Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  As Kamil leaned over the old man, Shirkuh took his head in his hands and kissed it. “You have done well, my nephew. You have chosen a good partner. I like your plan, and I think it will earn us all some good money. I am proud.”

  Deep down I think I’d assumed that something would go wrong, that the plan would never be allowed to ripen and bear fruit. Someone would be eaten by a crocodile, or struck by a golden ball blown off a pawnbroker’s, or an earthquake would swallow Tokyo, leading to global economic meltdown. But now, amazingly, it was all systems go. For the next month I worked harder than I’d ever worked before, harder than I thought it was possible to work.

  On Monday I phoned around the half-dozen fabric agents I knew. I was looking for relatively small amounts of cloth, and it was easy enough to find stray rolls that nobody else wanted. I’d always got on quite well with the agents: down-to-earth middle-aged men, for the most part, more than happy to give me a good deal in exchange for a quick flirt, especially as I was after the odds and sods that often went unclaimed. In a week I had what I needed; not exactly what I wanted, but just enough to make the samples.

  Nor was the basic designing too difficult. I had sketches and ideas galore, and after another week of pencil chewing, head scratching, magazine thumbing, and general, all-purpose pondering, I had half a dozen Penny Moss pastiches, which I knew the buyers would go for. I tried to make things just a touch funkier and younger than the Penny Moss stuff, but nothing that could frighten the horse-faced women of Wiltshire, and Hereford, and Rutland. I’d discarded anything that required serious tailoring, concentrating on sexy, fifties retro dresses. Keeping a cap on costs meant we had to stick primarily to fresh cottons and printed viscose. The colors were mainly sugar almond and pretty pastel, pointing sometimes at Marilyn Monroe, sometimes at Courtney Love. I was proudest of a halter-neck jersey wrap dress, in a wild chocolate-and-aquamarine print. Very Diane von Furstenberg. Probably too crazy to sell that well, but I needed one small indulgence or it all would have been too soul destroying.

  But I always knew the tough bit would begin when the fabric and designs had been settled. Every fashion student learns pattern cutting. And then forgets it. It’s difficult, boring, time-consuming, and plebe-y. A bit like life drawing for art students. Anything other than a casual disdain for pattern cutting amounts to admitting that you’ll never be a real designer, with other people to do that for you. And of course, it’s the one really useful skill that fashion college teaches, or could teach if the silly students had any brains. Good pattern cutters never go hungry or end up working in McDonald’s like most of the people I went to college with.

  Stupidly, like the others, I bunked off from pattern cutting, learning just enough to scrape through the exams. I then went through all my memory files and wiped out whatever feeble scraps of knowledge might have adhered, just in case they got in the way of anything more important. The result was that I now had to relearn painfully all the horrid little tricks of the trade (never put a center back seam through a bias dress; don’t confuse your model with your customer). I felt like a stroke victim having to learn again how to talk, and go to the lavatory, and eat without dribbling mush down her chin. Yet it felt good. I was making real things with my hands, cutting, with each snip of the scissors, into the woven fabric of the world.

  Latifa loved it all. Suddenly, from nowhere, she had a job she didn’t hate, a job that paid her enough not to have to fret about the bus fare to work. She threw herself into every task I gave her and watched everything I did, so she could learn the ways of production. The awkward thing about dragging someone up from the ranks is the possibility of resentment from those not so graced, as I knew all too well. But none of the machinists seemed to mind, and Latifa acted as the perfect link between the office and the shop floor. She made a point of getting the best of the machinists to run their eyes over the designs to help advise over what was possible and what merely fanciful.

  It was Latifa’s idea to have the catwalk show for the girls.

  “I don’t think we can,” I said at first. “We haven’t got enough of the collection ready. You know we’re only just doing the toiles.” (Toiles are mock-ups in calico to give the designer an idea how things are going.)

  “Couldn’t we roughly make some up in the proper fabric, just four or five pieces? It’ll give a much better idea what they’ll look like.”

