by Holly Smale
I smile, take a quick photo of the other-worldly stunning and confident models, and send it to Nat.
Then I glance at the time and start wandering towards the black Citroën waiting for me on the kerb.
I feel like I can finally focus now.
All I really want to live, be and harness tonight is my bed.
And maybe a unicorn, if there are options.
“Goodnight, Kenderall,” I call, opening the car door. “And thank you.”
“No problem!” she yells as the Nick-alike walks past her slightly too quickly. She winks and points at his back. “And now I’m off to PARTY with this one!”
“Go for it,” I smile, clambering into the back of the car and yawning widely. “He’s all yours.”
I’ve only just staggered back into the hotel, checked briefly over the printed-out itinerary for tomorrow, thrown on my pyjamas and crept into bed when my phone starts ringing.
Which, to tell the truth, is not an enormous surprise.
I may be an international model and officially an adult in several countries around the world, but I was not given a free rein on this trip.
In fact, the conditions of my adventure have been typed on to an A4 piece of paper, underlined twice, signed and put in my suitcase: securely water-protected in a ziplock plastic bag, for good measure.
“Harriet?”
“Mmmm?” I snuggle contentedly beneath the clean white covers with my eyes shut. “Hey, Annabel.”
“Are you safely at the hotel?”
“Mmmm.”
“In bed?”
“Mmmm.”
“Is Elle McPherson there?” I hear Dad say from somewhere nearby. “Or Liz Hurley? Did you put in a good word for me with them as promised? I ate a multivitamin today. They need to be kept aware of how healthy and strong I am for my age.”
Needless to say, Dad gave me his own list to follow. On that one I’m strictly ordered to attend every party going (including ones I may not be invited to).
“Don’t worry, darling,” Annabel tells him in a warm, light voice, “we’ll add it to the weekly newsletter we send all the Supers.”
Then she clears her throat.
“Now, Harriet. You know your father and I love you and respect you and admire you very much. Just as much as you love and respect and admire the rules we set for you. So … we’d like to see the proof of your current location, I’m afraid.”
I open my mouth to object, and then realise that it wouldn’t exactly be unheard of for me to stretch the truth with my parents. In fact, scientists have recently developed a material called hydrogel – a compound made of alginate, polyacrylamide and water – that can extend to twenty times its original size.
I think it’s fair to say that the accuracy of what I tell my family tends to be similarly flexible.
Sighing, I switch to video-call and peer at them through one eye. “Evidence,” I mumble, pointing at myself and then my crisply starched bed linen. “In bed by 11:30pm curfew, as contractually agreed.”
In order to get my parents to agree to three days in Paris with only Wilbur as a chaperone, I signed up to a bedtime even earlier than Cinderella’s.
“Excellent,” Annabel smiles. “Tabitha says bon nuit, by the way. Or she would if she were conscious and capable of communication in any language.”
She points her phone down at my baby sister, sleeping with Dunky, her beloved stuffed toy donkey, gripped tightly against her cheek.
A wave of love washes over me.
Also a little jealousy: I’d enjoy being asleep like that right now too.
“Bon nuit back,” I smile through a yawn.
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” Annabel says as Dad blows kisses in the background and elaborately mouths Find Liz Hurley. “We miss you.”
“Miss you too.”
And the last thing I see before I close my eyes are the people I love best in the world, smiling down at me from England.
ow for the science bit.
Somatotropin is a peptide hormone secreted by the anterior pituitary gland. Its purpose is to stimulate growth, cell reproduction and regeneration in animals, and it’s released primarily at night: just one of the many reasons we humans need decent rest and relaxation time.
Without it, we can’t repair or recover.
So when I say that – after a solid night’s sleep for the first time in a week, curled up in my soft, cosy Parisian bed – I wake up feeling like a brand-new person, I don’t mean that metaphorically.
My brain and heart have been healed.
I have been literally remade.
