by Lucy Sykes
“I have hardly seen you all week.” She pretended to glower.
“That’s because I still sit in the front row and you lurk all the way in the back like a shifty little commoner taking all those delicious Instagram photos.”
“Massimo, meet Orly. I am sure you have heard all about her, but I think she could teach even you a thing or two.” Orly’s face lit up.
Metal clinked against glass and Imogen saw Eve trying to climb atop a chair. Two waiters rushed over to lift her up, attempting to pull her dress back down as it crept up over her thighs.
“HIIIIIIII!” Eve said to the room. This wasn’t planned. The plan was to let people mingle for the better part of an hour, before Imogen and Eve would, together, welcome everyone and talk a little bit about the new Glossy.com. It was evident this would be Eve’s show, not hers. The three bloggers Eve had been chatting with raced to the front of the room, jabbing elbows at guests. Imogen had taken to calling them the Selfie-razzi, since they were Eve’s personal documenters.
“We NEED to get up there,” one of them shrieked.
“It’s, like, our job,” another one said to Cynthia Rowley as she practically shoved the petite designer against the wall. One began tapping the side of her Google Glass. The other two raised their phones up to record and snap Eve, not caring who they blocked behind them.
“So grunge is apparently back at this year’s Fashion Week.” Eve paused. “Either that or there are a lot more homeless people in Lincoln Center.” It was meant to be a joke, but the delivery and the reception crippled it at both ends as murmurs of disapproval hummed through the crowd. Eve continued unaware.
“I want to welcome everyone to this adorable little party we just threw together at the last minute.” Eve paused for a second as the star of Project Fashion walked into the room. “Heya, Gretchen.” She fluttered her hand as the supermodel gave a tight smile and nod.
“You don’t know how excited I am to launch Glossy-dot-com. Forget boring old magazines. This is the future.” Eve’s voice always had a certain authority to it, even when she was standing on top of a chair, but she didn’t know how to read a room. She wasn’t savvy enough to realize that this crowd loved magazines, had grown up in magazines, was supported by magazines still. But she kept going, doing the same spiel she gave in San Francisco. Imogen could hear the rustling around her crescendo as guests shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.
“I am so happy that we have so many amazing designers here in the room with us. I want to thank Timo Weiland, Olivier Theyskens, Rebecca Minkoff, Phoebe Philo. Alexander Wang, I’m wearing a pair of your booties right now.” Eve pointed at Thakoon. Alexander wasn’t at the party. The only thing the two men had at all in common was their Asian heritage.
“My goal is to make fashion exciting again. My goal is to bring all of you”—she spread her arms wide as if she were hugging the room—“into the motherfucking digital age, and I will not rest until I do it.” Eve believed that cursing for effect was a sure way to get people’s attention. Instead the crowd winced.
“I know what the Internet likes. It likes cats and side boob and beaver shots. We are going to find a way to take advantage of all of those things at Glossy.com to make us the destination for millennials to do all of their shopping.”
Imogen had never heard the words “beaver shot” spoken out loud. She took a deep breath and waited for Eve to finish before gently pushing herself forward. She placed a hand on Eve’s waist to alert the girl she was there and smiled up at her, making a small gesture meant to indicate, “May I?”
“I think Imogen wants to say something to you,” she said, visibly disheartened by the lack of enthusiasm for her speech.
Even Imogen, positive often to a fault, couldn’t think of a way to spin that terrible speech. She cleared her throat. “Thank you, Eve. Eve is a tech genius. I can’t begin to thank her enough for all of her hard work and everything she’s teaching me.” Imogen knew she had to repair the bad vibe in the room. “We live in a crazy Wild West of a new world. Who would have thought six months ago that my magazine would become an app? If I’d known, maybe I would have extended my vacation.” That brought a few titters. “You were invited here tonight because we consider you part of the Glossy family and we want to keep you in the loop about all of our future plans. We know that none of you had any shortage of parties to attend this evening, so we are grateful you chose ours. I know how important hashtags are these days. Please send out lots of tweets and Instagrams. We have an inkling of how to make this party go viral, so sit tight for a surprise. Drink up, eat up, thank Danny, your amazing chef, afterward and drink lots of water, because you don’t want to be hungover tomorrow.” Imogen raised her glass and the crowd applauded briefly before Chelsea drowned them out with the opening chorus of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” While Imogen spoke, Eve had managed to scurry down from the chair.
