There was something cowlike about them all, shifting their weight every so often on the sagging sofa cushions and against the straight-backed chairs. They were all so soft, so benign in their shared heftiness. They were, I realized, the exact opposite of the angular, nervous creatures I spent so much time with at work, whether models or other fashion editors, and I thought briefly of Maggie Beecher, who would—it had been confirmed in an email I had received the previous afternoon from Moff—be stepping into my shoes when the time came.
I had been pleased with the decision—as pleased as I could have felt given what else had happened. Maggie was the perfect solution to my problem. She wasn’t the usual entitled and immaculately polished young woman Moff was used to striding into the office—the sort who had a clutch of titles already on her résumé thanks to who her father was or where she’d been to school—but she had more talent than any of them.
Moff liked the glitz and the glamour by proxy that those women brought her, but I knew that what really mattered to my editor was good ideas and a sense of humor. A hard worker, good writer, and even better feminist, Maggie would be so indebted to me for giving her a year in the job that she wouldn’t consider screwing me over to keep it. I pictured Maggie’s earnest excitement when I’d first mentioned the vacancy to her: That sort of gratitude didn’t run out within twelve months.
Faced with my new crowd, and relieved to have a name for the replacement in my old life, I felt more positive than I had for the past seven days. I began to anticipate the little flourishes in my abdomen with excitement, rather than to dread them as harbingers of sadness. What had happened to Winnie was dreadful—cruel and unnecessary—but that wasn’t going to be my story.
When my turn came in the group welcome exercise, I smiled and said, “I’m Margot Jones, I’m nearly eighteen weeks pregnant, and I’m the fashion editor at Haute magazine.”
4
MAGGIE
She didn’t think she’d ever been happier than when she answered her phone to Emily Moffatt’s offering her the job as Margot’s cover.
That was one good thing about being single: She could admit that the best moments in life aren’t always the ones spent gazing into somebody else’s eyes or walking hand in hand along a sandy beach. Sometimes they come from good old hard work and achieving something tangible—like more money, seeing your name in print, and mentally replacing everything in your wardrobe with more expensive versions. She was joking about the last one. Sort of.
“I really liked your style in the interview, Maggie,” Emily Moffatt informed her over the phone in that slightly throaty West Country–posh voice of hers. At first, Maggie thought she meant her outfit and made a mental note to tell Cath that the blazer had done the trick, but then she realized the editor was talking about her attitude.
“You were so enthusiastic, so excitable,” the smooth voice continued in her ear. “So many people in this job are so jaded. It was enlivening to speak to someone who clearly wasn’t worried about being cool.”
Ouch.
It was true, Maggie had never been anything even approaching what the in-crowd would ever term “cool,” but the other woman was wrong about its not bothering her. She started worrying as soon as she’d hung up the phone.
She was terrified she’d sit down at Margot’s desk and the rest of the office would start laughing at Emily Moffatt’s elaborate joke, that a beautiful carbon copy of someone more like Margot would appear and poke her out of the way with a sharp anorexic elbow. Or that she’d show up in Milan and some shiny-haired PR with a clipboard would come and move her to a seat at the back where nobody else would have to look at her.
It wouldn’t even need to be that far-fetched: She worried she’d break the chair on her first day, because it’d be the first time an actual bum—as in, one with cheeks as well as bones—had sat on it. Which is why, from now until she started, she’d be going to the gym, mainly eating salads, and knocking back gallons of water a day in a bid to look more like the women who so unnerved her.
That all started tomorrow, of course, because she was going to have a glass of wine right now to celebrate. And maybe another one after that.
“We’ll speak again nearer the time, of course, but for now, I’d like you to come up with a few ideas and send them over to me directly,” the editor carried on, firing words at her. “Let’s get you writing for us as soon as possible.”
So you can knock me into shape, Maggie thought. It wasn’t just her waist that needed sculpting, it was her words. She was good at constructive criticism though, and once she had written for Emily Moffatt, she could write for anyone. This job was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to Maggie Beecher.
After they spoke, she went home and deleted all the dating apps from her phone: no distractions. She’d been for enough drinks with enough men who weren’t quite interested in her to last a lifetime, whereas an opportunity like this only happened so often. She intended to give this job her full attention.
She poured some white wine into the only clean mug in her and Cath’s kitchen, sipped it on the sofa, and racked her brains for something she might be able to write for Emily Moffatt. Moff, as they all called her. How would Maggie know when she was allowed to use that nickname too? Perhaps she signed an email with it, and then you knew you were in the club.
It might sound counterintuitive, but the way Maggie hunted for ideas was to see what everybody else had already done—it got the juices flowing in her own head. So as she drank her wine, she flicked through various blogs and news sites on her ancient, slow-functioning laptop. She’d be able to get a new one thanks to this job, and that fizzy, excited feeling returned to her stomach again.
Her mind wandered from what she might bring to Haute to the subject of everything Margot had already brought. She typed “Margot Jones” into the search engine and scrolled through the results. Lots of articles, unsurprisingly, from hot-off-the-press catwalk reports quickly typed even as the models were still leaving the runway to longer, more-in-depth interviews with celebrities and designers that she’d clearly crafted over a few days from her desk.