  “I suppose we could, but it seems mad having a show when we’re still only halfway there.”

  Although I could see the problems, I quite liked the idea, and I was open to further persuasion.

  “It’ll be a laugh,” said Latifa, gaining confidence from the absence of a blanket refusal. “And more important, it’s the way to get the best out of the girls. It’ll make them all feel part of the plan. Working here with your nose in the machine all day, you never get the chance to understand the big picture; you never even really see the whole garment you’ve just made. My dad was a right bolshie, and he used to go on about how people are alienated from the product of their labor, and that makes them hate their work. Not that he knew much about labor: he was on the dole most of the time. Well, anyway, this is a way of dealienating the workers.”

  I was impressed with her argument; perhaps it could really help to pull the team together. And boy, did we need that.

  “Okay, then,” I said decisively. “But you’ll have to be the model.”

  “Katie!” she said, clearly delighted. “I can’t do that! I can’t do the walk, you know, the bum thing!”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “I’ll do it if you do it, too.”

  “Deal.”

  So four days later all twenty machinists, chattering and giggling with expectancy, plus Kamil and Vicky, crammed into the showroom. Several of the women had brought in food, and spicy samosas, onion bhajis, and vegetable pakoras were passed around, to be washed down with sweet tea and cans of full-fat Coke. I noticed that some of the women had put on eye makeup and lipstick, which I hadn’t seen before. Latifa brought in a ghetto blaster, and the urgent, breathless sound of Bhangra, a high-energy cross of Eastern and Western dance music, filled the air. Kamil went around joking with the girls, squeezing arms and patting knees in a slightly forced attempt at familiarity, but even that couldn’t spoil the sense of fun.

  “Like Versace in bloody Paris, damn right it is, eh?” he said to Pratima and Bina, who were standing together, carefully ignoring each other at point-blank range. Their eyes met for a second before they had to cover their mouths with their hands to hide their laughter. “Yeah, Versace, or maybe Christian Dior,” he continued, pouting a little.

  Latifa and I were watching through a crack in the door.

  “Out you go, girl,” I said, patting her bottom.

  And out she went, dancing and skipping to the Bhangra beat, in the first of the print dresses. The women outside gasped and laughed and clapped. There were playful taunts and jokes in all of the factory languages. They were more respectful when I went out but still smiled and clapped in time to the music. I was careful about using only the longer dresses (particularly on Latifa) so as not to offend their sensibilities, but I think the holiday atmosphere would have excused almost anything short of full-blown nudity. It helped, of course, that we were all girls together, apart from Kamil, the palace eunuch.

  So we took it in turns, helping each other in and out of the clothes and swigging from an illicit bottle of gin. Nothing was quite finished, and there were plenty of dangling threads and pinned hems, but that hardly mattered, and any defects were lost in the swirl and music and laughter. I let Latifa finish with a very rough approximation to the Diane von Furstenberg number (it was taking a long time to get it to fall in the right way, but you could tell that it was going to be something special), and even Vicky roused herself sufficiently to say, “Wow!”

  At the end I made a little speech thanking them all for their efforts. I had to single out Vimla and Pratima for special praise, as they’d done most of th
e skilled work, but the others didn’t seem to mind and clapped them enthusiastically, which made them both blush and look down at their feet. I could see that they were moved.

  It seemed very quiet in the flat when I got home that night.

  You’re probably wondering about what I did when I wasn’t working. In one way I can answer that by simply saying that I was never not working. Every waking second at least a part of my brain was worrying at a problem, eating silently into it, like bacteria on a tooth: the best way to stitch that panel or join that collar; the areas to skimp, the details to get right.

