if anyone asked me in college what my goal was after graduating, i’d always say it was to work at
@jcrew . it was peak jenna lyons era, and i lived for every presentation, trying to recreate the looks on my own. the day after graduation, my parents drove me from boston to new york and told me, “may all your wishes come true for you here, yuri.”
that summer, i interned at
@openingceremony making $10 a day, using my graduation money and savings just to cover rent. i knew i needed a full-time job if i wanted to stay in the city, so i found every j.crew recruiter i could on linkedin and messaged all 15 of them asking for an interview. i refused to take no for an answer—and on my birthday, 8/24, fourteen years ago, i finally got my first job as a sample closet coordinator (i owe you stuart - HR 10th floor).
if you told me back then that
@akiandkoichi would one day be part of a j.crew holiday campaign, i never would’ve believed you. i used to be the one sprinting to shoots from the office, dropping off samples, unloading and organizing, so being on set this time as “the talent” felt incredibly surreal. it brought back so many memories of my coworkers from those early days. we used to have so much fun together. one of the highlights was working with
@whit_wag —14 years after we were in the sample closet together, here we were on set again.
this is long, but i wanted to share how much this moment means to me. i say this often, but this one truly is a full-circle moment.