There was the occasional personal piece, too. She was funny, Margot, and had the all-important ability to laugh at herself. Reading through her counterpart’s back catalog, Maggie felt the fizz settle into something heavier in her stomach. Margot knew this job inside out; how would Maggie ever measure up?
Then she did what she had spent most of her twenties doing, what every psychologist she’d been to see in the years since had told her she mustn’t, and what she had eventually started fining herself for, with a little jar of coins that she kept on her bedside table.
She clicked the “Images” tab and prepared to compare herself ruthlessly and unforgivingly with a woman who made her feel a bit nervous and a bit fat.
She’d always done it; you probably have too. Ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriends, current boyfriend’s former girlfriends, the friends of those girlfriends, their sisters perhaps, frenemies, frolleagues—whatever you want to call them. She would stare at grainy snapshots of them online until she’d convinced herself that they were prettier, thinner, richer, happier, more clever, and more successful than her. Until she felt like the least important, the loneliest, the ugliest and most boring, most desperate person she knew.
This is where the wonders of modern technology have brought us: to the bathroom scales and the full-length mirror to measure our flaws and obsess over our imperfections. Do you think our grannies pored over sepia photographs of their neighbors and felt like shit? Maggie didn’t either.
The human psyche’s a fascinating place. There she was, only hours after having been on top of the world, in front of a screen full of photos of the woman she was supposed to be replacing. Her last psychologist would have called it “self-esteem sabotage.” Maggie took another swig of her wine and began scrolling.
Her
e was Margot crossing a street in Paris, presumably making her way from one couture show to another, wearing a caramel-colored sweater, shearling-lined biker jacket, and white jeans. White jeans! Maggie had banned most white items from her wardrobe on the grounds that she drank too much red wine for them to be viable. The fashion editor had the jacket loosely slung over her back without having put her arms in the sleeves, a styling trick Maggie now knew (more research, and more wine) that the fashion industry referred to as “shoulder-robing.”
There Margot was at a store launch in a gray trouser suit and black turtleneck, the oversized fit of the trousers and jacket conspiring to make her look even slimmer than she really was. Maggie had always wanted to be the sort of woman who could rock up in a suit, but the last time she’d worn one was to her Oxford interview (she didn’t get in) and she’d spent the whole day pulling the hems up away from puddles and the crotch seam out of her bum. Trouser suits were made for men, not for women with curves.
In the next picture Maggie found, Margot was posing awkwardly, as though she didn’t like having her photograph taken, on some steps. It must have been from quite a while ago, because she had bangs that had since grown out and her hair was much longer, past her boobs and almost to her waist. Her fluffy gray sweater had deliberately overlong sleeves that covered her hands, her knee-length navy skirt a distinct school-uniform look to it, despite being slit to the thigh. On her feet were black patent Mary Janes with a small kitten heel and her legs were encased to just below the knee in black woolen socks.
Maggie had to do a double take to check Margot wasn’t in costume, but there in the caption it said: “Margot Jones of Haute at London Fashion Week.” Behind her was a designer’s logo, the show she’d just come out of when the street-style photographer had caught her.
There was always a pack of them at the shows—photographers. They lurked on corners and outside venues during fashion week, hunters dressed in expensive wet-weather gear waiting to set off the click-click-click of their digital SLRs at the most deserving outfits they saw. The editors on the front row might have been the ones analyzing next season’s trends on the catwalk, but the pavement snappers reviewed them right back. Each flash of their cameras was a judgment in their favor, every time a lens was lowered without a picture’s being taken a slur on an ensemble no doubt painstakingly put together with precisely this moment in mind.
There was nothing more excruciating than walking up to the door of a show only to see the entire herd of photographers sheathe their cameras as you walked past. Maggie swore some of them did it with a dramatic flourish and a little sigh, just to make you feel even worse about disappointing them. Actually there was something more awful: being asked to step aside so they could get a shot of the person you were with that didn’t have you in it spoiling things.
She used to think the key to having your picture taken by them was to trick yourself out in an embarrassment of designer labels—specifically this season’s must-have bag or shoes, so that magazines could use pictures of people wearing them on their websites to say, “Yes, we were right: Look at these beautiful people with all the things we told you to buy last issue.” Not that they would have paid for them, though—most editors just borrowed stuff from the fashion cupboard for the shows, as though it was the world’s most glamorous branch of Blockbuster Video.
But even in her finery, Maggie had never been one of the ones chased by the photographers, the ones who stopped traffic by posing for the pack in the middle of the road or pretended to talk nonchalantly into their phones while presenting their best angles.
No, what the most photographed had in common wasn’t logos and bling, it was high cheekbones, glossy hair, big eyes, pouting lips. Because it was never really about the clothes at all, but about how beautiful you were. How your chromosomes clashed together to make your face; how well your grandparents picked a mate. You could turn up for the pack in a clown suit if you were beautiful and they’d still take your picture.
