Dhani Mau '06 Profile

Dhani Mau ‘06 is the West Coast Editor of Fashionista.com, the website that is “one of the most influential voices covering fashion” and has a monthly readership of over 2.5 million. But Dhani had a different plan when she first arrived in the Big Apple.

Dhani was attending New York University, studying journalism and interning for fashion PR and communications firms, like Tractenberg & Co. and Maguire Steele. “My first couple of internships were with fashion PR companies, where I did things like pull clothes for magazine shoots for the brands we represented and work fashion week events,” but Dhani said “PR wasn’t for me and I wanted to try writing.” In 2009, she transferred to the Fashion Institute of Technology where she earned her degree in Fashion Merchandising and Management and began her first internship at Fashionista.com. “My boss at the PR Company connected me with the then-EIC of Fashionista.com,” Dhani says and she spent 6 months interning with Fashionista before moving to Elle.com as an Editorial Intern. However, not long after starting at Elle.com, Fashionista offered Dhani a full-time position.  Dhani says, “I started as an assistant editor and then, five years later, I became the Editorial Director, and now the West Coast Editor.”

Dhani’s body of work at Fashionista is extensive, varied, and impressive. She writes, edits, and publishes several articles each week, covering topics like designer interviews, collection reviews, features on industry trends, and emerging trends. While the focus is on fashion as a whole, the website offers editorial pieces focused through multiple lenses: business, style, news, beauty, careers, shopping, fashion week and editor’s picks. In the last year, Dhani has written reviews for designer Valentino’s 2017 resort collection, a piece about how models are creating a dialogue to make fashion more inclusive, and exploring why top designer Michael Kors is downsizing his department store collections. And that’s just a sampling of her work. 

Dhani’s work at Fashionista has taken her to such fashion capitals to New York, London, Milan, and Paris to cover events in the fashion world. Most recently, it has taken her to Los Angeles, where in February 2017, she moved to take on a new job within Fashionista as the West Coast Editor, where she writes with a stronger focus on the growing LA fashion industry. According to Dhani, work at Fashionista is “really fast-paced and requires that I be able to write things quickly and well, and to think critically, analytically, and creatively...” and “I think SAAS helped me to think that way, to be a good writer and to have the discipline to get things done.”