*
Blinking into consciousness, I roll over and smile happily in the warm winter sunshine. I pick up my phone and grin at the messages that have turned up this morning:
Hope you’re kicking the fashion world’s butt. Possibly literally. ;) Jasper x
Tell me nobody’s wearing purple. ;) Indy x
Just discovered that Couture was actually founded by Charles Frederick Worth, WHO WAS ENGLISH. Toby Pilgrim
So it’s not actually French at all. Toby Pilgrim
I think you should alert the authorities because they are definitely making it sound like it is. Toby Pilgrim
OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS I HAVE LITERALLY NEVER BEEN THIS HAPPY THANK YOU THANK YOU Nat xOxOxOxOxOxOxOxOx
Beaming, I click on the attached image.
It’s a photo of me standing on the Purple Party yacht, with Kenderall’s arm round my waist, wearing the green dress: flushed and wide-eyed and smiling a tiny bit.
Underneath it says Top models Syren and Harriet wearing Gaultier and Nat Grey at the Purple Party at Paris Couture Fashion Week.
And it’s all over the internet.
I think I’d better stay out of the way of that blonde designer or she’s going to string me up from the rafters like a fluffy ginger boxing-bag.
Still, great for Nat, right?
Maybe not so great for India: she’ll be furious that Paris Fashion Week has officially stolen her colour.
Smiling, I stretch wide like a cat for a few moments, then drink a large glass of water, put on my teddy slippers and pad over to the bathroom. I’m just dubiously examining the spot on my chin and trying unsuccessfully to resist the urge to squeeze it once more for posterity when there’s a loud knock on my door.
“Coming!” I call, taking another gulp of water and giving my new demonic chin-horn another tentative prod.
Then I pad back over to the door.
Wilbur bursts through it before I’ve even heard the door click: all yellow polka dots and black cape and enormous shoulder pads.
Without being rude, he looks a bit like a cheetah superhero from the eighties.
“No,” he says, gently smacking my hand. “Naughty. What did I tell you about picking your spots?”
I blink at him. “I wasn’t …”
“Baby, you look like you have grown your own mini volcano out of pus,” he says breezily, flinging a large furry purple bag on to my unmade bed. “That’s not couture. That’s a bad Blue Peter session. But do not fret your little rabbit nose, because I’m here to save the day. Also I like today’s outfit, a propos. It is adorborama.”
I stare down at my pyjama top.
It says:
What Do You Call A Dinosaur With An Extensive Vocabulary?
A THESAURUS
The matching PJ bottoms have diplodocuses and open books drawn all over them. I had them made especially for me by a website I found on the internet to celebrate getting straight As in my GCSEs.
Nat’s not the only super-cool fashion designer in my friendship group, you know.
“Wilbur,” I say, gulping down another glass of hydrating, beautifying H20, “what are you doing here? I thought you said you’d check in by text?”
“That was a-vent,” Wilbur says merrily, pulling open the bag and getting pots of potions and ointments out. “Which is French for before I got my adorable toosh kicked by my boss at Infinity at six-thirty thi
s morning for letting you lose us another client.”
I flush guiltily. “Oh.”
“And now it is a-pray,” he continues, tugging out a soft grey face-towel. “Which is French for after I cancelled my other plans for the morning so I could make sure it didn’t happen again.”
I flush a bit harder. “Wilbur, I’m so sorry.”
It was a genuine mistake – albeit an incredibly stupid one – and I feel awful about it. Even if my best friend did benefit rather a lot from my misunderstanding.
According to her last text, her new blog’s already had 2,000 hits and only twelve of them were me.
“No need for apologiserisation, my little chocolate-chip pancake,” Wilbur continues breezily. “I should have been more specific. Maybe stuck a Post-it on the wall with a neon flashing arrow pointing at THE DRESS. Maybe with the words THE DRESS written on it in neon marker pen. You know, as a special Harriet-Hint.”
