Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  Paris meant Première Vision—the world’s biggest fabric fair. For the past two years I’d gone along with Penny, as her girl Friday. It was the polar opposite of Mile End, the good to its bad.

  “Anyway,” she added with her characteristic contempt for logic, “aren’t you going to a party tonight? I haven’t been to a party for months and I don’t complain.”

  “What about cocktails at the Peruvian embassy last Thursday to push vicuna yarn?”

  “Darling, that was business and not pleasure. And I still don’t know what a vicuna is, which was the main reason I went.”

  “But didn’t you get legless and have to be escorted out for biting a general’s gold braid to see if it was real?”

  “I was only being playful. And he wasn’t a proper general. But he did have such a virile . . . mustache.” The line paused as Penny drifted off into a romantic Latin American reverie involving, or so I imagined, an abduction by the besotted colonel, adventures with wild gauchos, a palace coup, a forced wedding, the adoring crowds, the assassin’s bullet, a coronation . . . “Anyway,” continued the queen presumptive of Peru, “that wasn’t a real party. What I want is a party with paparazzi and people I’ve heard of. It’s not for me, you understand: it’s for the good of the company. We need a . . . one of those things, you know, a higher profile.”

  “Well, why not come tonight, then?” I only said it because I knew she wouldn’t.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Katie. I wouldn’t dream of gate-crashing. And I don’t even know where it is.” I was a little concerned about the relish with which she pronounced “gate-crashing,” which suggested that the idea had a wicked appeal.

  “Look, Penny,” I said, “come or don’t come, it’s entirely up to you. But now I have to get home: I haven’t a clue yet what I’m going to wear.”

  “Oh. Okay. And Mile End—you will remember to kiss Cavafy for me, won’t you?” she said.

  “Of course, Penny,” I said, suppressing with an effort that made my eyes water, a jostling crowd of curses and expletives.

  CHAPTER 2

  In Matching

  Knickerbockers

  The party to which Penny alluded was a launch at Momo’s. I can’t remember what was being launched—chocolate-flavored vodka or something—it never really matters. Milo, naturally, was doing the PR, and the place was packed with B- and C-list celebs. Not all fashion, of course, but given that it was one of Milo’s, there was bound to be a fashiony feel. There were models, a smattering of out-of-favor designers, and a few vaguely familiar telly people from daytime soaps or early evening quizzes. Milo had clearly been coasting: this really wasn’t his best work. The one real catch was Jude Law, who’d promised to make an appearance in return for the indefinite loan of a Gucci lizardskin jacket.

  I was in my element. I have, you see, the sort of face that people think they know: people are always convinced that they’ve seen me on something. And best of all, I knew people in several of the discrete clusters that had formed. That meant I could island-hop, moving from one to another as soon as the conversation dulled, which in the PR fashion cosmos took on average four and a half minutes.

  First, there was Milo’s lot by the bar: that’s Milo himself, PR Queen of London, sleek and wondrously handsome in black neoprene suit and a pair of piebald ponyskin shoes. Next to him, close as a gun in a holster, there pressed Xerxes, Milo’s Persian Boy. Xerxes was an exquisite miniature, eyes dark and lustrous. Milo said he was a Zoroastrian, a fire worshiper, and that he’d never let him blow out a match but would make him wait until the flame had eaten all the wood and licked at his fingers. No one had ever heard him speak. Some said he was dumb. Others disputed his origins. I’d heard, of course, the story about Xerxes being a Bangladeshi waiter, but who knew the truth in this world of rumor, fantasy, and Fendi handbags?

  Pippin, Milo’s ex, a perpetually resting actor, hovered close by, although it was hard to work out if his interest was in his old lover, or the Persian Boy, or the barman, or the bar. Pippin was a hard one to like. Pretty, of course, in a high-cheekboned, floppy-haired, pastiche Eton kind of way—he would never otherwise have kept Milo’s attention for eighteen months. But there was something fetid and creepy about him, as if he’d just pulled himself away from an act of gross indecency with a minor.

