I like to think that [my time at Jezebel] is a natural extension of my time [in college], where I spent my time trying to have something to say about the way in which language registers trauma, the way in which Virginia Woolf posited an imagined apocalypse, the way in which James Joyce's Molly Bloom was able to engage in time travel through remembering kisses. Fashion, like literature, like language, is about interpreting a narrative. And being a fashion blogger is about finding what's interesting and what's substantive about this medium, and being unafraid to occasionally remark, "Sorry, but I think this is bullshit." (Which is a statement frequently incurred when presented with...anything, like a bad novel, without a point of view.)...

[T]he really helpful thing, I think, that I got out of my education in the humanities was an awareness of restrictions and liberations afforded by subjectivity. All day long, I write about what I think is "good" and "bad" in regards to that most heinous of phrases, "personal style." But what I'm always trying to remind my readers is that these are just my opinions. I don't really know any more than they do about these things. I just know what I like and what I don't like, and they should be unafraid to have opinions about how they dress themselves too. The unusual thing about covering fashion for a blog as opposed to a print publication is that my readers interact with me in real time. The moment I post something, they're off commenting. In a five minute window I will be told by people I don't [personally] know...that I should quite my job, move to L.A. and become a celebrity stylist, stealing the reigns from Rachel Zoe, and then hear from someone else that I have the worst taste of anyone "ever" and that I should never leave my house. Occasionally, this leaves me amused; frequently this leaves me paranoid.

The internet is still the renegade medium of the publishing world, and oddly even more so of the fashion world, a community that, of all things, prides itself in being more forward thinking, inventive, and creative than the rest of the poor mortals inhabiting the earth. I suspect that part of the resistance is that fashion community has longed thrived on its insular nature, the fact that only the so-called elite who work in it are privy to its ups and downs and changes. The Internet is all about accessibility, which, in my opinion, is what the fashion industry should be about, too. Fashion is fun; It's silly and a little frivolous, sure, but it is also about self-expression and one of the most direct and palpable manifestations of the culture and politics of our age. It's impossible to not see a connection between current events and the way in which 'lady-ism' and prim and proper hyper-feminine silhouettes emerged on the runways following September 11th, showing a desire, perhaps, for older, more conservative and debatably safer times. For Spring 2008 Marc Jacobs...took these dainty lady looks and shredded them to pieces, doing granny suits in sheer fabrics, or with entire panels cut out of the sides and backs. The shoes he showed hand an inverted heel: Though many critics hated the style Jacobs showed, I admired it. To me, it was one of the most vocal cries against conforming to the current political agenda - this desire for the costuming of "safety' and nostalgia - I have seen to date. Getting dressed might not be rocking the vote, exactly, but fashion is a form of art and powerful tool for messages of revolution and rebellion.

Victoria Beckham, however, is not. But the most-trafficked article I ever wrote was, in fact, titled "Victoria Motherfucking Beckham Is Here." It was the liveblog I did from my little Blackberry chronicling each and every second of the Project Runway finale this season...but I really am a great admirer of Ms. Beckham's. She is probably the most influential face in fashion right now which is hilarious because all she ever did, really, was be the worst singer in a cheesy manufactured pop girl group, marry a soccer star, and spend lots and lots of money on clothes. But I think the way she has been championed by the big name fashion magazines and the tabloids alike is, in a perverse way, a good sign for where things are going in the fashion community. Beckham is, really, a sort of everywoman: She is an average girl who made her something into something "important," if you will, essentially though dress. To me, she represents how things ought to be: Any of us can be something more, or at least different, through how we choose to present ourselves through our wardrobe. And Beckham gets this: She knows she's just a front and I respect that, because, really, that's all that fashion is, too. It is only representation.

I also think I have the world's best "people" (my "actual" family and those who are like family to me), all of whom allow me to love what I do because they are a part of my life. (If you are reading this and nodding, you are one of those people, btw.) In particular, I have to thank Matt, who always asked for/feared a post about himself; my parents, who put up with all my mishegas; and Jason, the world's wisest younger brother, who can accomplish anything he sets out to do.

But beyond that — and her putting up with demanding edits, late night emails, two exhausting New York Fashion Weeks, a diagnosis of vertigo, and hundreds of hours watching Martha, The View, and Regis & Kelly — Jen has done a number of features that I think regular readers should revisit and new readers should introduce themselves to. (Readers with other suggestions are welcome to link to them in the comments!) There was her foray into foray into pole-dancing, her tryout for America's Next Top Model, her liveblog from the Project Runway finale in Bryant Park, her experience being silently judged at the Soho Prada store, the Hooters party she hit up last fall, and, my personal favorite, our Label Whores feature, for which Jen sewed designer fashion labels into cheap clothes and tried to sell them to snotty consignment stores. All of these are examples of Jennifer's singular initiative, good humor, intelligence, creativity and energy, for which I will always be grateful. Ralph Lauren is a lucky man. Godspeed, sweetie, and don't forget those polo shirts!