He carefully plucks the pale lilac dress down from the wall, whispers to it “sorry, little one” with an affectionate stroke and folds it neatly away with a tiny sigh of sadness in a special cloth-lined bag.
“But my next show isn’t until lunchtime, is it?” I check, starting to panic. “I swore it said in the itinerary I didn’t need to be there until twelve-fifteen.”
“That is right as a slip-stitch on two bits of adjacent fabric,” Wilbur beams, putting a hairbrush on the bed.
I blink at him. “So is that correct or not?”
“It is.” He gets a pair of hair-straighteners out. “Which, kitten-poodle, means we’ve got just enough time to get you ready.”
I look at the beauty paraphernalia now piled up into heaps and almost completely covering my bed.
It looks like the only rubbish tip on the planet that Nat would pay to rummage through.
“But isn’t that what stylists are for?” I say in amazement. “To make me a perfect ten?”
Wilbur laughs and looks at my throbbing chin and my fringe with toothpaste from last night still flecked at its ends.
“Monkey, they’ve only got so much time. I think we need to get you up to zero first.”
*
An hour and a half later, my face has been properly cleaned and treated and exfoliated, my spot is miraculously almost gone, my hair is clean, soft, straight and swishy, and my eyebrows have been gently plucked into tidy, elegant arches.
And I’m now wearing green leggings and a yellow T-shirt with a cartoon of a Labrador on it. I mean, if I can’t convince anyone I’m French, I may as well give up on being chic entirely.
Bouncing, Wilbur shepherds me through the hotel reception and into the black car idling by the kerb.
“Are you coming to the show?” I check as he climbs in after me. “To the first one?”
“Kitten-munch,” he smiles, getting his phone out and starting to smash at it with his finger again, “for the next six hours I’m not leaving your side.”
ow, beauty is obviously subjective.
The word itself comes from the Old French 14th-century term biauté, which means ‘pretty, seductive or attractive’, but we each decide what that means to us: what alignment of features or characteristics is pleasant to our own, individual senses.
However, as we all know, some places or people definitely tend to get more votes than others.
And as Wilbur and I drive through the streets of France’s capital, sunlight flickering between buildings and trees, I can see why even the word itself was born here.
Beauty is in every line of Paris.
It’s etched in the graceful shapes of the windows and arched doors of its houses; in the pops of blue and white wooden shutters, the gentle greys and greens and taupes in the gradations of the stone.
It’s in the weaving ivy climbing the walls and the uneven steps holding cobbled streets together; the bright blue cafes and little red boulangeries, yellow boucheries, pink confiseries or green fromageries; the shining windows piled high with rainbows of macarons and croissants and cheeses and cream cakes.
It’s in the perfectly spaced lines of trees and organised pots of flowers, and in the size of the sky: so much bigger and more open than in Tokyo, New York or even London, mainly because very few buildings are allowed to be over five storeys high.
It’s in how regular it is, thanks to the strict urban regulations that have kept everything in the same style for centuries. (Also because it wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War and then patched up again in the sixties.)
Beauty is buried in its history and culture.
No less than a hundred and fifty-three museums; hundreds of churches and galleries; dozens of world-class monuments including l’Arc de Triomphe, Le Sacré-Coeur, Le Panthéon, Le Centre Pompidou.
And in the very heart of all this light and prettiness lies Le Louvre: the world’s biggest museum, art gallery and the old home of Napoleon, who Jasper says used to have the portrait of the Mona Lisa hanging in his bedroom.
AKA: the centre of Paris Fashion Week.
Which is why – as our car drives straight past the enormous stone façade and the huge glass and metal pyramid that serves as the museum entrance – I spin to watch it disappear behind us in total confusion.
I’m trying to find a suitably pretty way to put this.
Where the unicorn poop are we going?
“Umm,” I say as our car crosses the river and continues into the south of the city – past the Disney-like turrets of the Musée de Cluny and the Université Paris-Sorbonne (one of the best universities in the world and on my application list for next year) – “am I not doing a catwalk show today?”
