“I hope you’re not upset,” he said, his voice filled with chivalrous détente. “Here, can I help you?” he offered, and reached toward the pile she had so painstakingly tidied up before her.
Caught staring, I forced my head to swivel downward like I had dropped something on the floor.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Madeline said to him, with a disappointed drop in her voice. I crossed the threshold of the classroom, my strides as regimented as a soldier’s, and her words were drowned out by my harried footsteps against the marble floor.
I SPENT TWENTY MINUTES WAITING IN THE LINE AT FEDEX, stuck behind a balding head that resembled the swirling eye of a hurricane. I spent ten minutes waiting for them to retrieve the package, then another twenty in traffic, and by the time I had returned to the Régine office with the Alexander McQueen package, I was ten minutes late for the run-through.
Standing by a table of accessories was Edmund Benneton, Régine’s fashion director and my personal idol. In a royal blue cape and a matching turban like some great maharaja, I recognized him even from behind.
Sabrina and Clara were crowding around him, along with a male and female editor I hadn’t met yet. Behind a fortress of clipboards, they all slanted over his shoulders in an attentive formation, pens poised like bayonets. Edmund was staring at a hat on the table, arms crossed over his chest, drumming jewel-encrusted fingers over his silk sleeves.
I came up slowly behind them, trying to catch Clara’s eye so that I could discreetly hand the box off to her. “It’s extreeeemely important,” she had said. “Don’t even photograph it, just bring it straight to me”—and that was what I was trying to do.
“We thought we could add a couple of ‘new’ designers this time,” Clara was suggesting, finger-miming quotations on the word “new.” “Nothing too wild, just—you know, to give you a slight edge.”
“A slight . . . edge?” yawned Edmund. “What for . . . ?” He was distracted by his contemplation of the wall—a pause of several seconds—then roused by the recollection of an important fact, which he repeated with the drowsy half-conviction of a bedtime epiphany. “I don’t like new designers.”
“No, of course not,” Clara gently agreed, but, wooing him into wakeful clearheadedness, continued, “though you know sales at Bazaar have been creeping up on us—it’s all their new stylists, they’re taking everything in new directions.”
A cantankerous harrumph. “I don’t care about the new anything,” he grumbled, tightening his arms across his chest as the blue silk gleamed beneath the pressure. “The new designers, the new stylists—they last a year and then they all flunk out.” With a superior smirk, he peeked out over his upturned nose; when nobody corroborated his assertion, he let out a petulant sigh and conceded to ask, “Who are they, anyway . . . ?”
Clara’s finger flicked into the air, then recoiled.
“Well, who are they?” he repeated, this time with a tinge of suspicion. “Who are these new stylists you think I should be concerned about?”
Still nobody answered, and it felt wrong to be eavesdropping from only two feet behind them so I chose that moment to whisper, “Your McQueen box,” and held it out toward Clara.
Everybody turned to me at once, wide-eyed faces pulled back in shock. Sabrina’s own expression wavered on outrage, as though I had in fact climbed onto a table and revved a chainsaw in the air. If there was anyone who should have been surprised, though, it was me, because I found myself staring for the first time at the visage of Edmund Benneton.
Of course, I had seen him in countless pictures, always swirling about in a cape or a fur coat, but I had never seen his face so close before. Compared to the others, Edmund seemed the least distressed by my interruption, but only because he appeared too tired to muster any expression at all—so unbearably, painfully, wretchedly tired. He wasn’t much older than forty, yet he had deep frown lines around his mouth and a perpetually worried crease above his brow. On his forehead, beneath the folds of his turban, glistened a layer of sweat as slick as if he’d just rubbed on an ointment, and all I could do was stare at the incredible bags under his eyes: two swollen gray folds like plastic bags full of septic fluid.
“Who are you?” he asked, although he seemed to lose interest the moment the words left his dry, papery lips. I thought I saw his eyelids fall as they capitalized on a stolen moment of silence, while each pore in his loose skin seemed to gaze down like a prisoner through a barred window.
