is waif
BEHIND THE SCENES: MY TRIP TO WAIF MAGAZINE'S OFFICES
In the middle of Manhattan sits a building. It’s not particularly striking, but it’s very tall - one of the tallest skyscrapers in Midtown, I learn later. At over 65 stories tall and taking up an entire city block, the building is easy to overlook as you pass by. It’s just another New York building. I step inside and make my way through some of the most intense security I’ve ever encountered. I present the front desk with my birth certificate (required for entry) and proof that I’ve ever talked with anyone affiliated with the building. What is this place? I wonder to myself. My Gmail app takes awhile to load, but 15 minutes later, I show the front desk people an email exchange between me and the senior editors at Waif Magazine - the tenants on the top twenty floors. They point me to the elevator and I head to floor 47, the welcome floor.
The ride up is quick, about the same as my trip on the train from my modest apartment in East Williamsburg (Brooklyn) to reach this building. 30 minutes later, the elevator doors open to reveal the reception area. At the front desk, the receptionist — a high school student who I’ll refer to as Kennedy — scrolls through job postings on their laptop computer that is AirPlaying live to the 72” monitor mounted on the wall behind them.
“The office of Waif Magazine is at once incredibly busy and isolatingly deserted, indistinguishable from any other office but definitively bizarro.”
Their desk is completely bare except for a phone which never rings. A plastic light affixed to the desk illuminates the word waif. Kennedy greets me, seemingly surprised by my visit. I see them type something quickly before returning to their job hunt. I take a seat on a couch, which Kennedy tells me is 100% compostable, and wait for approximately 45 minutes. On the wall above me is a decal that reads, “If you’re early, you’re late; if you’re late, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re fired.” I’m hoping that I err more on the side of early than on time - I can’t afford to be fired, not right now.
The office of Waif Magazine is at once incredibly busy and isolatingly deserted, indistinguishable from any other office but definitively bizarro. Makeshift cubicles are constructed from unused copy machines; I’m reminded that an online publication has no need for paper. There are no employees, aside from Kennedy, at least not on this floor. I learn from my trip to the well-hidden restroom that the 47th floor is host to a competitive residency for one sorority each year to use as a combination work and co- living space in exchange for something that seems clear to neither of the parties involved. This explains the constant dull roar of invisible chatter and the glitter of hundreds of unattended office phones ringing off the hook. Once a week, the sorority in residence sets up shop as a call center for Waif’s hotline, 1-833-IM-A-WAIF. Kennedy tells me that most of the calls they receive through the hotline are just bots and scammers; “Everyone wants to make a quick buck. It’s annoying but it makes the real calls more meaningful.”
After I wait for about an hour, I’m greeted by a young woman wearing one of the signature is waif t-shirts (white with black ink). She introduces herself as one of 500 interns that work for Waif. This surprises me at this point, though I’ll soon learn that unconventional is the convention around here. She leads me to the center of the floor where we step onto an escalator up to the 48th. The energy here is the opposite of 47: teeming with loud people, shouting over each other like the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange. The intern tells me it’s the busy season as Waif prepares for their cornerstone Fall issue called “Refuse Fashion.” “It’s an issue that’s broadly themed around anti-fashion,” she says. “Ideas are the currency around here, and most of the time it’s quantity over quality. One great idea only takes up so many pages. Several good but not great ideas can fill out an entire issue of Waif.” She’s not wrong. Waif does seem more interested in the pursuit of the best idea rather than presenting the best idea itself. I think that distinction is important to the ethos of the publication, both on the page and in the office. Waif strives to create space for its readers and its creators to see themselves reflected in the historically impenetrable medium that is the Fashion Magazine. Why else would a company have a team of interns outnumbering the executive staff?
We quickly move on from the cacophony of the 47th floor up to this intern’s corner office on the 65th floor, a location assigned through seniority. “We’re placed based on how long we’ve worked here. I’m the senior creative intern so I get the higher floor and the corner. Check out the view.” It seems impossible that we can see all of Manhattan, but we can. “Makes it worth the pay,” the intern tells me. “How much do you get paid?” I ask. “$30/hr.” I do the math —the Waif intern will be paid more to talk with me today than I will be paid to research and write this article. “But the environment and the people are second to none,” she adds. “Can I get you anything to drink?” I accept her offer as she makes her way to the bar cart by the window. She shakes up a bottle of ArKay non-alcoholic whiskey and pours it into two ornate tumblers. We clink our glasses and take a swig. It does not taste like whiskey, but I expected as much. Plus, I don’t need to be drinking real whiskey so early in the day.
