Sean Avery. Photo: Getty Images
Just in case tales of Sean Avery’s Vogue internship are giving you bright young things eager to intern at the magazine delusions of grandeur, we called up some real ex-Vogue interns to find out how close their experiences were to Sean’s. Turns out they were preeettty different. For example, Sean is getting minimum wage for his work at the magazine, while real interns don’t get paid a dime. We’ve listed a bunch more differences here. Our sources’ names have been changed to protect them from, well, lots of stuff.
Sean Avery met the managing editor and got a company e-mail address and his very own desk on his first day.
Elizabeth: “I was not treated nicely. It was very fast-paced. It was just kind of a walking-on-eggshell environment.”
Ashley: “The company e-mail address doesn’t exist with interns. Also meeting the managing editor is out of the question. We didn’t have desks or a chair or anywhere to sit. There was one computer and one chair — that was basically the general intern and computer chair. If you had to print out pictures or do a return on the computer, you had to wait to use it. I felt that we were just a big army. At any time in the closet there were about fifteen of us. For the most part, people didn’t know who you were individually.”
Sean Avery’s tasks include guest-editing mensvogue.com and flying to L.A. to help with special projects.
Elizabeth: “I was out a lot in town cars picking up items, returning items. I was sent on ridiculous errands. Not so much that the errands were ridiculous, but they would send me out in noontime traffic and they’d call me an hour later and be like, ‘Where are you?!’ and I had eight places I had to be.”
Ashley: “Our tasks for the day were anywhere from returning samples for products that were too expensive to be sent via messenger to reorganizing the closet — that was a big one.”
Sean Avery attends meetings with senior staff and checks in weekly with the managing editor.
Elizabeth: “I had to run little errands for the senior staff.”
Ashley: “There was no such thing as a meeting with senior staff. We were never invited to, like, go to meetings. We interacted with the assistants. I do have to say the highest-level people like André Leon Talley were always very, very sweet. We didn’t have meetings with them but they were always very nice to the interns.”
Sean Avery eats enormous lunches in the cafeteria and gets away with spilling them on people.
Elizabeth: “I never got lunch. I didn’t get lunch breaks. We had to eat in the closet.”
Ashley: “I was able to get lunch. It was like, very quick, go down get your lunch, eat it, and come back up. There was a sense of having to get permission for a lot of things. I don’t remember if we had to tell them we were going to the bathroom, but that could’ve been possible.”
Sean Avery goes to photo shoots and helps style them.
Elizabeth: “I went on some photo shoots but it wasn’t at all glamorous — I was doing all the packing up, bubble wrapping products. I never styled — I steamed clothes.”
Ashley: “We dropped off trunks for photo shoots. A large part of it was packing the trunks for the photo shoots and unpacking them.”
Sean Avery hangs out in the closet with no shirt, shorts, and sneakers.
Elizabeth: “I was told to wear heels a lot but after a while I stopped, with all the running around.”
Ashley: “We had a meeting in the very beginning of the summer and they were like, ‘We’re not going to tell you you have to go buy a whole new wardrobe and buy expensive clothes, but it’s a high-fashion magazine — you should dress the part.’ It was kind of hard to wear heels — we would bring flats in our bags, and everyone would change into them when we got really uncomfortable.”
To see more of Sean doing the job a million girls would kill for, check out the slideshow of him prancing around the Vogue office. It looks like he’s working so hard he doesn’t even have time to keep his desk neat.
Related: Lookie! Sean Avery Blogs!
The Diary of ‘Vogue’ Intern Sean Avery
