The Engineer at Anthropologie Who Taught Me Plenty

Julika
Julika

This is Julia. She’s a stylist at Anthropologie, the wonderful, whimsical store frequented mostly by younger women, although lucky are the older among us who show up for bargains and get so much more.

I was there today, my husband safely on the boyfriend couch as I poked around,  found a ton of stuff and made my way to the fitting room.  Among the crowd and line of shoppers waiting their turn was this woman, headset on, jaunty scarf around her neck.  I must have looked as overwhelmed by my choices as I felt because she just plain took charge.  Showed me why my sleeves couldn’t be full length, which things should be tucked in and which should be left out.  My favorite lesson:  “Don’t hide your hips.  They’re good.”  Miraculous advice for someone who, for at least a decade, wore size 14 jeans. (Not anymore….)  I so wish I’d met her years ago; she taught me how to make  simple choices that looked great in ways I would loved to have mastered long ago.

Julia herself was fabulous.  Her mother was stylist for Lucille Ball, beloved star of  the long-running 50’s sitcom I Love Lucy.  Avoiding her shadow, Julia became an engineer, rising high in the executive suites of Hughes Electronics.  When she retired, she surrendered to the natural gifts and love of style that she had indeed inherited from her mom and went to work as a stylist herself.  “I’m having a blast.” she told me.

This, one of my last NABLOPOMO posts, is a thank you note to her for the fun I had and the things I learned through her generous guidance.  I have some great new stuff, too.

 

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.