I opened my mouth to reply, but Clara flicked her hand between us—a sort of delicate distraction. She smiled nervously, like I was her toddler and my cries had just interrupted an important dinner. “Don’t mind him,” she said, with a laugh so forced it reminded me of a girl with a finger in her throat, trying to vomit. “He’s . . .”
“He’s nobody,” Sabrina filled in. As if trying to inflict an electric shock, she clamped a hand over my shoulder then, not wanting to be associated with me, tore it away.
With a hopeful gesture toward the shoes, Clara invited them all to resume consideration of other matters, and they turned away except for Sabrina, whose head directed me to the back of the closet with a nudge so severe I thought her neck might crack.
I stood there for a second in silence. Even in my most pathetic childhood moments I had never been called “nobody.” I wanted to shrivel into a fetal ball like the big baby I evidently was, but instead my feet moved inexplicably toward the back of the closet, one dead weight in front of the other.
The small Alexander McQueen box suddenly weighed a hundred pounds. I let it tumble out of my hands onto the floor by George’s feet and fell into my chair.
“You’re late,” George said cheerfully, popping a mint into his pasty mouth.
I groaned, and propped my forehead in my hands on the desk.
“What?” he asked innocently. “I’m sure they’re not mad. I mean, I’d have thought from the way you just went up to them that you were all best friends—you, Edmund, and the rest of the gang.” He pointed to my shoes. “Go ahead now, why don’t you kick back and make yourself at home while you’re at it?”
I turned my head up. For an indeterminate number of minutes, I stared at my screen saver—the Régine logo twirling blithely about—and when I regained my senses, George was opening the McQueen package, running the box cutter over the top with his pinky out. I had a twisted vision of George slicing his hand, gushing blood all over the Régine closet floor. Would the editors stop to help? Or would the run-through continue while Sabrina exiled George to the bathroom before he could stain any of the white clothes?
“These won’t work,” Edmund was saying now, “this plastic. Who thought that was a good idea?”
I peered at them through a gap in the garment racks.
“It’s Lucite,” explained the male editor I hadn’t yet met, a blond man in his thirties who I’d soon learn was Will, the associate fashion editor.
Sabrina swiped the offending tray of accessories from Edmund’s view and laid it to the side.
“I need quality,” Edmund said, ignoring him. “Not plastic. Who shoots a beautiful woman in plastic?”
I cringed a little at his directness. If before Edmund had given the impression he might fall asleep at any moment, now he was skimming along fast. He seemed to have remembered that there was an office waiting for him, and that the sooner he finished the sooner he could fall asleep in it.
He stared at a tray full of gloves I had laid out earlier and snapped, “I need gloves. Why aren’t there any gloves?”
“These are all the ones in white from the Fall-Winter collections,” Sabrina assured him. “If you’d like, I can bring you a bigger selection from our archives.”
“Yes, what are they doing there, Susan? Please get them.”
“Of course, Edmund.”
“Susan?” I whispered to George, mystified. “He doesn’t know her name?”
Sabrina, otherwise known as Susan, had taken two steps in the direction of where the archival g
loves were stored when Edmund’s voice punctuated the air. “Susan, where are you going? Stay here.”
“Of course, Edmund.”
“You know better than to just walk off like that in the middle of my run-through.”
Sabrina mumbled an apology, while I struggled to decide on a train of thought; obviously I was amused to see Sabrina relegated to such an insignificant realm of Edmund’s consciousness, but I was also slightly horrified that he would forget the name of someone who worked so closely with him. I turned it over in my head, and decided that because Edmund was a genius didn’t mean I should expect him to be perfect; he was required by his job to remember a million names, so why should I villainize him for forgetting one?
“Can we not get anything better?” remarked Edmund, who was now bent over the shoes like a fishing pole over a pond.
I heard Sabrina emit a faint “Ow!” as he flung a pair of needle-nosed pumps over his shoulder.