Then I swivel and watch l’Observatoire de Paris – one of the most important astronomical centres in the world – glide past, totally unvisited.
“You certainly are, my petite pot noodle,” Wilbur chuckles as the car pulls to a stop in a bright patch of sunshine. “Right here, in fact.”
I frown at what’s propped up in the middle of the grass. “In a tent?”
It’s rather small and white and inconspicuous, and frankly not exactly what I was expecting from the most high-fashion event this planet has to offer.
I thought there’d at least be turrets.
“Here.” Wilbur climbs out of the taxi and starts leading me towards the tiny marquee, grinning widely and clearly enjoying himself immensely. “On this spot precisement, choco-nut. Or icy, as the French people say.”
He points at where he’s standing.
I blink at the road next to us: it’s full of slowly moving cars, a few statues and some pigeons. Nothing spectacular, and certainly nothing worthy of the designer royalty I thought I was about to model for.
“In the street?” I check. “Is it some kind of pop-up show? Or one of those Flash Dance type things?”
Please say no please say no please—
“Harriet Manners,” Wilbur says in a disturbingly business-like voice to a woman with a clipboard standing outside the entrance. “Infinity.”
“Number thirty-three,” she replies after scanning her list with a quick nod.
“Baby bean-fence,” Wilbur says, pausing and staring at his buzzing phone, “sorry to amend my numero-uno plan, but can you do the next few hours without me, pudding? Jessica’s having a hissy-fit about the colour of her dress and the designer is going loco. Hand on my heartbeat, I’ll returnez by the time it starts.”
I try to smile bravely as my heart plunges. “But– but where is the show happening?”
As we all know, I like to be as informed as possible about everything, at all times. Not least the topography of where I’m about to walk in heels.
Wilbur beams as clipboard lady pushes open the flappy door to the marquee that has PRIVATE stamped on it in big black letters. “You will see anon, my little fish-face. In you pop.”
Then he starts giggling and gently pushes me door-wards. “Ahehehehe! Or – to put more fine a point on it, kitten – maybe you won’t. It really depends on the lighting.”
The marquee is flooded with brilliant light, it’s boiling hot and the air is filled with a heady combination of hairspray, perfume and the faint mouldy smell that comes with temporary plastic-coated accommodation.
There are people everywhere.
Shouting, screaming, talking, occasionally singing: trying to make themselves heard over a multitude of hairdryers, all blasting and roaring away.
Models are crammed next to each other like fashionable baked beans: squished together on rickety plastic chairs with umpteen people pulling their hair in different directions, simultaneously having truckloads of make-up applied by dozens of make-up artists; standing like mannequins while pairs of stylists stitch them into dresses and glue sequins on to their collarbones.
It’s hot. It’s loud. It’s chaotic.
And obviously I’m not an expert on these topics but it’s not pretty or glamorous or sophisticated or chic at all.
Feeling utterly bewildered, I’m led through the artificially hot fashion-spangled mess to a seat in front of a brightly lit square mirror with ‘33’ written on the corner in black marker pen.
To my left is an angular, brown-skinned girl with her hair in tight curlers, speaking angrily into a mobile phone held several inches in front of her face, and to my right is a curvy blonde having her lips slowly and carefully painted black.
“Yo,” the blonde says somehow without moving them.
“Y-yo,” I stammer, taking my seat, quickly snapping a photo of the room and sending it to Nat, then plonking my mobile on the table in front of me.
“Parlez vous l’Anglais?” a pretty lady with a short brown bob says, checking the piece of paper she’s holding. “You speak English?”
“Mmm,” I mumble, because I’m now so overwhelmed I think I’ve forgotten how to.
She pops her knuckles loudly.
“Great,” she says with a grin. “I’m Léonie, by the way. Let’s get cracking.”
nd get cracking Léonie does.
For the next two hours, I am prodded, poked and rubbed so vigorously that I’m genuinely scared she’s about to break me.