Tongue in Chic

by Kirstie Clements

  Did I need a fresh perspective; an actual holiday? Or maybe just a waist? Sometimes when I was feeling my age—or last night’s degustation dinner—the enthusiastic pronouncement that pencil skirts and wide belts were back made me want to fling myself off a cliff.

  I dragged my attention back to the issues at hand. There was a general consensus that this October issue would focus on all things ‘haute couture’, and thus bespoke, rare and special. It was always a good, no-brainer fallback position for a magazine such as Chic, given the luxury-products advertising we carried and the fashion we were required to promote.

  In fact, it was essentially our raison d’être. But even I reeled in shock at some of the high-fashion prices. Apparently this season, spending $4000 on a pair of summer sandals was considered to be inevitable, as opposed to insane, although the girls doing the editing were all on salaries of less than $50 000 a year and were still living in shared accommodation, only eating every second day. I once had the idea of introducing to our pages lower-priced fashion, with merchandise from the high-street stores, and had thought this would be a great service to our readers. Surprisingly, I was bombarded with complaints from readers that if they wanted to look at low-priced fashion, they would buy a tabloid magazine. This was certainly music to the fashion department’s ears, and they went back to calling in Chanel couture.

  * * *

  It was time for Nikki to chime in.

  ‘I have another story. This will be on super-luxe, super-expensive beauty products and treatments.’

  ‘Do tell,’ I said dryly.

  ‘Well, for example, there’s that new moisturiser that’s full of caviar extracts. There’s cashmere shampoo. And there’s a nail polish that contains diamond chips. There’s mink eyelashes. And, wait, solid gold eyelash curlers!’ she squeaked, unencumbered as she was with any sense of irony, or of social justice. I hadn’t felt this tired and depressed since I proofread breakout-box copy about a battery-operated vibrating mascara.

  ‘If we’re going to get our bodies “summer ready”, Nikki, then what do we do about flabby upper arms?’ I challenged her, perhaps unfairly. Nikki did not do well when put on the spot.

  Alicia, who read the daily world news extensively and was exceedingly bright, interjected.

  ‘I’ve read that there’s now a procedure for batwing arms. They remove the fat and stitch the arm skin back together, rather like a tummy tuck.’

  The whole staff, most of all me, murmured appreciatively, the whole concept of embracing a sensible diet and exercise again having been niftily skirted. I recalled the time that the then fashion director, Beth, had been wearing a thick wool blazer on a particularly sweltering day and I suggested she take it off.

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I hate my upper arms.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ I concurred. ‘But aren’t you hot?’

  Beth shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, so what. I’ve been hot for twenty years.’

  While clearly the operation was worth looking into, we moved to the next item on the schedule, which was the cover lines that needed to be written. The rest of the staff left for their respective desks, leaving Alicia and me to thrash it out. I loved this part of the monthly magazine process, although to all intents and purposes we had been regurgitating the same cover lines for the past fifteen years. But we liked at least to pretend that we were reinventing them each time. While people assume that fashion moves rapidly, it has the remarkable ability of also staying in exactly the same place. Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Sarah Jessica Parker were still the cover girls du jour. We said ‘Get Ready for Summer: the Shape of Things to Come’ in the nineties and we would say it again now.

  There were a few things we knew to avoid: anything too serious, too clever, too downbeat or too colloquial. Once, a genius from market research, wanting us to mimic the success of Marie Claire, decided that numbers sold, as did the words ‘Get Great Hair’ or ‘Look Ten Years Younger’. This entirely specious piece of data was then handed to every publisher who subsequently walked though the door, and some diligent sub would have to tally everything featured in the magazine that month, so we could proclaim ‘897 looks!!!!’ The sad result was that readers often counted them themselves, and if you were wrong, they called you on it.

  ‘Shall we say it’s a “collector’s issue?”’ I asked. Everybody was calling their issues ‘collector’s issues’, even if there was nothing whatsoever that made the issue special. Recently, a competitor had called one of their issues a ‘collector’s issue’ because there was a model on the cover, which we never fully understood.

  Alicia shook her head.

  ‘Only the consumer can decide if something is really worth collecting,’ she said, which reminded me that she was really smart, and should probably be doing something else.

  There were occasions we had put an issue out with merely one or two words on the cover and they had achieved very successful sales, but it was something you could only do now and again, and if you had a particularly strong image that demanded less clutter. Usually, images needed extra help. So we fiddled around with double entrendres and clever word play while we had a second cup of tea, and then settled on ‘Update Your Wardrobe Now, Looks You’ll Love’, high fiving each other as though we’d invented a new language.

