Tongue in Chic

by Kirstie Clements

  Marie, who was tall and broad shouldered, and also needed 42 or 44 size jackets, was horrified.

  ‘We can never let ourselves be more than a size 44 Italian!’ she pronounced. ‘We couldn’t work in fashion. We wouldn’t be able to shop in Prada. We’d have to buy our clothes at … (sharp intake of breath and long dramatic pause) Marina Rinaldi!’

  Marina Rinaldi is a popular label for the ‘fuller figured’ woman. Later, over lunch, we both declined the proffered cotoletta Milanese and made a solemn pact never to buy elastic-waist pants. A fashion designer who had begun his career in the seventies once said to me that the introduction of stretch fabric had much to do with the world population’s general slide into obesity.

  ‘It used to be that if your good skirt felt tight, you cut back on food a bit until it was comfortable again,’ he pointed out.

  * * *

  The girls in the fashion office had a goal: to be press-rack size. The fashion houses generally held small end-of-season sales where members of the media could purchase items at a fraction of the normal, very high price. Whether it was an unavoidable irony or hypocrisy, given their tiny salaries the staff couldn’t actually afford the clothes they promoted as must-haves in the magazine, so a Prada press-rack sale was the equivalent of Christmas—but with behaviour not dissimilar to the Running of the Bulls. In order to be able to wear the pieces, the girls had to be model size. Most of them were close to that anyway, but it was problematic if they, god forbid, had bosoms or thighs. Being press-rack size required dietary vigilance that I was not the slightest bit interested in pursuing. There was no diet on earth, or any amount of exercise that was going to mould my thighs to the point they could fit into a Balenciaga skinny pant. I just congratulated myself on the happy coincidence that I was a sample size (39) in shoes.

  A five-day juice cleanse had arrived and was sitting in its cute little cooler box on the desk of Anna, the junior fashion editor. Bugger, I remember thinking. They all got so emotional when they were on juice fasts, which also made them have terrible halitosis. It was a particular pain when we were on deadline. Why could they never just think: ‘Oh, I’ll eat more salad, jog around the park and cut down on carbs for a while’? It was always some radical plan that consisted of juices and powders, and thus brought on bouts of light-headness, fatigue and tears. I tried the five-day juice cleanse myself, but by day three found myself on the phone to the managing director of Louis Vuitton, struggling desperately to remember the reason I’d called him in the first place. I’d put the phone straight down, gone to the snack machine and bought a packet of chicken crisps.

  I wondered where Anna was.

  ‘She should be in soon,’ replied Helen. ‘We have a casting at 10 am.’

  Normally, I didn’t attend the model castings—girls came and went, but rarely were they good enough for the fashion editors, and it was a novelty for me to be asked to walk down to the fashion office and take a look at a new girl. The only models Chic worked with were at the very top of the tree—hopefully, one of the top ten on the highly influential models.com website—and these girls were not expected to actually come in to the office. They didn’t come in to try on the clothes, they didn’t go to see the photographer; they would only appear at the designated shoot location. Given how famous they were, you thanked your lucky stars if they turned up. But today the fashion office was seeing the latest winner of Next Top Model, as she had apparently dropped half her body weight since taking out the prize, was heading overseas and now might just be thin enough to appear in the magazine.

  Models had always had to watch their weight and stay sample size no matter what, and on the international runways, it was the thinner the better, no question. As a rule we didn’t run diets or diet stories in the magazine, and never mentioned counting kilojoules; we took the position that our readers were healthy and happy, and in control of their weight. We, and the magazine, also preferred to think the same of the models. It suited our purposes, I suppose, as we created this perfect fantasy world. But deep down, most of us had to know it was a fantasy. As one prominent model was once quoted: ‘It’s impossible to look anorexic without being anorexic.’