The sounds of the party—small talk and nibbling—resumed.
“That’s it?” Eve hissed into her ear. “That’s all you’re going to say? We spent five thousand dollars to make sure these people aren’t hungover? We invited them here to get them on board with our app.” What exactly had Eve wanted her to say?
“That isn’t how business is done in this world, Eve,” Imogen hissed back, irritated by Eve’s gumption when all she had done was save her neck. “These things take time, patience and schmoozing. I think I know more about how this is done than you do.”
“We need them now. We needed them yesterday. You didn’t even get the guest list right. I know most of the people here already.” Imogen looked around and knew that wasn’t true. Eve couldn’t have already been introduced to half these people, except possibly when they rang her phone years ago. “I wanted new people at this event and you didn’t deliver.”
Eve stalked off to the bathroom, leaving Imogen with her mouth agape. While she was talking Alex had joined the crowd at the back of the room. He picked his hand up to wave and then rushed forward when he realized she was upset.
“Great speech. Short and to the point. Let them drink at night and do their business during the day,” he reminded her. It was something Carter Worthington had told him years ago at one of their advertiser schmooze fests when Alex, after a few too many margaritas, had asked her boss what exactly was the point of spending so much money on their events.
“I have to deal with Eve.” Imogen kissed him quickly and then took off for the bathroom. She heard Eve before she saw her, giant heaving breaths echoing through the hall. Imogen knocked on the door to her own powder room. “Eve, it’s Imogen. Can I come in?” She heard the lock unclick.
Eve was covered in a fine layer of sweat. There were no tears on her cheeks, but her face kept contorting in a way that suggested it would prefer to be crying.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” Eve sputtered. Her chest heaved, which caused her entire body to begin shaking.
Imogen grabbed a Kleenex from its tortoiseshell box to wipe off the edge of the sink before she leaned gingerly against it. She had experience with anxiety attacks. You had to wait them out. Back when they lived together in their shoddy little apartment, Bridgett suffered from at least one a week, brought on by anything from a bad day at work to seeing a rat on the subway, before her doctors found the right cocktail of drugs to keep them at bay.
The bathroom was small and cramped. Imogen stood so close to Eve that it would have been easy to touch her. By stretching her arm out just a few inches she could have put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but the very idea of touching Eve now, this new iteration of Eve, made Imogen recoil. She stayed as far away from the girl as the confined space would allow, but still she could hear Eve gnashing her teeth together—a sound like a well-heeled boot crunching over gravel.
Eve’s breath came in stilted waves. “They hated me,” she moaned, pulling at her curls, yanking them down around her chin and then, like a child, putting the end of one in her mouth to suck on it. “Eve
ryone here hates me. I failed tonight.” Imogen was worried the girl was going to hyperventilate. The tears finally came and Eve reached out to hold on to the hem of Imogen’s dress the way a drowning man would clutch at a life preserver. Only the mascara on her left eye had smeared. The right remained perfectly intact.
All of the party’s previous joy was siphoned away by each word from Eve’s mouth. “You need to breathe.” Imogen emptied out her glass of champagne and ran cold water into it. “Drink this.” She handed her two Xanax. “Take these. Wipe away your tears.” Did she sound too motherly?
Eve glared at her through her gasps, her face turning the color of merlot. “You wanted this party to suck, didn’t you?”