  Two of Milo’s PR girls fluttered among them. I called them Kookai and Kleavage. Although I always thought of them as essentially the same person, and indeed often mixed them up, there were some differences. Physically they weren’t alike at all. Kookai was a pretty little thing, soooo Asian babe that I could never understand why she wasn’t reading the news on Channel 4. Sadly, she was also too dumb to realize that all she had to do was ask and she could drape herself from head to toe in the Prada and Paul Smith samples that lined the office walls back at Smack! PR. Hence Kookai.

  Not a mistake that Kleavage was to make. Less naturally attractive than Kookai, with a jawline perhaps a little too well defined, she was nearly always the best-dressed girl in the room. Best dressed and least dressed, showing off her miraculous tits and supermodel midriff. Where Kookai was sheer gush, Kleavage was always more calculating: you could see her working out the angles, searching with those violet eyes for openings . . . weaknesses. So different from the broadband PR lovebeam that was Kookai.

  I slipped in beside Milo, who was whispering something obscene into the ear of the Persian Boy. He looked at me, frowned for a nanosecond, and then kissed me on the lips, sliding in his tongue just long enough to make his point.

  “You look amazing,” he said with that luscious, creamy voice of his. The voice had been his making; telesales his first arena; cold-calling his métier. “Yes,” you’d have said to the double glazing, “Yes, yes,” to the encyclopedias, “Oh, God! Please, yes,” to the financial services, and only ever, perhaps, “No,” to the dog shampoo. So that fifty-thousand stake was his, and Smack! PR born.

  The tongue trick worked on most people, throwing them off their stride, giving him an instant advantage.

  “Put your tongue in my mouth again, you fucking old queen, and I’ll bite it off,” I replied. It’s what I always said.

  “Less of the ‘old,’” he said, looking around with theatrical paranoia, “there are clients about.”

  We bantered for a little while, with Kookai and Kleavage giggling and trying to join in, Pippin smoking and self-consciously ignoring us, and the Persian Boy lost in his private world of fire, or chicken tikka masala.

  “Where’s your handsome rustic?” said Milo after a while, miming a telescope. “Haven’t left him back at the flat with an individual pork pie and a work of improving literature, have we?”

  Pippin giggled like a girl showing her knickers to the boys for the first time.

  I didn’t like Milo sneering at Ludo—that was my job, and it’s different when you love someone—but I couldn’t object without slithering down a snake to the bottom of the board.

  “Really, Milo,” I replied quickly, “surely you know that it’s after we get married that I start to leave him at home. He’s looking for the cloakroom. Could be hours.”

  “After you’re married?” Milo said slyly. “Have you set a date, then? Or are we still in the realms of whim and fancy?”

  I wasn’t sure if Milo had deliberately passed from teasing into malice, but he had found his way unfailingly to the nerve.

  “Milo, I know you’re bitter about never having the chance to be the glorious center of attention of everyone you know for a whole day, and never getting to wear white, and never having troops of pretty choir boys sing your praise, and never having literally hundreds of presents forced upon you, and never having a cake with a tiny statue of you on it, but you have to rise above all that.”

  Had I gone too far? Milo was famous for his grudges, which could lie dormant for years before bursting into poisonous fruit. But no, the operatic look of spite he threw my way was reassuring.

  “You can keep the juicer,” he said throug
h pursed lips, “and just how many Gucci ashtrays do you need? A wedding is a tiny rent in the straight universe that gives you a glimpse of the infinite glory of the camp beyond. I’m there already.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” said Pippin from the bar.

  As soon as I felt Milo’s eyes begin to flicker over my shoulder, I moved on—talk to any PR for more than five minutes and it’ll happen to you. The core of the next group was formed by three models, one posher than princesses, one of the middling sort, and the last born under the chemical cloud that covers Canvey Island, in deepest Essex. Despite spanning the entire range of the English class structure, there were few differences between them discernible to the naked eye: they all smoked the same cigarettes, they all had the same hair, the same black-ringed eyes, the same magnificent bones, and here, unshielded by the doting camera’s veil, the same tired skin.

