I first walked into the Elle offices as a very naive 21 year old. It was 96. The first thing I noticed?
Not the beautiful dresses on a rack, or the surprising scruffiness of the place or Yasmin Le Bon (YASMIN LE BON!!). No it was the incessant ringing of phones.
It was pre e-mail. When press releases came in the post and sample clothes were requested by fax.
You needed an assistant just to field your calls. By the time I was Beauty Director my ‘mailbox’ would frequently implode.
I am so grateful for the advent of e-mail (because you can achieve in 50 words and two minutes what would take ten minutes plus on the blower).
Fast-forward twenty years and my friend, the esteemed ex beauty director of Vogue and now Creative Director of Seen Nicola Moulton, leaves me a voicemail. “I know I am being practically prehistoric by actually calling, but I fancied a chat.’
Calls have their place right? They establish a human connection. From a PR point of view I know they are not as bonding as a face-to-face, but still much more humanising than e-mail.
I wonder if I might try and speak to PR’s more often. I have a problem (a nice problem), which is that lots of you would like to meet up. And I would like to meet too but my work/kids/commute mostly prohibits it. So perhaps instead of me batting dates back and forth that in all probability I’ll never be able to make – perhaps we should just chat?
