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Harriet Mays Powell is fashion director at New York Magazine and a former editor at Tatler. Her work has also appeared in Glamour and Elle magazines.

The fashion director at New York Magazine shares her fear of becoming obsolete in a youth-driven industry.

Question: What keeps you up at night?

Harriet Mays Powell: God, college tuition. I’ve got two small children and figuring that all out and the fact that when they’re getting there is just going to be a half a million dollars a year it certainly frightens me. I think that keeps—it certainly keeps my husband up a little bit and as a result of that I stay awake. I want to be able to be involved in fashion for a very long time. I love to work. Fashion is not necessarily an industry that allows age. It’s about youth and flash-in-the-pan and things that change all the time, so I worry a bit about continuing in a meaningful way, my career going forward, and in having some importance to my existence because I don’t want to not work. I love it and I’m a better, more, I think saner and happier person because I do work and need to do that in my life. So, yeah, college tuition is kind of the—yeah sort of long-term panics I have, which are college tuition and how do you morph and still stay viable in an industry that doe not necessarily like age in the way some politics or law or other things actually embraces that, and fashion does not. So, I worry about how to be smart about going for it and getting older.

 


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