An Unpaid Intern's Lawsuit Hasn't Changed the Game at Hearst
Just in time for Fashion Week, The Cut has caught up with Hearst's most famous intern: Diana Wang, whose legal fight over an internship has ballooned into a class-action lawsuit. It's sort of fitting that Kayleen Schaefer's interview with Wang is going up the one week where editors, models, and designers grab the spotlight and allow the The New York Times to get away with headlines like "Wacky Meets Khaki." And it's also fitting that all the grunt work to get those editors to their fashion shows, to get those models into castings, to get the credits for all those photos: it all falls on the shoulder of unrecognized, unthanked, unpaid interns--interns like Wang. Schaefer's interview isn't unlike the epilogue to The Devil Wears Prada, with Wang saying she's given up fashion for a social media gig after her four-month internship at Harper's Bazaar landed her nowhere. And of course, the gristly, gory bits of editor maleficence are the show-stoppers (the line "the practical agony of getting through a subway turnstile with seven shopping bags in her hands" makes an appearance). But there's something perhaps more frightening than an editor being mean to you and making you carry lots of bags for free on the sweaty New York subway. As Schaefer notes, even with Wang's class-action lawsuit there are still plenty of interns who care more about their future jobs (in most cases theoretical) than they do about supporting Wang:
As another Fashion Week rolls by, Wang is trying not to think about what she lost and to accept her new role. Since filing the lawsuit, she’s heard from Bazaar interns who served with her. “They said, ‘I’m glad you did it and I hope you win,’” she says. “‘I still want to be in this industry, but I’m silently supporting you.’”