He was on his feet again. “Is there anything else they can have on their heads?” He poked through the assortment of hats which had been laid out for his perusal. Suddenly, he was seized with inspiration: “THIS. This is it.” He raised up an article from the table with two fingers, for all to see. From my occluded view, it was just a piece of limp fabric—like a soggy piece of cheesecloth. “We need more like this. It’s perfect. Just imagine it with Look Fourteen from the Marc Jacobs collection, and the thigh-high Ferragamos in patent leather.”
The editors scribbled furious notes, nodding fervently. “You’re absolutely right,” gushed Christine, the other associate fashion editor, who resembled Clara in every way except for the fact that she was white.
“I do looooove that,” Clara sang.
I watched Will hastily replicate the formless “hat” on his clipboard with a stream of epiphanic scribbles. “I totally understand your vision now,” he said. (After the run-through, my own investigation of the captivating headpiece resulted only in confusion, as I remained convinced it was a piece of cheesecloth which had accidentally ended up there.)
“Ooohh, this one I love too.” Edmund held up a plastic see-through hat.
I didn’t understand—hadn’t he just said, “no plastic?” Nobody else seemed much surprised.
“Can we see if something can be done about these wrinkles, though—Susan, why don’t you steam this?” Edmund held out the plastic hat to the side and dropped it in Sabrina’s general direction. She caught it with one hand while continuing with the other to rub the spot on her shoulder where one of the heels he had aimlessly tossed had just clopped her.
“Will, who is doing transparent this season? We need more transparent pieces. Definitely shoes with transparent heels—how about those ones from Michael Kors, can you get those in by this afternoon maybe?” He was careening fast now. “If only Burberry wasn’t doing transparent in those garish shades—it’d be smart to work in a few Burberry pieces. See if they don’t have a bag or something in regular-transparent, not purple-transparent or orange-transparent or any of those other obscene variations they did this season. Also anything transparent by Wang—Alexander, not Vera—and how about those clutches by Gucci, with the gold studs? Christine, that’s your market, right?”
Later that day I would learn that Christine covered all the designers that held runway shows in Paris or Milan, while Will focused on the ones showing in New York and London.
“How are we on credits this issue?” Edmund asked.
Clara flipped through the pages on her clipboard. “We have to squeeze in a Longchamp credit—if we don’t feature some pieces, they’ve threatened to pull their ads again.”
It had never occurred to me that the contents of Régine’s pages were determined by anything other than aesthetics—let alone by the politics of pleasing advertisers.
“Blegh,” he replied. “Let them pull the ads, they’re hideous.”
“We should really include some Céline, and like you said, some Burberry would be good—they’re running a six-page spread to kick off their new perfume. Although like you said,” she added, to reassure him she had been listening, “we couldn’t possibly feature anything in those garish shades.”
Edmund glanced at his watch. “All right, that’s enough,” he said, swinging a tassel on his cape. “Thank you everyone for your work, and keep me posted—although don’t expect a reply—and, oh!” He swiveled back around, serious once more. “None of what happened last week with that Dior shoe—that was very disappointing, and an embarrassment. If I ask for it specifically then I’d better get it, and if PR says no, then one of you must have a good reason for me.”
Everybody nodded, and he waved over his shoulder as he swooshed through the door. The editors were huddling together, clucking in hushed voices, when suddenly the door flew open and Edmund poked his turbaned head through the crack. “Does anybody have any contact solution? My eyes are all dried up again.”
Sabrina pitter-pattered over to her desk to get some, and he plucked it from her hand—“Thank you, Susan”—and disappeared again.
George was on his feet. “Time to clean up,” he said, snapping his unscathed fingers in my face, no blood in sight.
What I hadn’t realized while watching the run-through was that a complete upheaval of everything George and I had prepared that morning had occurred just beyond my narrow view in a period of less than fifteen minutes. Velvet-lined accessory trays had been dumped out, carefully lined-up shoes tossed asunder. I half-expected a Jacobin from the French Revolution to pass by with a flaming torch, having lost his way to the Bastille and desecrated the wrong place.
Sabrina shot past our desk, still rubbing her arm. “George, have you grabbed lunch?” she asked, taking a seat at her cubicle.
George shook his head.
“Go. Fifteen minutes.”