  Also, I had witnessed some extreme behaviour that shattered this fantasy. In 2010, one of the top local models had decided that her 34C breasts were getting in the way of the clothes she had to model, and therefore potential bookings, so she had them surgically reduced. Later regretting this decision, she had them reconstructed, although they were slightly smaller than they were originally. All this was in a period of twelve months. She was nineteen, and now had livid scars to remind her of her original, beautiful and healthy, breasts.

  ‘Just make sure she isn’t skeletal,’ I instructed them about the model they were about to see, and marched back to my office, knowing that, like most of the industry, designers, stylists and photographers, they would refuse to recognise it anyway. I didn’t waste much more time thinking about it, though, as I was sure she wouldn’t get booked. She would, no doubt, have an overbite, thick ankles or some other feature ‘that wasn’t quite right’.

  My assistant, Katie, had arrived, holding a reheatable container of last night’s healthy home-cooked meal in one hand, and a giant chocolate cream cake in the other. She was a curvaceous size normal, shopped at outlets, snacked on potato crisps a few times a week as an afternoon treat, and exercised every morning by taking long runs along the beach with the odd-looking dog that she’d saved from the pound. While she was apparently in absolutely the wrong industry, the team used her to judge the cover options each month, to see what would appeal to a non-fashion, ie well-adjusted, person.

  ‘Why are you late?’ I asked. Katie was never late.

  ‘I had to pick up cake; it’s Simone’s birthday today.’

  Simone, our art director, was one of those rare beings who ate anything she liked and could not put on weight. For some reason, the art department was staffed with sparrow-thin, pale-skinned brunettes who looked like they’d come from the set of The Ring, and all of whom could eat like Vikings. This was the case throughout the twenty-five years I worked in the fashion-magazine industry. Any promotional cakes, sweets or chocolate that were sent to the magazine were always immediately placed in the art department for immediate consumption, therefore providing minimal temptation to the fashion office.

  I had developed a phobia early in my career about any food that arrived by courier or post, suspecting that it could have been injected with poison, with the purpose of killing me. As editor-in-chief of a top-selling high-fashion magazine, I had become used to being public enemy number one for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), for groups opposed to child models, for eating-disorder organisations, anti-smoking lobbies, religious zealots, feminists, women against plastic surgery, disgruntled advertisers and people who thought makeup was stupid. Oh, and photographers unhappy that their shots were cropped. Brightly iced cupcakes looked creepy; macarons, menacing. Drinks could be spiked; loose-leaf tea could be laced. So, there was no way I was eating anything that was delivered to us.

  I had other self-imposed rules about eating and drinking, which helped keep my weight in check. My naturopath had instructed me never to eat anything standing up, believing that food needed to be enjoyed and savoured at the table and that finger food was simply providing empty, unsatisfying and fattening kilojoules. Thus, for twenty years I avoided thousands of trays of hors d’ouevres painstakingly prepared by the best chefs in the world, and although many would consider that a dubious triumph, at least I’ve never had to wear caftans. Yet.

  ‘You have a lunch today with François,’ said Katie, referring to a rather prickly and generally difficult managing director of a prominent luxury jewellery house. I was currently dining out at least six or seven times a week, and I had more more rules for lunch and dinner with clients. No bread, though if I were starving I could eat the crust, but without butter. No desserts, ever. Very few carbohydrates. However, it was necessary to have a glass
of wine. I needed some sort of Dutch courage to sound upbeat when clients asked how the magazine business was going.

  Anna popped her head into my office and said, ‘Ellen is in the fashion office.’

  Ellen was the photographer we had chosen for the cover and lead story for the next issue. I followed Anna, and found Ellen sitting at a table with Helen, crunching on a carrot.

  ‘I just got back from a ten-day fast on Koh Samui!’ Ellen exclaimed.

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard about that clinic. Everybody is going there!’ said Anna, transfixed.

  ‘Yes, you just have juice and water for ten days, and you administer your own colonics every day,’ replied Ellen who, I had to admit, was glowing. But I sensed danger, as this sort of talk was all Anna needed.

