Lauren Ezersky Is Still New York’s Most Unjaded Fashion Journalist

Ezersky’s charm worked. This is a woman who could get into Alexander McQueen’s hotel bed and film an interview with him. No public relations red tape! And if there is red tape, Ezersky has firm advice. “Never take ‘no’ for an answer,” she says. That interview with the late McQueen encapsulates both her persistence and her oddball interviewing sensibility. She met him at New York Fashion Week in the early 2000s, when she ran up to him and bluntly asked where he was staying. The next day, she spent the whole morning calling McQueen at his hotel until he woke up and picked up the phone. “I said, ‘I’m coming over with my crew,’” says Ezersky. “We went over and he just got out of the shower. I was like, ‘Don’t change, get in bed, and I’m getting in bed with you.’ He ordered breakfast and the breakfast came and we just kept rolling. He just rolled with it.”

This is the sort of persistence that got Ezersky into fashion in the first place. She was born in Yonkers, New York, which she describes as a do-nothing town. Even from a young age, she was always obsessed with fashion, the kind of person who would get a job to pay for a fur coat that she put on layaway. She went to Northeastern University in Boston for three years, hated it, and came back to New York. Her first job out of college was working as a showroom sales girl, receptionist, and buyer at the showroom of 1407 Broadway. (It was during these days that she met Marc Jacobs, a sales boy at the now-closed store Charivari).

After Ezersky left 1407 Broadway, she started selling jewelry. “I just go around from showroom to showroom and I just made sales,” she says. “I knew everybody’s payday date. I’d say, ‘Here, take it. I’ll come back when you get paid.’ So I’d come back on Friday.” It took her not one but three times to enter the Halston showroom, which eventually led to one of her formative early experiences in the industry. “One day, I’m there with all my shit spread out, and who looks in but Halston. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so busted.’ He just walked over, looks at everything, and says, ‘Oh, very nice!’” Through her new connections at Halston, Ezersky attended his fashion show, one of her first. “Pat Cleveland was going on the runway. She stops in the middle of the runway and twirls, puts on lipstick, and then twirls around and keeps walking. It was amazing. And I’m like, ‘I gotta be doing this. I gotta be interviewing people.’”