  I knew Canvey Island quite well: she’d modeled for us more than once. She had a little more conversation than the other two, but even so it was limited to accounts of her appalling sexual experiences. I always liked her story about losing her virginity at thirteen to a guy with a tight curly perm and pencil mustache, who’d picked her up at a nightclub in Billericay. He started dancing next to her, expertly separating her from her friends, his white slip-on shoes moving like two maggots on a hook. He bought her three sweet martini-and-lemonades and then led her outside to a Ford Escort van in the car park. He exclaimed, “Ta-da!” and threw open the back doors to reveal a flowery mattress, with a stain the size and color of a dead dog in its precise center. He bundled her into the back, fumbling at his stone-washed jeans. Her skirt was up and her knickers off before she knew what was happening. His cock was smaller than a minitampon, so she felt little pain. After four weasily thrusts he came, yelping out an excited, “Fuckfuckfuck.” With a smirk of satisfaction he tied a knot in his condom and chucked it down the side of the mattress, where it joined dozens more. He locked up the van and went back to the club. She went for some chips and ate them as she walked home.

  She was telling the story again to four men strutting and preening around the models. Two were tall and good-looking, two squat and ugly: a footballer and the footballer’s agent, an actor and the actor’s agent. The actor had made his name playing East End villains in low-budget British gangster films, but a public school drawl kept breaking through the studied Cockney. The footballer was famous for biting the testicles of a more talented opponent, and this singular act of brutality had mysteriously given him access to the world of celebrity. I sensed that my presence was desired and realized at once why—I’d round out the numbers nicely. But I knew I’d be stuck with one of the uglies. Life, like these agents, was too short. And Ludo, of course, was out there, somewhere. I smiled and moved on. Still, the footballer had been rather good-looking, decked out by some tame stylist in an Oswald Boateng suit, conventionally, almost boringly, tailored, but showing, when he moved, flashes of brilliant electric blue lining, like a fish turning on a coral reef.

  There were, naturally, endless scrounging journos. I knew most of the fashion writers, “the clittorati,” as Milo called them, as bitchy in the flesh as they are fawning on paper. They were never quite sure what to make of me. They knew that I was oily rag, a production pleb. But they also knew that I was heir presumptive to the Penny Moss throne. And, okay, it’s Ruritania, and not the Holy fucking Roman Empire, but royalty’s royalty, after all.

  “Hi, Katie. So what are we all going to be wearing next year?” said one, but with a flickering eye that added silently, As if you’d know.

  “Oh, you’re in luck,”—I smiled back—“it’s kaftans, kaftans, kaftans.” I pirouetted away without waiting to see if it detonated.

  I preferred the nonfashion hacks, honest cynics, eyes peeled for the goody bags and the drinks tray, even if, as one of them slurred into my ear: “Christ, Katie, we stand out in this crowd like white clots of fat in a black pudding.”

  Who else? Ah, the nervous group of execs from the Norwegian vodka company, terrified in case they’d made some dreadful mistake, but completely unaware of what a mistake, or a triumph, would look like. I thought about being nice and talking to them, telling them how well it was going, but life, like a Norwegian winter’s day, is just too short.

  In truth, it wasn’t going that well. Jude Law had still not appeared. I wondered if Momo had perhaps borrowed the security people from Voyage and they hadn’t let him in—“sorry, darling, this really is more of a snakeskin party.” The free drinks had run out and the journos were quick to follow. I went to find Ludo.

  As I’d figure-of-eighted around the room, Ludo had waited patiently in a corner, moving only to reach for the trays of chocolate-flavored vodka, or vodka-flavored chocolate, or whatever, as they floated by. He was hammered and had turned melancholic.

  “Fucking hell, Katie,” he began, the language harmless in his gentle voice, “you’ve left me standing here like a cunt all evening.” He’d taken to using the dreaded c-word. He claimed he wasn’t trying to shock, but that it was an attempt to reclaim it, like rap artists calling each other nigger. I didn’t quite see how that worked, with him being a man and not a woman, and therefore not having one to reclaim, but I usually let it pass.

  “Ludo, you’re a grown-up; there are plenty of people here that you know. Why didn’t you talk to them?”

  “I tried a couple of times. But you know how it is: there’s nothing I have to say that would interest them.”

