Marina Larroude: Why The Power Of The New Is Always Trending

“I want to see what is new, what I haven’t seen yet. I want to see it what’s not commercial, and what is not out there yet.”

For Marina Larroude, Market Director of online fashion bible Style.com, creativity is about the novel, the fresh, and the as yet unknown. Ever since she was a little girl, Larroude has been interested in how we express ourselves through fashion. “I found a school notebook from when I was younger and one of the questions in it was ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ My answer was, ‘I want to be a fashion editor.’ I was 10 years old when I wrote that, so I think I always knew, in a sense, that this was what I wanted to be doing, but it took me a while to realize that I could make it my career.” After working for two years at Brazilian Vogue, Larroude moved to New York where she worked at various jobs in the fashion industry—at handbag designer Botkier and smaller house Alice Temperley, before realizing her true calling was in editorial. “I met Candy Pratts Price [one of the earliest editors at Style.com and the eventual Creative Director of Vogue.com], and sent her my resume with flowers. She must have been like, ‘Let me see if this girl’s crazy or not.’ So she invited me in for an interview, and the rest is history.” After working for two years as an assistant at the now-defunct Men’s Style.com, she moved up the ranks and is currently in her eighth year with the company. “What I tell all of the interns or whoever comes to me for advice is that when I got the job here it was in the menswear market. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do in the long run, but I needed to get my foot in the door. I feel that that perfect job will come with time, and you should be open to learning and having the experience. That will eventually take you wherever you want to go.” Larroude knew she loved the constant learning experience that being in journalism—especially online journalism—offered her. “What I like about editorial is that you can get behind so many designers and so many ideas and so many brands at the same time. You never have to think only one way. When you’re working with a single brand in the industry you have to devote all your time to it. With editorial you can never get bored because you’re always seeing new things.” And that, for Larroude is what constitutes creativity. “I think it’s newness. It’s always looking for something new, or seeing things that are very simple, and putting them in a new format that no one has seen before.”