On her desk, she has a tweet framed:
“Oh yeah,” she notices me reading, “me and the other senior interns love this tweet. It’s sort of a mantra around here.” I ask her about the singular like on the post and she starts scrolling on her phone. “Now it’s two,” she says. Curious to know what the process is at Waif, I talk with the intern about what her job usually entails. She tells me she’s writing an article for the next issue. “It’s called ‘Stop Juuling.’ I recently just threw away my Juul and want to encourage others to do the same.” A great idea, I think, but she’s not as excited about it. “I’m worried about it coming across as righteous. I mean, for one, I am - I was - a consumer of this product. I get the appeal. Who am I to all of a sudden be like ‘fuck that.’’ For some reason, the self- awareness bordering on self-consciousness surprises me. I fully understand the magazine to be this perpetual side-eye glance in the direction of pop culture and even skate culture, which obviously takes a certain degree of cultural understanding and assuredness to comment on, but it doesn’t occur to me till now that the people at Waif are real people who must exist outside of this air or persona or sensibility they wrap themselves in. Like Waif serves as a role model to insiders like me, so do the people who staff the magazine - a throng of open- minded and free-wheeling young people, eager to inspire.
As though the clock had struck midnight at our delicate daytime ball, the intern I spoke with got up swiftly and silently from her desk, opened her office door and left the room without saying one word. I waited for her for a few minutes before realizing that our meeting was done. Unattended, I am a bit of a snoop. I love to look places I’m not supposed to look - journals, drawers, cabinets, I’m there. Like the floor I was received on, this 65th floor is largely deserted, save the Tupperware plastic drawer units that line the walls. In the top drawer lay what must be 1000 plastic choker necklaces in all different colors and patterns. In the next, two boxes full of is waif stickers and promotional business cards. I assumed their was some outsourced fulfillment center that packed and shipped merchandise orders for Waif, but it becomes clear that it is somebody’s sole job to address and pack each order. But who? There is literally no one around. For a company with a staff of 500 interns, the floor is deserted, and I get the sense that no one else really knows I’m here. I snap a few photos for my reference, pack up my things, hop in the elevator for a quick 30 minute ride back to the lobby, and head home.
Once I’ve had time to set my things down and make a quick bite of food, I begin to imagine what went wrong. Did I do something to offend the intern? I can’t afford to leave this visit open-ended. I fire off an email to my point of contact to let them know what happened. I met with an intern who showed me to the 65th floor and then suddenly left the room and disappeared without a trace. I get a canned response from the Editor-in- Chief saying thank you for my message, it will be forwarded to the editorial team, and STAY WAIF in all caps like that. I don’t know what good it will do, but at least I’ve done something. Now, I wait.
A week passes. I shoot over a follow-up email, this time not even receiving an automated response. I watch as month after month new issues of the magazine roll out, credited to a team of people far fewer than 500. I order a shirt, a request that sits seemingly idle for two weeks until one afternoon I get an email that my order has been shipped. A contact button at the bottom takes me to an email address @iswaif.com - not the usual Gmail addresses that I had been emailing before. I type a message, begging for information: who was I talking with? Who am I talking with now? What is Waif Magazine? Like the creature of habit that I am, I send and I wait.
Too much of my job is sending and waiting. The idea business - the creative industry - is sending and waiting. I hate that. I’m trying to train myself to have several ideas simultaneously so I can send and wait on one and then get to work on another. If you send and wait too long, pretty soon it’s next month - or worse, next year - and what have I done but waste away the remnants of my youth. With no response and nothing to lose, I decide enough is enough and head to the subway, taking the same familiar ride from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan.
I walk up the subway stairs and over an avenue to discover there is no building. Where there once sat the biggest building in New York is now an ice skating rink the size of an entire city block. Having recently received historical landmark status, it is now almost always packed any time I walk by it.
Literally, wall to wall packed with Manhattanites in their sharp shoes, snaking through this giant box pretending to have fun. It’s like the 48th floor, but no one is having fun.
Some months later, after I’ve moved on from my visit and my subsequent outreach, I get a response from someone: Hi. I’m sure I’m not supposed to respond to you, but I want to. Waif is small and has no office. We loaded in all of this stuff to this building in midtown and cast 500 movie extras for one day of work. The office culture at Waif is the opposite of office culture in that there is no office and there is no culture. It is, as we demonstrated and described to you that day, highly collaborative, but it’s hard to know when we’re working on something and when we’re just having fun. Thank you for coming in to talk to me that day. I ended up scrapping the anti-Juul piece, as maybe you noticed. Maybe you didn’t. In any case, I’m sorry I left that day. I wish I remembered why, but I don’t. I wish I knew what happened to the building, but I don’t. If I had to take a guess, the building was only there for as long as we were. The magazine is tailored to your idea of what a publishing office must be like. This is to say: I’m sorry, stop Juuling, and most importantly STAY WAIF.
I want to be upset with Waif for tricking me, for leading me on, for wasting my time. But at the end of the day,Waif is all I have-a necessary buffer between virtual and actual realities I parse between every day. I star the email to keep it at the top of my inbox. I reread it from time to time when I feel challenged by Waif or if I’m waiting for the next issue, a reminder that someone notices me.