  I pictured Ludo explaining some innovative use of a scientific metaphor in the poetry of John Donne to a ditzy Marie Claire stylist, and I felt one of my waves of affection. Perhaps I should have talked to him, or introduced him, or something. But I’d been trying that for eons, and it never worked. I’d introduce him to someone nice in fashion, or a Channel 5 TV director, and he’d bark into their ear about sea eagles and that would be that. And I had to be strict: every couple needs at least one set of teeth between them.

  “Oh, come on, Ludo. It’s not my fault that you’ve got about as much small talk as a cactus. And you hate fashion people, and anyone trying to sell things, or make money, or enjoy themselves.”

  “Then why do you make me come to these bloody things?” The tone was half whine, half grump. Not attractive.

  “No one made you come, and you know you’d only sulk if I didn’t invite you.”

  “I should have been marking,” he slurred on. “I mean, look at these people. What have they got to offer the world? How would the world be a worse place if they were all burnt to death in a tragic airship disaster?”

  “But who would organize parties if Milo wasn’t around? And who would people take pictures of if there weren’t models? Really, Ludo, you are silly.”

  It was then that I noticed it arrive. I’ve no idea how it managed to pass through the security cordon: perhaps the heavies were shocked into torpor. The “it” was a beige safari suit, fastened at the front with a mathematically ingenious system of leather laces and eyelets. And at the bottom, omigod, there they were in all their obscene glory: the matching knickerbockers, laced with wanton exuberance under the knee. This wasn’t seventies revival, oh no. This was seventies pure and simple, served straight up, as she comes, rayon in tooth and claw. It was prawn cocktail, and steak tartar, and bird’s angel delight; it was Demis Roussos backed by the Swingle Singers. It was Penny.

  The conversation came back to me. Days before in the office, Penny had described the suit.

  “That’s so in,” I’d said. “You have to wear it.”

  It’s the kind of thing you always say when people tell you about the old stuff in their wardrobes.

  “Really? Perhaps I will,” she replied, and I tuned-out to concentrate on the dancing lines of figures in the costings book.

  The problem—the mistake, if you like—was the gap between the seventies in the seventies and the seventies now. You see, whenever there is a revival there are always touches, not necessarily subtle, that distinguish it
from the real thing. Miss those touches and you look like a children’s entertainer. Penny was certainly providing entertainment. Her progress through the party was followed with rapt attention, the very intensity of which somehow drove out the wholly natural laughter reflex. Penny’s actressy poise, her wonderfully controlled refusal to glance around her, gave the whole thing something of the flavor of a visit by an aloof Hapsburg dowager to a small town in Montenegro.

  Ludo saw her, too. “Mum . . . oh, Mum,” he mouthed, and shrank back into the shadows like a schoolboy who knows he’s about to be kissed in front of his mates. I was caught between admiration and horror. How I’d love to have a tungsten ego like that, such a flagrant assumption that my whims were a sure guide to glory. But for now it was good to be on the outside laughing in.

  Bloodhound keen, her nose led her to the bar and, coincidentally, into the middle of Milo and his courtiers. I winced in anticipation of the rebuff she must surely receive: would she perish by fire or by ice? Milo, abetted by his jackals, was adept at both.

  Penny began a conversation. I heard the odd phrase— “Warren Beatty and I . . . Prince Rainier . . . often at Sandringham”—above the renewed party hubbub. And miraculously, I saw that Penny was dappled with laughter. Milo smiled indulgently on her; Pippin had turned from the bar and was whinnying appreciatively; Kookai and Kleavage coiled themselves like cats around her legs.

  The explanation was simple: Penny had found her way by chance or instinct to the one place in the party where she would find a receptive audience. You see, as had suddenly become clear to me, Penny was a fag hag waiting to happen; and her moment had come. Here the absurd miscalculation of her attire was transformed into a camp triumph. Here her curiously masculine femininity could be seen as the playful challenge of the drag queen.

  I thought about rejoining the group but decided that the moment was too perfect to risk spoiling. And anyway, it wasn’t fair on Ludo. He looked pleadingly at me and said: “Please please please, we have to go now, before she sees us.”