life. But, of course, many parts of fashion are both bullying and racist: much like everyone on those shows was entrapped in a structure of bullying. There was also the fact that everyone featured was white… and financially privileged… and thin.”

“We were taught that if you weren’t hungry enough for it, then there were 100 others, ready to take you down, who were. If you weren’t prepared to basically hospitalise yourself, you weren’t worthy of this job that ‘a million girls would kill for’, and the job would never be yours”

Before the internet allowed us a more democratic view of the inner workings fashion via tell-all Insta stories, shows like Running In Heels and The Work Experience, in which contestants battled it out for an internship at Marie Claire and fake agency Grade PR respectively, were our only access to an industry painted as incredibly cutthroat and impossible to get into. We were taught, repeatedly, that if you weren’t hungry enough for it, then there were 100 others, ready to take you down, who were. If you weren’t prepared to basically hospitalise yourself, you weren’t worthy of this job that ‘a million girls would kill for’, and the job would never be yours. At the time these shows were on the air, reality TV still felt like reality: we hadn’t yet found a way to watch it ironically, in the way we glue ourselves to Love Island now, tweeting as we go.

While the shows, for the most part, have ended (although The Hills is set for a comeback), a lot of the behaviour they depicted still goes on. “As much as these shows, or The Devil Wears Prada, have been referenced time and time again, it’s hard to deny when people ask if what goes on in them actually happens,” the person behind @fashionassistants, the anonymous Instagram account airing stories of behind the scenes mistreatment, explains.

“‘Oh my God, you work in fashion? You work at a magazine? Is it like that film with Anne Hathaway? A lot of similar things can and do happen. When I meet other assistants, it becomes a bonding exercise on set or in the fashion cupboard – ‘Who’s the worst person you’ve assisted? What’s the worst job you did?’ This is a stressful, competitive industry – due in part to these shows opening up the doors of otherwise hidden worlds – and people may not always be the sweetest and kindest versions of themselves, but there is never an excuse for some of the stories submitted to the account and told to me by personal friends. It should never have become ‘the norm’.”

Are there any positives to these shows? Well, yes. For some, they have become a coping mechanism, as we send memes of Kelly Cutrone breathing fire to our friends, knowing that really this is all a big joke – and that at least it could be worse. For others, reality tv actually did prepare them for what they would come up against when they entered the industry – and it was a positive thing.

“I literally thought this was what interning was – not sitting down for three days on the trot, being given ten minutes for lunch, and then being sneered at for eating hot food in the office. I soon developed tricks to get around that though,” a friend tells me. “I was an incredibly good intern, and I quickly realised my own value. Eventually, my boss, who actually demanded that I didn’t eat because she genuinely thought I was too fat, was disciplined by higher powers, and things got much better. I left with a glowing reference, and I learned all my tricks from being glued to shows like The Rachel Zoe Project, or Project Runway.”

Another explains they weren’t allowed to take a day off for a funeral, but went above their boss’s head and had it cleared. “Since then said boss has actually had far more respect for me.”  

“I literally thought this was what interning was – not sitting down for three days on the trot, being given ten minutes for lunch, and then being sneered at for eating hot food in the office”

The other question is: after watching all these shows, why did we all still want, no, yearn to work in fashion? Was it to be able to gain as much power as Kelly or Michael or Rachel, and treat those below us worse than the aforementioned office dog? “It didn’t deter me in any way,” a friend who has experienced bullying and racism from the industry throughout the course of their career explains. “In fact, it made me excited to fight my way in, and then use my voice to say things kindly, beautifully, from my perspective too. That’s why we all love fashion right? Because we see ourselves in it, we escape through it, it makes us feel less alone. And anyway, it’s all worth it to feel like Brad did when Rachel took him to his first Chanel show, when he was just totally blown away.”

There’s no denying that fashion is flawed – it preys on exclusivity, on hierarchy, on huge pay gaps, and extreme inaccessibility. But when it comes to working culture, things are changing, albeit slowly. “Some people have reigned like this since the 80s and 90s, and when you’ve always been surrounded by ‘yes’ people, it’s going to be hard to let go of that power,” @fashionassistants explains. “I think people are starting to show a little more appreciation for the supporting team they have around them, and checking their behaviour before they fly into a rage on set because a look hasn’t arrived on set when it’s completely out of the hands of the assistant. There’s a long road ahead of us and there will always be the artistic geniuses who lack certain social skills and don’t make life easy for those around them, but any change is good change in my eyes.”

While many of us working in the industry grew up on these shows, and accepted what we saw as gospel, that doesn’t mean we want to continue perpetuating the bullshit they did. Of the people I spoke to, they told me that Running In Heels, and The Rachel Zoe Project, and Kell On Earth only served to make them want to work in fashion more. Not because they believed what they saw was okay, but because they could do it better, and with more kindness.