  I did see Carol and Ursula one evening, but I couldn’t talk to them about my life, and they didn’t even seem that interested. What did they care of Kilburn? They wanted the old Katie, light, and bitchy, and silly; they wanted tales about famous designers, and models, and actresses. I began one story about a beautiful actress, generally perceived as sincere and “real,” who was trying on dresses in her suite at Claridge’s. “It’s no good,” she squealed (Milo, of course, swore he was there, and it wasn’t impossible), “I can’t choose, I can’t choose! I just look so pretty in all of them.” But then I saw their eyes, and I realized I had told them the story before. For the first time ever, our parting “must do this again soon” sounded insincere.

  Jonah took me out to the pub two or three times. Not, I should stress, the Black Lamb, but to a quiet place in St. John’s Wood that made me think of Primrose Hill, long ago and far away. He talked gently about philosophy and the way to find a meaning in life. He seemed pleased about the developments at Ayyub’s. It struck him as all very camelish. He asked me if, now I was “more stable, and a bit less, you know, crackers,” I wanted to talk things through with Liam. I thought about it for a moment, but the answer was no. He had saved his marriage at my expense, which, if one looked at it with cool detachment, was an understandable thing to do, even if he was a fucking lying rat. On balance I really felt very little animosity.

  Every couple of weeks I’d have a Ludo evening. I’d take out the bag with the socks and pants, open a bottle of wine, and take them both to bed, where I would weep myself to sleep. Indulgent, I know, but cheaper and less fattening than pizza.

  So, summing up, my life had settled into a pattern of intense and actually quite satisfying work, essentially unrelieved by any kind of social activity at all (assuming you discount my affair with the laundry bag). And it was okay. Until I looked up and found that it was Christmas.

  I had always tried to be cynical about Christmas: the tawdry commercialism, the false emotions, the terrible telly. But somehow it always got me in the end. As soon as the Oxford Street lights went on, I would feel a little (say, two-espresso) thrill of elation. Christmas was always fun at work. The shops were busy, which kept the girls happy, and Penny insisted on decorations in the office and the studio, which somehow took the edge off the usual bitching and backbiting. If we’d had a good season, and often even if we hadn’t, Penny would take everyone out for a posh dinner at San Lorenzo or Le Caprice. Hugh was always at his best at the Christmas dinner, flirting methodically with everyone from whichever new callow teenager we had in the shop to Dorothy, the seventy-five-year-old cleaner. Penny would make a speech, which, after beginning well with hearty thanks and congratulations to all present, would usually drift off into one of the familiar anecdotes involving proposals by show business luminaries of yesteryear.

  It had to be different at Ayyub’s. There wasn’t the money for much in the way of festivity, even if there hadn’t been religious sensitivities to take into account. I talked to Kamil about a bonus for the machinists, but he replied:

  “Katie, you want us to go upmarket, I agree. You decide we must pay our ladies top rates for the job minimum wage, I agree. You want a production assistant, I agree. You say we must allow the ladies to be sick, I agree.” (That last, incidentally, with astounding bad grace.) “But now you want a special payment for doing nothing, to mark a festival we don’t celebrate. That, Katie, is going damn shit too far, too far.”

  The best I could do was persuade him to close an hour early on Christmas Eve. As I was packing up, Latifa and two of the machinists came into the office.

  “We’ve got you something,” Latifa said shyly. “Something for Christmas. It was Vimla’s idea. It isn’t much.” She pushed Vimla forward. “Here—” Vimla gave me a box, tied neatly with a pink ribbon.

  “Can I open it now?”

  Presents were, of course, what I always liked best about Christmas. Before our first together, Ludo had asked me what I wanted. I’d replied casually, “Oh, nothing, really, just a book or something cheap,” and the idiot took it at face value. Now I can dissemble with the best of them, but even Ludo must have seen that the look on my face when I unwrapped The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was not ecstatic joy. That was a lesson I made sure he learned.

  But a gift from the girls? I was hugely touched, but also fearful.

  “Yeah,” said Latifa.