  ‘Just hang on,’ I said, in my most stern ‘Jean Brodie’ voice. ‘Those places aren’t necessarily registered medical clinics. My friend Simon went to a new one in the Philippines that everyone’s been raving about. It dispensed some hocus pocus about colonics, and food groups that matched your blood, and he decided it saved his life. But the real game changer was that he stopped drinking enormous amounts of alcohol for three weeks. It was just a very exotic drying-out clinic.’

  Anna looked crestfallen, and, I thought, a little wan. I wondered when she had started the juice cleanse, because the Gucci press sale was happening any day now.

  Just then Penelope, the Next Top Model winner, was ushered in, looking vaguely terrified and nothing like she had when she won the contest. She had morphed into the quintessential model—pin thin with messy long hair, wearing skinny jeans, biker boots and a leather jacket. She must have dropped at least ten kilos since she had been on the show. The fashion office looked thrilled and I left them to it.

  * * *

  Once again at Morgans, I listened distractedly to the client complain about not receiving enough editorial coverage, while I perused the menu and settled on the $60 lamb chops and steamed spinach.

  ‘But there was a piece in this month’s issue, François,’ I said amicably, as I handed the menu back to my old friend Jeremy, the maître d.

  ‘We measured it and it was not the same size in centimetres as your competitor’s mention of us,’ he said with a completely straight face.

  ‘You measure editorial with rulers, François, not by the quality of the story?’ I replied, praying for the chardonnay to arrive and help alleviate this idiocy.

  The bottle duly appeared, but when the waiter went to pour, François held his hand over his glass and said, ‘Not for me.’ It, was, yet again, going to be a very long lunch.

  I had quite a few interesting, if not vaguely nauseating, fine-dining experiences during my years at Chic. Earlier in my career, when I was a beauty editor, I attended at least three lunches a week. The organisers of such gatherings automatically assumed that every beauty editor was watching her weight and, as a consequence, I was served poached salmon so many times that now the mere thought of eating it makes me gag. There were other harrowing incidents involving fish, the most notable being a terribly upmarket dinner in Paris in 2000, back when one could smoke in restaurants. I had been making strained small talk with the very famous fashion designer on my left, which basically involved asking him as many, hopefully interesting, questions as I could think of, while he answered in desultory monosyllables, staring straight ahead and refusing to make eye contact. Halfway through the main course, and clearly bored, the designer lit a cigarette, took a few long drags and stubbed it out in the middle of his plate. I have never recovered from the sight of the silvery fish swimming in cream sauce and skewered with a Marlboro.

  On another occasion in 2009, I shared a table with an of-the-moment supermodel, Cassandra, whom I was trying to snag for a future cover. I glanced over at her halfway through the main course to see that, surprisingly, she had already cleared her plate. It wasn’t until she and her agent had left and I was settling the bill that I noticed that her meal had been masticated into small balls and left under the table.

  As I was driving back to the office from the lunch with François, at which he had, at least, displayed no dietary quirks, my phone rang. It was Bernard.

  ‘Darling!’ he began theatrically. ‘I have some bad news. Guess where Estée Lauder are insisting on taking us for that dinner?’

  A thirteen-course degustation with matching wines at one of the world’s top restaurants? Dear god, no. It was our idea of digestive hell. Too much food, too much wine, too many kilojoules. Bernard used to refer to a degustation dinner as an ‘eye of newt, wing of bat’ night.

  When it came to eating and drinking, there was also the constant stream of cocktail parties Chic hosted and threw, of which every minute detail was important. The magazine’s events department would spend weeks deliberating over the menu, ensuring that the foie gras would be perfect, and that all the canapés were measured to a certain circumference, so as not to be unwieldy and therefore un-chic. There were many other rules. Never have red wine and white wine glasses on the same tray—uurrgh. Do not serve food that has the potential to be double dipped in the sauce. If you gave anyone a toasted ham and cheese sandwich, you’d be sued, but if you offered a miniature ham and cheese toastie, well, yes, how darling. Also, while the choice of food occupied most of the meetings, and most of the budget, for these parties it was, of course, highly unlikely that much of it would be consumed. Also, Bernard would often have to pull up the events girls over the alcohol they intended to serve. He would say to me afterwards, and quite correctly: ‘They were thinking of serving non-vintage, non-French champagne, so, god help me, not champagne, but sparkling wine, and whisky cocktails? On a hot night like this? The crowd will be at each other’s throats.’

