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"  How did you get your start and what was your job? Bonnie Morrison: There was no clear trajectory that I followed. It was a little haphazard. I think my aspirations at the time ending up putting me in line to be a PR person, even though I didn&amp;#039;t realize it at the time. I worked at an advertising agency that specialized in fashion, then I worked for (florist) Robert Isabel. Finally, I got an interview at Conde Nast through my dad. I had no magazine experience, so I went into the Rover Program\u2014which meant I became an in-house temp. You would just go and work for about a week at a time\u2014on a project or to fill in if someone was on vacation. So I worked all over the building for two months and then after three months if you weren&amp;#039;t placed in a job you would be let go. After two months, I was very excited when I got a position as Adam Grossman&amp;#039;s assistant at Self magazine. It turns out that I had interned for Adam when he worked for Madonna when he was a prop stylist. Roopal Patel: I went to Bergdorf Goodman as an assistant in the fashion office and that was really my first exposure into the world of retail. Dawn Mello was president at the time and she had just left Gucci where she found Tom Ford. So coming into this word of fashion and working for Lillian von Stauffenberg, who was Lillian Wang at the time, was really my first peak into fashion and what was happening in the city. It was really a creative playground, that&amp;#039;s the best way I can explain it. Mickey Boardman: Paper Magazine is the only real job I&amp;#039;ve ever had. When I started as an intern in 1992 I was also going to Parson&amp;#039;s for fashion design. I already had a BA in Spanish, lived in Spain for a year and then moved to New York. While I was an intern, I did horribly at school, they hated me\u2014they didn&amp;#039;t get the imagination of Mickey. I ended up failing the class my senior year and at the same time the person who answered the phones at the mag quit and so they asked me to answer the phones until they figured out what to do. I did that for a year or two and then I was named associate editor. I remember I had just gotten the first teeny Mac computer that literally looks about as big as a children&amp;#039;s Japanese backpack. Changing the font was about as fancy as you can get. I felt like a housewife turned career girl, pretending I knew what I was doing\u2014but basically I was doing then what I do now which is b.s. and torture people and get tortured and set up photo shoots.  Give us a glimpse into technology at the time\u2026 Bonnie Morrison: It&amp;#039;s funny we had computers but I don&amp;#039;t know what we used them for. I had an email address, but you still spent the entire day on the phone calling in samples. It took three months for lookbooks to be produced, so you would order slides from (photographer) Dan Lecca of each collection. There was a lightbox in your boss&amp;#039;s office and to call in samples you&amp;#039;d get on the phone with PR and describe the look: &amp;#039;it&amp;#039;s a picture of Gisele, she&amp;#039;s wearing a striped dress, it has a notch lapel with a belt and a kick pleat.&amp;#039; You had to actually really be able to describe clothes. I think the slides were 300-600 dollars a show, so our bill from Dan was in the tens of thousands of dollars. We&amp;#039;d keep all of the slides from each collection that season in a file cabinet and you&amp;#039;d pull them out and then call the houses. But because you were talking with people on the phone all day, you cultivated much closer relationships. There was a market list too that you&amp;#039;d guard with your life\u2014it had like 20 pages in it and it would have all these cross-outs and white-outs. And we had Roledexes on our desk. The other thing we spent so much money on was Polaroid film in the fashion department. All fashion departments did\u2014boxes and boxes of it. Market editors would go to the press appointment with a Polaroid camera or a disposable camera and then drop the rolls of film on your desk. What was the role of the fax machine? Mickey Boardman: The fax machine was such a drama because literally it was only meant for people sending insertion orders for ads or something. We weren&amp;#039;t even supposed to give out the fax number. A publicist would call and want to send a 25-page press release fax to everyone in the whole office and we&amp;#039;d have to call them up and say please stop or we don&amp;#039;t have a fax. It was literally like a state secret to give out the fax number. Now it&amp;#039;s like, imagine being the person who invented the fax or being the heiress to the fax. You thought you were like on easy street the rest of your life. The fax had a real peak. I remember my boss interviewed Karl Lagerfeld and he sent a fax with a note saying &amp;#039;thanks so much&amp;#039;\u2014a fax from Karl Lagerfeld on that gross plastic rolled paper. It just seemed so glamorous at the time. That was the peak of the fax and now it&amp;#039;s all down in the pits. What was Fashion Week like? Bonnie Morrison: The shows were much more exclusive and even the shows in New York were not as much about celebrity. Really it was just the editors that went. There was no street style. Particularly in Europe, just editors went to shows. The funny thing was, Paris was pretty irrelevant and Milan was pretty major because Prada, Gucci and Versace were there. That was where the news came from. Saint Laurent was still at YSL and that&amp;#039;s was like completely moribund. Chanel was important. The models were more women, there were still girls working like the Carolyn Murphys, but it wasn&amp;#039;t the very young girls who were like 14 