  I unwrapped the box carefully, keen that they should see that I treated their gift with the proper reverence. I saw it. I gasped. My worst fears were confirmed. It was a hideous gewgaw, a knickknack. Of all things, an ornament. It was a little porcelain bird, a goldfinch, or bullfinch, or some finch. It served no purpose, it had no function. It was ugly and ill made. It could have been a metaphor for all of the things I had come to London to escape.

  Yet even as my aesthetic sense recoiled, I felt my heart swell with emotion. These women, who hardly knew me and for whom I had done very little, had contributed out of their meager earnings to buy me this. I turned upon their expectant faces my best smile, and like the orgasms I used to fake for Ludo, the smile became real. I kissed the three of them, Latifa, Vimla, and Rahima. I then rushed into the machine room to throw a net of tearful thanks over the others.

  It was the bullfinch that decided me on home. The idea of going back to East Grinstead had hovered in the back of my mind for a week. I hadn’t spent a Christmas with Mum and Dad since I first came to London. But the idea of spending it alone by the telly with an individual Christmas pudding was hard to face. Both Jonah and Kamil had made separate offers, and each had been rejected as politely as I could.

  So I went back to Kilburn that afternoon, packed a bag, took the tube to Victoria, and trundled through the suburbs of south London on the train to East Grinstead. For a moment, as we left behind the rows of terraced houses, I thought it had begun to snow, but it was only sleet against the window, and that soon turned to a heavy, black rain.

  There were no cabs at the station, and I was drenched and freezing when I reached 139 Achilles Mount, aka Daisybank. Dad answered the door. He looked blankly at me for a couple of seconds. He was probably expecting carol singers, or vandals, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or anyone except for his own daughter.

  “Katie,” he said finally. “You’d better come in. Your mum’ll be pleased.”

  I took off my coat and hung it in the hall. Mum appeared in the kitchen doorway. Dad put his hand on my shoulder, then wrapped his arms around me. Mum hovered, and I disengaged from Dad and squeezed her.

  “How long are you here for?” she asked.

  “Christmas. A few days. If that’s okay?”

  “It’s lucky we got you a present,” said Dad.

  “For me? But how did you know?”

  “Oh well, we always get you one, just in case.”

  And that year I got eight presents from my parents, one for each year I had been away, each retrieved from the back of the wardrobe, still in its wrapping. Each must have been agonized over, so close did they come to being right.

  “How’s that young chap of yours?” asked Dad on Christmas afternoon as Mum watched on quietly from the corner of the settee. “Seemed like a very nice, well-brought-up sort of fellow. Helped me fix the broken . . . the broken . . . whatever it was out in the shed.”

  It was a question I’d been dreading. They’d met Ludo once. I was worried about bringing him home to m
eet them, but Ludo insisted. I thought it would be a catastrophe, but in fact they all got along quite well. Dad took Ludo out to help him mend the whatever-it-was in his shed—Ludo was always good with machines and gadgets—and they came back laughing and joking like old friends. At the time, I held it as a black mark against Ludo. The old Katie, the mad Katie, as I now thought of her, didn’t want a boyfriend who liked the ways of East Grinstead. She wanted a fellow Metropolitan sneerer. But now, looking back on Ludo’s easy, down-to-earth charm and good manners, I saw it as yet another reason to love and to mourn him.

  “I messed up, Dad.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “You never know, Katie,” said Mum, “he might come back.”

  “Yeah,” I said to comfort them, “he might come back.”

  “Because you know your father once made a big mistake, and he thought he’d lost everything. But I forgave him, and I’m glad I did.”

  My dad turned and smiled at her and took her hand. What had been his sin? I wondered. Surely not another woman? But what else could it be? What else is it ever? Suddenly I saw Mum and Dad as real people caught up in the same passions and temptations as I was. I know it’s not an original insight: Ooh, look, the older generation are human, too! But it hit me with the force of revelation, and Mum and Dad paradoxically came at the same time into a sharper and yet a softer focus: I saw them with greater clarity and yet more sympathy.