George rushed out, and Sabrina said, “Ethan, I need to speak to you. Bring my credit card and your cab receipts.”
My stomach turned. From the excitement in her razor-like tone, I could tell this was going to be enjoyable for only one of us. I dragged myself over to her desk and pulled out the two cab receipts I had stuffed into my pocket, followed by her credit card, and slid them toward her keyboard.
As though by handling her credit card I had somehow contaminated it, she brushed it exaggeratedly against her black blouse. “I really hate to reprimand you on your first day, Ethan,” she said with disingenuous docility, “but perhaps I was unclear.” She used the edge of her corporate card to flatten out my crumpled receipts, ironing them out once, twice, three times against her desk to demonstrate to me the unacceptability of wrinkles at Régine, then looked up. “I hired you as an intern.” She returned her card to the designated slot in her Céline wallet. “You’re nobody’s equal here—not even George’s.”
She bent over to return her wallet to a black Hermès bag at the foot of her chair, while I waited like a carcass hanging from a butcher’s rack. The handbag fell into the recesses underneath her desk, where her delicate ankles were crossed beneath her black lamé skirt. She turned back up toward me and folded her hands coolly over her knee.
“That incident ten minutes ago will be the last time in this office you speak before being spoken to. Interns just don’t do that here. You just don’t do that here. Not to mention that at Régine, ten past two o’clock is not the same as two o’clock.” She put a cold hand on my forearm. “I’m not mad, of course. I mean, I’m sure things were different at Yale,” she said, with a crackling veneer of compassion. From the cock of her eyebrows, and the satisfaction in her curled lips, I knew the knife in my stomach was coming next: “Unfortunately, here you’ll have to work for the right to be treated as an equal.” She exaggerated the word “work” as if she were teaching it to me for the first time.
Then she rewrapped her fingers around the handle of the blade and gave it one last twist. “You said it’d be easy, right? Who knows? If you work hard enough, then maybe . . . Didn’t you want a job here? . . . Maybe one day you can
have this.”
She gestured across the six-by-six-foot corkboard cubicle that I was meant to covet—and which, in so many ways, I did—then, catching a glimpse of an unread e-mail, she gasped “Prada!” and her hands were sucked toward her keyboard like magnets.
The e-mail that had swallowed her undivided attention had the subject line Emergency. Prada needed reassurance that Look 7 could be picked up from the set of Edmund’s white-themed photo shoot in time for a W cover shoot the next day. I knew this because in Sabrina’s spacious cubicle there was nowhere else to look but over her shoulder at the computer screen, and I couldn’t help but read what was there. I wasn’t sure if I had been dismissed, but Sabrina’s words had left me flush, and the awkwardness of standing there was merely deepening the discomfort of my debasement.
I turned, and she said, “I left a plastic hat on your desk—can you steam out the wrinkles? You’ll find the steamer in the corner by the gloves.”
“Of course,” I said through a veil of calmness, adding under my breath, “Susan.”
Sabrina didn’t hear me, which was probably for the best.
I FOUND ON MY DESK THE HAT SHE HAD BEEN REFERRING TO. It was shaped like a floppy transparent bell, and I didn’t see any wrinkles in it, but what did I know? I rolled out the steamer from the corner where she had instructed me to look. It looked a little like a snake, attached to a pole with a large mystical glass container on the bottom and a swirly hook on the top, where its head rested.
I had never seen one before, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. George was gone for lunch and I definitely couldn’t ask Sabrina, so I searched on the Internet: How does a steamer work? The search results instructed me to fill the glass container with water, so I set out carefully with it in my hands, trying to find the bathroom.
Beyond the hallway through which I had entered that morning, Régine, I discovered, was more puzzling than a topiary maze—just one sharp corner after another, and a hundred cubicle walls in rows, all white—and it was only after running into several dead ends that I found the women’s bathroom. I figured the men’s bathroom would be next to it, but all I could see was an unmarked door. When I tried to open it, it was locked, and on the other side there was no door at all—just Kate Moss on the wall, her eyes glazed over with indifference.
An Innocent Fashion Page 8