It was a long road to Ralph Lauren’s spring 2025 show in Bridgehampton. Really, though: at 2:30 p.m., I boarded a sprinter van in Midtown Manhattan organized by the brand with eight other fashion editors. By 3 p.m., it still hadn’t left. And at ten past the hour, as we began to inch down Madison Avenue, I knew we were going to be late for the brand’s desired 6:30pm start time. I just didn’t know how late. Because the only thing worse than the New York City traffic we were currently in? Long Island Expressway traffic—the exact highway we were trying to turn onto.
Two hours later, and we’d only made it ten miles. (Earlier in the week, my editors asked me to live blog my journey on the new Vogue app. One of them asked why I hadn’t really posted yet. I sent her a video of us stuck outside a Hooters in Queens.) The mood on my bus, which had started out lighthearted and jovial, began to turn. We’d run out of small talk and unlike a cocktail party, there was nowhere to politely excuse ourselves. Plus, water had begun to drip from our air conditioning. The editor getting dripped on asked the driver if he could help. He offered to pull over. “We aren’t stopping,” someone hissed. (Ok, fine. It was me. I hissed!) So instead she took the plastic Ralph’s bag of snacks they’d given us and used it as a makeshift bucket to collect the water, like we were in Grandpa Joe’s house from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.
Then, the texts started arriving. We knew that the more important show attendees had been offered alternate (or to put it less politely, better) modes of transportation to the Hamptons in the form of helicopters and private cars. However, we didn’t know that they were already there. It turns out they’d arrived hours ago, and were wondering: Where the hell are they? And here’s the thing about fashion shows. A designer will wait for his front row VIPs to arrive. But the bus people? They do not usually wait for bus people.
So then it became a slight panic about whether or not we were going to miss the show entirely. (“Did we want to stop to use the bathroom?” The bus driver asked. We all shouted back “no” in unison.) After a hard right turn in Quogue, we sprung another leak in the back. “I need a cigarette,” the editor in front of me murmured. Yet at 6:51 p.m., our traveling Titanic finally reached our destination.