and 16. Overall, the shows just had a lot more spectacle. I mean Gianni Versace died in 97. Versace was super important. Gucci was super important. That&amp;#039;s where all the trends were coming from and it was around the time that New York had just started to be at the beginning of the season\u2014 historically it had been at the end of the season until Calvin Klein changed it. Helmut Lang was a really important collection and that showed in New York. But a lot of the Parisian houses that we all think of as super iconic had not been renewed or rebooted yet\u2014no Givenchy, no Lanvin\u2014in the way we think of it now. London wasn&amp;#039;t newsy, it was too expensive and the clothes weren&amp;#039;t distributed anywhere and that whole youth quake was very far from happening\u2014like the Christopher Kanes. Prada was huge and that was like the ticket to get\u2014and Prada was super generous. Prada was doing seeding with their bags, people would check into their hotel and there would be a Prada bag. Mickey Boardman: My first fashion show was in 1992 when I was still at Parson&amp;#039;s\u2014Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis\u2014 I was just in the standing room. It was like Linda, Naomi, and Cindy and all those girls and it just felt so glamorous. I remember when Fashion Week started at Bryant Park, it felt so special\u2014it still feels special to me. I&amp;#039;m practically a hillbilly, I&amp;#039;m from Hanover Park, IL so just to be at any show, let alone a big fancy show, I feel like I&amp;#039;ve just really hit the jackpot. It was before anyone outside of the industry cared\u2014now you get e-mails or a Facebook message from someone you went to high school with and they&amp;#039;re like &amp;#039;we&amp;#039;re coming to fashion week!&amp;#039; and I&amp;#039;m like what do you mean you&amp;#039;re coming to Fashion Week? But it was kind of fun then and it felt like an insider kind of family thing. I don&amp;#039;t remember it being so cut throat on some level and now it&amp;#039;s such a circus and I sound boring even saying it, but even to get to your seat, you have to go through people giving out tampons and Red Bull. Then there was an art form to crashing and being in the standing room and the kids in the standing room had great fashion looks. It was just more of a spectacle and more New York in a way. It just felt more like a downtown hip spectacle. Roopal Patel: Fashion Week was at Bryant Park and there were a few shows like Marc Jacobs, or when Alexander McQueen came to town, that were offsite, Helmut was offsite, but it was very intimate. It wasn&amp;#039;t the way it is today where you have a thousand people at the show. You may have had 200 to 250 and it was really the trade and you know fashion greats. Liz Tilberis was alive at the time, (editors) Carrie Donovan and Polly Mellen were a duo and you&amp;#039;d see them everywhere, Andr\u00E9 Leon Talley. It was the same cast of characters, but it was definitely more intimate. It felt very elite and incredibly selective and it was about the clothes. I mean there weren&amp;#039;t paparazzi standing outside. There weren&amp;#039;t all these photographers. People really didn&amp;#039;t know what fashion was and what was happening in the tents. Where was the off-duty party? Bonnie Morrison: Everyone went out in SoHo. I remember reading BAZAAR and they had a roundup of places to go in New York before I moved here and I was like &amp;#039;oh my god I&amp;#039;m going to go to all these places.&amp;#039; We went to Mumba on 7th Avenue South\u2014they had karaoke and there would be models there and Puff Daddy. It wasn&amp;#039;t the same then  because social media didn&amp;#039;t exist and the tabloid press was really different. There was the New York press like Page 6, but it wasn&amp;#039;t the same. If you were like a Richard Johnson you would still get tips, but you couldn&amp;#039;t just e-mail a tip\u2014 it wasn&amp;#039;t as easy for the average person to spread gossip. And it wasn&amp;#039;t like people were documenting, there weren&amp;#039;t video cameras everywhere, no one had a camera on their phone. We went to lounges mostly. If we weren&amp;#039;t drinking cosmos then it was still definitely a drink in a martini glass. The cosmos had nothing to do with Sex and the City, but when it came on the air and all those girls were drinking cosmos, we were like, &amp;#039;that&amp;#039;s totally what we drink,&amp;#039; it felt like they got that part right. Mickey Boardman: The spots were definitely Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, Nells. Was Nells still in the late 90s? I&amp;#039;m trying to remember. It&amp;#039;s all such blur. I&amp;#039;m really bad with time and space. I&amp;#039;m like was that 1993 or 2013? What was the event scene? Were there fashion parties every night like there are now? Roopal Patel: I feel like it was much more exclusive. There weren&amp;#039;t as many parties. There weren&amp;#039;t as many social gatherings. It wasn&amp;#039;t required that designers have events to lure customers or editors or any of that\u2014 it was about a show. If there was a dinner or a party, people would go out after. New York nightlife was about late nights and dancing. You&amp;#039;d see people at Mumba, or Save the Robots. Tunnel was around, Roxy was around. Honestly, nightlife was more fun. I think the idea of events wasn&amp;#039;t like today. It was much more intimate\u2014and exclusive. What were the major emerging names in fashion? Roopal Patel: Tom Ford just started at Gucci and was getting great notoriety\u2014like Madonna wearing that head-to-toe velvet suit at the MTV awards. I remember it like it was yesterday. He set the buzz, a new direction with this sort of sexy vibe. Calvin