  * * *

  Back at Chic’s headquarters, I could detect the lingering odour of someone’s reheated curry. I had read that the editor-in-chief of US Vogue, Anna Wintour, did not allow food to be consumed in the magazine’s offices, which given the overwhelming smells resisting the air-conditioning on any given day in our office, sounded like a not-unreasonable request.

  The copy editor was finishing her lunch, a microwaved concoction composed of brown rice, canned tuna and corn niblets. She ate this every day for ten years, although once or twice I caught her nibbling on a shortbread biscuit when we were on a really stressful deadline.

  Curious about the session with the Next Top Model winner, I went down to the fashion office. There were open packets of M&M’s on the meeting table, as well as Cheezels and rice crackers. Someone had been having a binge.

  ‘How did Penelope look?’ I asked Anna.

  ‘OK,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘She just fitted into the samples. The pants were a bit tight around the thigh.’

  The samples under discussion had just arrived from Paris, and were part of a high-waisted toreador-inspired collection that had been the hit of the season. The pants in question had been worn by the modelling world’s hottest property, Tinika, a Swedish lesbian who was the skinniest of the lot. If ‘less than size zero’ existed, she could claim to be it. We couldn’t cut the pants up the back, as they would have to be returned in pristine condition. We were going to have to find someone who could get into them. The label in question was an advertiser and this was a very important look. It wasn’t our job to find clothes to fit the models; our job was to find models to fit the clothes. This was becoming increasingly impossible. The curator of a famous museum that had staged a number of fashion-related exhibitions had mentioned to me that the clothes were getting smaller.

  ‘Our mannequins have had to be shaved down over the last few years, to make them two sizes smaller,’ he told me. ‘And in one instance, it turned out that the fit model for a famous designer had an abnormally small rib cage.’

  So, now we were looking for a model to fit into toreador pants that were, no doubt, designed to fit a … toreador? A man with no hips?

  ‘I know,’ said Marie, who having just returned from an appointment, was eating vegan pasta a
t her desk. ‘What about Philippe?’

  She was referring to a beautiful transgender model who was making big news internationally.

  ‘He’s so easy to dress. Remember how great he looked last time, in that black Prada dress with the ankle boot? He’s got the perfect body. There are no lumps.’

  I started in on the jelly snakes. I knew the glucose would make me bloat, but there were some Spanx in my office drawer I could squeeze into before tonight’s degustation dinner (sometimes, a Wolford bodysuit just wasn’t enough). I was idly wondering how many courses would be fish based when Simone appeared.

  ‘The cover shot is in,’ she said.

  This was from the shoot with Jade that Marie and I had set up in Paris. I felt the surge of excitement I always did when photos came in, mixed with the usual wave of nauseating anxiety. If it hadn’t worked and we didn’t have that all-important cover, I was going to have to explain to the CFO exactly what the hell we’d been doing. There was intense pressure from management to make sure each issue outsold the last. But, in the current competitive climate, with no further investment being made in the quality of the product itself, a significant growth in sales was a pipedream. No amount of gold foil mastheads or free shopping totes were going to turn around the inevitable slide in circulation figures that print was experiencing in its race against the internet.

  Leaning over the back of Simone’s chair, I looked hopefully at the screen.

  ‘She’s very pale,’ said my very sensible and tactful deputy, Alicia. She bought her clothes at vintage markets and restored old furniture, and owned two properties by the time she reached her mid-thirties. Roughly translated, this meant: ‘She looks like a cadaver.’