Earlier: You Can Take The Girl Out Of Jezebel But You Can't Take The Jezebel Out Of The Girl

The Good:
Amy Poehler: Actress, comedienne, Christian Siriano copycat.
I can only hope that Angelica Huston was invited for her amazing turn in The Darjeeling Limited as a mother/Buddhist nun who doesn't know what to talk about when we talk about love.
Ann Moore, left, is the CEO of Time, Inc. Indra Nooyi, right, is the CEO of Pepsi Co. Donatella Versace would be happy, surely, to see women in power wearing dresses.
Arianna Huffington: She writes books, she runs blogs, she wears ballgowns.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, which was apparently a little smug, highly readable and very "influential." (I hate that word.)
Georgina Chapman designs for Marchesa and married Harvey Weinstein. I'm not sure if these things, independently or together, make her a person of merit. But what do I know?
Kristen Wiig of SNL: Further proof that women are funny.
Madeeha Hasan Odhaib is the "Mother Theresa of Baghdad." I wonder if George Bush, or even fellow attendee John McCain, even care.
I love Martha Stewart: She runs an empire and still manages to can her own preserves. Also, she does it in heels.
Mary Lou Jepsen founded Pixel Qi and was also the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child, which strives to deliver mesh-networked laptops to children in developing countries.
Nancy Brinker, who founded Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is a breast cancer survivor and mother, and was also appointed to the position of Chief of Protocol by President Bush.
Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng: The dark overlord and his whipsmart wife.
Suzanne Vega: She sings.
Sure Baby Mama is supposed to be the anti-Knocked Up or whatever, but more importantly, Tina Fey has brought Liz Lemon and Tracey Jordan into our lives.
Did you participate in Teach for America? Or have eighty gajilliion friends who did? Thank Wendy Kopp, who founded the program, for the experience.
Ziyi Zhang: She acts. Also I am in awe of her bone structure.

[Images via Getty.]

Jennifer and her MoDo iChat avatar are abandoning us for the preppier, more well-financed clutches of Ralph Lauren, where she will be their new Women's Editor — designing, creating and conceptualizing original content for the women's holdings under the RalphLauren.com umbrella. (She will also, hopefully, be sending us free pairs of Madras shorts and brushed-cotton tees that we can wear on our nonexistent yachts during our nonexistent summer vacations with our nonexistent, tow-headed Aryan children.) But she will continue to be found on Jezebel occasionally — she still owes me that May Past Fashion on bridesmaid and flower-girl dresses! — and we will be running small tribute posts to her throughout the week. What I'll say now is that we simply could not have launched this blog without her, and her endless amounts of energy, devotion, and creativity are both enviable and inspiring. We're damn proud of you, Jennifer. I only hope that we've been as good to you as you have been to us.

Earlier: Meet The Editors

The truth is that they are keeping me on because they know I am a "loose cannon" and will get myself fired for cause and that Dodai and Anna, being black, will have a fully reasonable case for a race discrimination suit, and they are pre-empting that potentiality with a generous severance package and, one imagines, seats on all Conde-sponsored "Our Hairstyles, Ourselves" panels forever and ever in perpetuity. And Dodai and I will laugh about it and go about our business because the universe is absurd that way. So I am going to make the case for them, since this is my last chance and their logins have been deleted from the system: America is not really a traditionally classist country but it is a traditionally "racist" country, and that racism masquerades as classism in the pages of all the Conde Nast magazines, where we don't see it as being so noxious because "classism" is not endemic here, it seems like some exotic foreign import a la Anna Wintour, and anyway, if you are not black you don't have to think about any of this stuff every day, because enough black people have confronted the obstacles that it feels like progress, and maybe, eventually, it will be.

Barack Obama is powerful and strong and visually charismatic enough to chip away at the likes of Vogue, and the imagery that forms the foundation of our consciousness will begin to salve the wounds to the national soul that has been forged by an economy that has overvalued the superficial for entirely too long. Economic realities beget cultural and societal ones. Slavery was just cheap labor, right? What's more American than cheap labor?