Klein and Donna Karan were the big American names at that point in time, Helmut was the cool kid on the block and you had Marc Jacobs and John Galliano who starting the revival of the old fashion houses. Galliano went to Dior and he was still known as the bad boy of fashion so to speak and Marc Jacobs had just formed his partnership with Louis Vuitton. What we considered to be so much part of our everyday fashion vocabulary today, where we see all these designers restarting with these big houses, was just beginning then. LVMH as a group was just forming. Alexander McQueen showed his first collection in the mid &amp;#039;90s. Where did you shop? Bonnie Morrison: It&amp;#039;s amazing\u2014when you first move to New York and you&amp;#039;re 22\u2014how little you live with. There was definitely a month where I ate pancakes only. My parents had given me money and I spent it at the Freelance shoe store in SoHo. I used to shop Freelance and Joseph all the time. I wore a big, stacked heeled loafer with like a skinny pant, which is how we all dressed. I have not eaten a pancake since. What and who was everyone wearing? Mickey Boardman: It seemed to me there was more of a uniform. Someone like Eleanor Lambert would always be in Zoran, a Zoran pullover and pants with a turban. Carrie Donovan had the big glasses and then some black baggy schmatza. You would see people like that as opposed to, &amp;#039;oh there&amp;#039;s that Miu Miu dress.&amp;#039; Now you see the Carine Roitfelds in the Balenciaga the day after the show. Then, more people had their look. They just wore what they wore. Plus, they just looked like journalists they didn&amp;#039;t necessarily look like show ponies. Not that it&amp;#039;s better or worse. I felt like there were more respectable kind of people like Patrick McDonald, who just loved fashion and had crazy looks and would be shot by Bill Cunningham. I felt like there were more of them then. And guys in big baggy suits. Bonnie Morrison: People did not wear jeans in the office. I think in many ways it was much more dressed up. Prada and Calvin were hugely influential at that point. People were either into that very minimal thing\u2014Chanel was always a holy grail but it was worn by older women\u2014 or the women who had the bodies for it did the Chloe by Stella McCartney look\u2014you had to have the legs and the body and the money. Chloe was an important collection, but Chloe was very casual\u2014even though it was very expensive for those ringer tees and very lean cords. H&amp;amp;amp;M and all those high street brands had just started to be introduced. I remember the first H&amp;amp;amp;M store opened on 5th avenue and there was a line and people didn&amp;#039;t even really know what it was\u2014they just knew it was a huge sensation that had been all over Europe. Roopal Patel: I had a very different vibe then, I was very into minimalism. I was kind of obsessed with Helmut Lang and Margiela. I would wear like an asymmetrical cut long black Margiela skirt with a Helmut Lang t-shirt. I was pretty much a minimalist. I liked a lot of black at the time, which is very different from my wardrobe now, because I live in color. And you know it was also Prada. Prada accessories were huge, so I really loved when Prada Sport came into fashion, which kind of created all the nylon which she had for quite some time. You also wanted a Prada bag, you wanted a Prada shoe, not that you don&amp;#039;t today, but that craze for Prada accessories was really big. It was a really big deal. And Manolos! I remember buying my first pair of Manolos. What was the shoe story? Bonnie Morrison: Jimmy Choos were just being introduced and everyone wore Manolos\u2026 but when I see looks from the &amp;#039;90s, even if the outfit looks sort of okay, I can always tell it&amp;#039;s the &amp;#039;90s because of the heel of the shoe. I just saw old pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow and that Tom Ford suit or the red Gucci velvet looks amazing\u2014and then you look at the shoes and there&amp;#039;s no way she&amp;#039;d wear the shoes again. The shoes are always wrong. It&amp;#039;s a weird clodhopper maryjane with a thick, chunky heel. No one was doing the skinny stiletto yet. It&amp;#039;s one of the most aesthetically impoverished shoe eras. What were designer retail prices like? Bonnie Morrison: Bags weren&amp;#039;t $2,000 then, they were like $600\u2014a designer bag wasn&amp;#039;t that expensive. I remember there was something in the Times about all these women carrying the same Prada bowling bag. Prada had done a big gifting and Prada had no need to do wide spread editor gifting. That was the very beginning of that\u2014brands that had the resources that wanted go what we now think of as viral really launched that\u2014which was crazy. Editors would come back from Europe, even the most frugal, with hauls because everything was so much cheaper because Italy was still on the Lira. They would come back wearing head to toe Gucci. Now people go and when they do damage, but they come back with like one Celine boot. Who were the It girls? Mickey Boardman: Elizabeth Saltzman for me was everything. I remember the first time I sat in the front row next to Elizabeth Saltzman, I felt like I had really hit the big time. And I was always thrilled to see Debi Mazar. It was kind of before celebrity in fashion, so there wasn&amp;#039;t that front row mayhem and insanity. Roopal Patel: At the time it really was the social women, the society ladies. There were the cool girls, like Aerin Lauder\u2014 everyone loved to see what Aerin was wearing. Carolyn Bessette was very much in that time period. Calvin was very influential in the &amp;#039;90s. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a2617/1990s-fashion/>