Imogen’s heart sank. Nothing she did was going to help. Eve had the manners of a psychopath. It was in these moments that Eve reminded Imogen of her old dog growing up, a Jack Russell who had been perfectly well behaved in their London flat, but revealed his true colors on a day trip out to Kent. Nutkin forcefully escaped from an open car window, running straight toward a small lamb that had been caught in the barbed wire at the edge of a field, its leg bent at a ninety-degree angle and bleeding. Once Nutkin smelled blood there was no turning back. He was an attack dog cloaked as a city dog. The shepherd’s boy got Nutkin with his shotgun shortly after the dog killed the sheep. It was Nutkin’s fate. He was born like that. Eve was born like this.
Rage clouded Eve’s eyes as she glared up at Imogen. “Why do I even keep you around?”
Dropping her voice, Imogen glared back at the insolent little bitch.
“Watch it, Eve. I wanted this party to be a success just as much as you, and so far it is. You have some of the most powerful people in the fashion industry in that room right now and they are more than happy to speak to you about Glossy-dot-com. If I were you, I wouldn’t let that opportunity slip away.”
Eve lifted her face and stared dully into space before standing up and turning to the sink. Imogen barely had a second to jump out of the way before the girl vomited next to her. She watched as Eve chugged the glass of water and then threw the Xanax into her mouth.
“Get out. I need a few minutes.”
Imogen shook her head in disbelief. “Get yourself together before you come back to the party, please,” Imogen said coolly before she slipped sideways back out through the door, brushing against Andrew Maxwell, the only person standing in the small hallway between the sitting room and the backyard.
“Is she all right?”
“As a human being, no. Right now I think she will be fine. You certainly have your hands full, Andrew.” He moved his hand toward his head, wanting to run it through his hair, before thinking better of mussing it up and bringing it back down to his pocket.
“She’s just a perfectionist, Imogen. She just wants this project to succeed.”
Imogen gnawed on her bottom lip. “That isn’t what she wants. She wants this project to be all hers.” She regretted the words the second that they came out of her mouth, knowing that Eve probably heard them and that if she hadn’t, Andrew would most definitely repeat them.
When she emerged from the bathroom, Eve looked worse for the wear. Imogen tried to ignore her as Eve kept to the edges of the party, typing furiously on her phone, stopping only briefly to whisper in the ear of Addison Cao, conspicuous as always in a blue crushed velvet suit, before hopping into a black Uber without saying good-bye.
Soon after Eve left, Imogen’s surprise arrived. She was going out on a limb here, but from the little bit she understood about how things went viral on the Internet, she thought she had a shot at making this work. Her friend Ginnifer (one of the mommy gang from school and a longtime volunteer with the ASPCA) arrived right at the stroke of nine with a crate of wiggly, squiggling rescue puppies. It wasn’t really her idea. It was Annabel’s. The night before, as she had fretted over the party being a disaster, her daughter peeked her head over her iPad.
“Just bring in a bunch of puppies,” Annabel said matter-of-factly.
It sounded ridiculous. “Why, darling?”
Her daughter shook her head. “Because…the Internet,” she said breezily as she walked up to her room.
Of course her daughter was right.
The crowd at the party went wild. So many Instagram videos were taken, phone batteries died. There was a miniature melee to get close to one particularly grumpy-looking little bulldog named Champ. Dog hair covered couture, but no one cared, and nine adorable puppies got homes they never could have dreamed of.
The party went until midnight. Once Eve left it turned into such a good time, the night becoming boisterous and buoyant. Or maybe it was all in Imogen’s imagination that everything grew louder and less serious. Furniture was pushed to the side of the room to allow for flailing limbs to catch a beat. The crowd danced like they were in the basement of the Ritz.
Fashion Goes to the Dogs
By Addison Cao, WWD columnist
Fashion went to the dogs last night at the Glossy.com party to celebrate yet another Fashion Week. Returning editor in chief Imogen Tate hobnobbed with fashion royalty old and new, including Donna Karan, Thakoon, Timo Weiland, and Carolina Herrera, at her gorgeous West Village town house. By the end of the night, no one was paying any attention to the posh set. Seriously! It was all about the puppies. God bless the Internet. It just might be the most Instagrammed party of all of Fashion Week after Tate brought in a crate of adorable adoptables. #Perfection.