I began hating fashion when I covered retail at the Wall Street Journal and began learning about the hiring practices of Abercrombie & Fitch. Sometime in the early nineties Abercrombie had been recast — under the leadership of the Limited Brands and a bizarre Ralph Lauren clone named Mike Jeffries — as an "aspirational" brand appealing to middle-class mallgoing teenagers, and the centerpiece of this strategy was turning every kid who worked there into a "walking mannequin" for the brand. At first, this was organic; the hot frat boys they recruited found it easy to convince their lifeguard chick ex-girlfriends to come work too. But retail is a drag, and the company was growing quickly, so rules and procedures needed to be established. Every store was given a "target school" — a college university expected to supply some quota of students to the stores. Only Georgetown students could staff the Georgetown store, for instance; George Washington students were forced to take the Metro down to the less-coveted Pentagon City location, etc. etc. Management further isolated fraternities, sororities and sports teams at the schools for recruitment to work at the stores, and sent forth their most attractive and charming brand representatives to woo them in. The idea was that the stores would reflect some sort of idealized form of real life, and they did.

But as the chain continued to grow, exceptions needed to be made. Certain tony prep schools were targeted for recruitment. Exceptionally-attractive staffers were allowed work at the stores of their choosing. Local modeling agencies were sometimes tapped to staff the coveted positions at the front of each store. Target school quotas could be ignored so long as each store was hot enough.

But each store was never hot enough. District managers pressured by regional managers pressured by the constant pressure for increased profits assured to that. Weekly, they would monitor the stores, admonishing the manager for allowing Jeremy to work the register in last month's clothes, or letting Rick wear white shoes, or allowing Melanie to wear red lipstick when that wasn't "brand-positive," or ever hiring Melanie in the first place because, at 130 pounds she was horrifically obese. Uglies and fatties and people who didn't "get it" were cast out; new kids came in; the stores devolved into constant chaos and somewhere in the middle of the constant hire-purge-hire cycle a few too many minorities slipped in.

And that is when things really got nasty. Where the few token black people who had worked at Abercrombie in the nineties felt generally comfortable with the culture, blatant, stomach-churning racism gradually supplanted whatever the company's "culture" ever was supposed to be. In my investigation — and you must understand, as a 24-year-old reporter I took my "investigation" of Abercrombie & Fitch very seriously and interviewed literally hundreds of employees — a regional manager told me the VP of stores had referred to a Latina employee in a Texas store as "the maid," and his South Street Seaport store as "the Asian Invasion" and finally, a New Jersey store with an offensive quantity of black employees as "The Jungle."

Now, if I may offer you the chance to link this thing with that thing and chuckle at the irony, ha ha ha.

I got fired — well, resigned — before I could write that story for the Journal. It all happened because I emailed a copy of the draft to a "source," for fact-checking, and then he emailed it to someone else, and emailed it to someone else, and eventually it made its way into the hands of the Crisis Communications PR firm Abercrombie had hired to deal with all these race discrimination charges. That is a big no-no, chiefly because Wall Street Journal stories are considered tradeable information, which I wasn't really thinking about because I was too worried about getting my facts right and avoiding an unfair association with another sloppy young recently disgraced newspaper reporter named Jayson Blair, even though I, being white, was not an affirmative action hire like Jayson Blair, but anyway my career might have survived if not for the taint of Jayson Blair, but as it was the story never ran and I left newspaper journalism.

The coloreds eventually got some reparations from Abercrombie & Fitch, in the form of a $50 million cash settlement. I was disappointed. $50 million is a lot for a race-discrimination lawsuit, but Abercrombie makes a 20% operating on nearly three and a quarter billion dollars in annual sales, thanks to its still-potent cocktail of "aspirationalism" and sweatshop labor. I wanted "It's a jungle in there" on TV somehow. Talk to suburban high school students sometime; everyone knows someone who got fired from Abercrombie. From their dumbshit $6 an hour job at Abercrombie where they were required to spend the entirety of every paycheck on the latest outfits just to keep the job in the first place. It's the odd business story that could have captivated the nation's youth, you know? It's a business story that offered a pretty neat metaphor for the kind of Orwellian perils of allowing the American economy to become addicted to the satisfaction of manufactured desires and false, immediate wants. Of course, I can name about ninety other case studies that could do the same thing, at least one or two involving Conde Nast publications, but I don't work in journalism anymore, because I made a stupid slip of the keystroke and hit "send" on something without thinking, and come to think of it, I probably shouldn't be telling you this story since the terms of my resignation from the Journal were that I wasn't required to, that I left on my own volition, but the difference between losing my job five years ago and losing it now is that I have done it already, and I really don't give a shit. So fire me, Conde Nast motherfuckers! There is no more effective diet strategy than being POOR.