That’s what Maggie thought as she looked at the weird avant-garde schoolgirl getup that Margot had on in this last photo and felt once again the twang of panic at never being able to live up to her. Fashion wasn’t at all about clothes, it was about the person wearing them and whether they were found worthy of admiration. And that’s when she had an idea that she knew Emily Moffatt would love.
* * *
MAGGIE WAS SITTING at the breakfast bar in her and Cath’s flat eating avocado on toast for lunch when she saw the name appear on her phone screen. She’d sent the email only a few hours earlier, so the editor must have liked what she saw. Maggie had heard this about Emily Moffatt, that when she got excited about something, she got really excited about it—sometimes her enthusiasm ran to several phone calls, texts, and emails a day.
“I love it,” she said when Maggie picked up, skipping the hellos. “Let’s do the shoot next week. I’ll put you in touch with Holly, she’ll get the clothes ready. Write it up for the Friday after that.”
“Great!” Maggie grinned into the phone. “That’s so kind of you, I’m so excited, I’m really glad you liked the idea!”
“Yes, well,” Emily Moffatt replied, cutting her off in her raptures. “Next week.”
“Brilliant,” Maggie said, and then: ‘Thanks so much—Moff.”
There was a moment of hesitation at the end of the line, a faint note somewhere between cough and surprise, and then the phone went dead.
A shoot. For the magazine. She’d be in those pages alongside the models and celebrities and society girls. People would open the issue, as Maggie had been doing for years, and wonder who she was, this glamorous, important person. Perhaps teenagers would study her in there, as she had those pages in her bedroom aged fifteen or so, and decide there and then that this was it: This was the job they wanted, the one they’d set their sights on throughout school and university, the one they’d be so proud to tell their friends and their family about once they got it.
After Maggie had had her brain wave the night before, she’d jotted down the bare bones of it in her notepad, finished her wine, and slept on it. Sometimes even good ideas had a tendency to unravel under scrutiny. She wanted to make sure she was offering up something that would work.
The premise was simple: that Maggie was not a fashion editor—yet—but that she’d be expected to become one once she took up the job. How does a civilian step into the most stylish shoes in the world? That was what she intended to write about in her first piece for Haute, and if she was being honest, she hoped to find out the answer along the way too.
She suspected that the “Holly” Moff had suggested would have a lot to do with it. As the magazine’s stylist, it was Holly’s job to dress everyone who appeared on its pages, taking into account the latest trends and their personal tastes, but mainly according to whatever Moff decreed. Maggie knew Emily Moffatt would want her to look the part in the pictures, but she quailed at the idea of baring her own scruffy self in a magazine more usually populated with unreasonably attractive celebrities.
On the counter, her phone buzzed with a message: “We’ll make you fabulous,” it said, “plenty of Photoshop.”
Not a woman to spare anybody’s feelings, Emily Moffatt.
* * *
WHEN THE DAY of the shoot came, Maggie had had her hair blow-dried and her nails done and had laid off the bread for a week in the knowledge that everybody looks fatter on camera—especially if they’re a bit fat to start with.
“Break a leg, Maggie!” Cath called as she ran out of the flat and into the car they’d sent to pick her up. The driver acted as though she was somebody significant, opening the door for her and pointing out the mineral water he’d left in the leather armrest.
I could get used to this, Maggie thought, and then she remembered the fact that all this glamour, all this opulence, had an end date—when Margot returned—and felt suddenly, momentarily, bereft even thou
gh her adventure had barely begun. It would be hard to hand it all back, she realized.
Everyone was so welcoming when she got to the studio that the worried feeling in her stomach dissipated almost immediately. Maggie had a tendency to spin out and had done so en route about it all being a ruse to humiliate her, imagining that the pictures would be so hideous the only use they’d be able to find for them was a feature on how not to dress.
It was times like this, when she used all her tactics to subdue the panic rising in her chest, that she most felt the absence of a boyfriend, a deep-voiced, calming influence who’d tell her, with quiet authority and gentle insistence, to shut up and stop acting crazy. Then again, it wasn’t like any of the men she’d dated had ever done that—at least, not in a nice way.
Holly turned out to be one of those women who looked like they’ve strolled straight out of the 1970s: long, straight brown hair and bangs; high-waisted flares and platform sandals; a soft and well-washed band T-shirt tucked in to emphasize her tiny, willowy waist. Maggie had always wanted to wear clothes like that, but she’d look like she was on her way to a nostalgia event. She made a hasty note in her pad for the piece about how the line between style and costume is blurred for fashion editors.
“I’ve got a few outfits for you,” Holly began even before Maggie had taken her seat to have her makeup done. The last time she had had someone do it for her had been her sister’s wedding, when it had felt troweled on inches thick and cracked every time she smiled. That woman had also been the person who’d done the bouquets; the woman on set today was French, with a closely cropped, curly blond quiff that signified her cool credentials, and Maggie doubted her talents ran to floristry.
“Moff was pretty specific about what she wants—daytime casual, daytime smart, evening casual, and then—my personal favorite—glamorama,” Holly continued, ticking off items on her fingers.
The New Girl Page 4