Not everyone was delighted. Glossy.com’s new editorial director, Eve Morton, slipped out of the bash early….
<<< CHAPTER TEN >>>
OCTOBER 2015
On a crisp fall Friday night Imogen found herself staring into the ruddy red face of Santa Claus. Ron Hobart, Imogen’s psychic and shrink (he was a package deal), bore a remarkable resemblance to Father Christmas. Editors and designers lived and died by him. “The Fashion Psychic” was his nickname. Not a single season passed without Donna and Tom ringing Ron to find the most advantageous date for their runway shows.
What most people didn’t know about Ron was that in addition to his knack for predicting successful dates and modeling careers, he held a PhD in clinical psychology from Johns Hopkins and was a licensed therapist. He was also a certified Reiki practitioner, if anyone cared to ask, which Ron hoped that they did.
More than a decade ago, during her first visit with the psychic, he told Imogen she would marry a tall, dark man with a distinctive birthmark. She laughed, convinced at the time she would absolutely marry the towheaded Andrew Maxwell. Six months later she met Alex and discovered a birthmark in the shape of a teddy bear on the back of his left thigh.
The moment Imogen arrived in Ron’s office, a steady stream of tears fell down her cheeks. Ron let her cry, alternating between glancing over his half-moon glasses with compassion and quietly reading passages from a worn hardcover of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet as they sat opposite each other in ugly green armchairs atop wall-to-wall shag carpeting. A fake fire crackled in the background. Photographs of Ron with his idols, Deepak Chopra and Oprah, lined the mantel.
Finally calm enough to speak, Imogen caught her therapist up on what was happening with Eve. Their previous sessions had been mostly about wife drama, mommy drama, friend drama. Imogen rarely talked about work.
“What bothers you the most about this situation?” he asked her. Ron’s index fingers formed a steeple supporting his chins. “You don’t still fantasize about Andrew, do you? About the man Andrew is right now?”
“No.” Imogen shook her head in a genuinely violent way that convinced her this was the truth. “But I do fantasize about having other things that Eve has. I fantasize about being relevant again. I fantasize about people asking me to make big decisions and caring about my opinion, the way they care about Eve’s.” Imogen laughed back a sob. “I feel invisible. I’m the invisible older woman. I walk into a room and no one notices. No one looks up. Then I feel guilty for wishing people n
oticed me.”
“I don’t think you’re invisible.”
“You should come to my office.”
“You know what you need to do?”
“Be grateful.” Imogen said, curious if she was wandering into a trap. “I am grateful. I have a gratitude journal and everything.”
“You sound like Saint Gwyneth Paltrow desperately trying to sound humble.”
Imogen tried to swallow her frustration. “I feel like a fucking imposter every single day and I hate that. I’m forty-two, for Chris-sakes. I’m too old to feel stupid.”
Ron grimaced. “I think you need to weigh what you are getting out of this job with how much you can handle being bullied by a woman, who, as you describe her, is a sociopath.”
Ron grew quiet for a minute and rolled his eyes back in his head. His frame began to shake.
“What do you know?” she asked him warily, wishing, not for the first time, that her shrink and her psychic were not the same person.
Ron trembled his fingers, making a show that the cosmos was communicating directly with him. “This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” he said reluctantly. “A lot of things are going to change.”
Imogen sat straight up, her spine a pillar. “What is going to change?”
Ron looked at her woozily. He always claimed that peering into the future exhausted him. “I don’t think you will stay in New York. Not full-time anyway. I see you spending time in the South. And there is going to be a wedding.”
“Eve and Andrew?”
Ron nodded slowly. “I think so.”
“They just met!”
Her therapist shrugged. The universe had spoken to him.
The timer on his iPhone beeped. Their session was over. He rubbed his temples and stretched his arms above his head.
She gazed at the man’s chest-length white beard gamboling above his belly, which did quiver, not unlike a bowl full of jelly.
There was one more thing. “Ron, do you tweet?” Imogen asked shyly.