"I moved to New York when I was 21 years old. I knew no one," Ahmed-Yahia recalls. "I basically sent my resume to everyone that I possibly knew might have a connection. A friend of a friend of a friend worked at GQ magazine and he reached out to me asking if I was interested in being a fashion assistant. I was open to anything creative but I knew zero about fashion."

Ahmed-Yahia is the oldest of seven kids, which may account for some of her tenacity. She went from a starting position at GQ to a fashion assistant job at Vanity Fair where she got a crash course in fashion knowledge firsthand.

"I like to say I just took a nosedive into the pool of fashion," she says. "I think most people that I talk to now that are outside the industry look at it as this very glamorous world where people that have a good eye just pick things out of the sky and put looks together. And that's not really what fashion and the fashion industry and being an editor means. It really means being responsible for driving the fashion industry, supporting the fashion industry. It clicked for me: this is a business."