  Maybe that would help to get that ghoulish-looking cover moving off the stands, I thought to myself as I went back to my office. In general, the reader wanted to see a model or a celebrity looking happy, healthy, fresh and attractive. It wasn’t really too much to ask, except in the competitive world of the high-fashion model wars. They were going to have to put up with whoever we deemed to be hot, whether they thought she was pretty or not.

  5

  Fatal Attraction

  I saw many staff come and go during my long tenure at Chic : the good, the bad and the stark raving mad. Luxury brands seemed to attract opportunists of the highest order, and extreme vigilance was required to ensure you were one step ahead of their furtive ambitions. If one of these fraudsters managed to make it onto the staff—even for a nanosecond, even if they’d been escorted off the premises by the police—the fact they had worked at Chic would remain on their curriculum vitae until the end of time.

  On the other hand, I’d heard about one woman, now working at a rival publication, who constantly recalled the heady days when she was starting out at Chic as a young, hopeful assistant, and relived all the crazy, wonderful episodes she had experienced, and went on about the wealth of knowledge she had gained. I had just celebrated my twenty-fifth anniversary at the magazine, and had absolutely no memory of the woman working there at any point, in any capacity whatsoever.

  Any avarice would normally surface once the staffer in question had access to a computer and a desk, but sometimes a mobile phone would suffice. Bianca was Chic’s poster child for how far you could get by pilfering the contact list of PRs. Bianca had sent in one mildly interesting story about relationships that caught the attention of the features editor, Jonathan. She was consequently invited to work part-time, to help Jonathan, mostly to check facts and perhaps try her hand at writing small pars or headings. Bianca was seated at a temporary desk in a corner, although apparently close enough to the action surreptitiously to plug a USB into Jonathan’s computer and download his entire address book.

  Weeks passed with little drama, apart from the fact that the fashion department hated her dress sense and decided she had really awful hair. Her over-coloured mane was blow dried out from her face and flicked back (so Miss Universe) as opposed to hanging down, sulkily straight, from a centre part as was preferred (so Daria, or Emmanuelle Alt from Paris Vogue).

  Then an envelope arrived that was addressed to Bianca Murray, Features Assistant. Jonathan intercepted it at the mail basket and, while mildly peeved that Bianca had given herself a title, decided not to mention it. He then left for a three-week vacation to the UK.

  Upon his return, he was surprised to find his desk relatively neat, as op
posed to groaning under the weight of invitations, press releases, newspaper and magazine subscriptions, CDs, DVDs and unsolicited review books. He walked over to Bianca’s desk, to see if perhaps she had been thoughtfully tidying up. The chair was empty but on the desk were teetering stacks of mail that looked suspiciously like the ones that Jonathan was missing. He snatched up the first package and read the label: Bianca Murrary, Features Editor. Envelopes began to hit the wall as, ninja style, Jonathan flung each one from the pile.

  After a series of frenzied phone calls to some of his PR contacts, it transpired that Bianca had told all the PR agencies that this was her new title and requested they kindly send most mail direct to her home.

  Jonathan was, understandably, apoplectic and Bianca’s ties to the magazine were immediately severed and her security swipe card cancelled. However, she had already moved on to bigger and better things. She worked her new contacts hard, writing and circulating a press release touting her editorial skills and her oh-so-contemporary understanding of Gen-Y female readers. As a result, she was quickly taken up by a media keen on anyone who had even the remotest chance of becoming a celebrity, was given a magazine column and was rapidly on her way to becoming a talking head on television, which probably had a lot to do with her hair.

  I had to admire her astonishing ambition, and her tactical prowess. It would be a couple of years before her new employers realised that that was all she had, after which she left the country.

  * * *

  It was often only after a staffer had left Chic that we would find out how much they had been abusing the system. Although I made it perfectly plain from the very first day on the job that I would not tolerate staff asking, or even hinting, for free products, for trips or for tickets to events, it was hard to police. I was even uneasy about accepting a discount, because the client might now think there was a tacit understanding that you would favour them with editorial. I once opened a package to find a jeweller had sent me a gift of a spectacular $10 000 ring. Aside from this kind of thing being against company policy, I knew what a giant can of worms it had the potential to open. I called the jeweller and said that it would be more ethical if I borrowed pieces from him on a six-month rotating basis, on the understanding that I would return everything, and this worked perfectly for both of us. I didn’t mind if the fashion girls were given something like a pair of jeans, a bottle of champagne, a beach towel or a scented candle, but big-ticket items were forbidden, unless it was a Christmas gift. They were acceptable, as it was clear that staff at other magazines would also receive them, and thus they couldn’t be considered payola. I had heard of instances in Russia that involved fur coats and cash hidden in magazines, but we weren’t quite at that level yet.

  Also forbidden was the borrowing of clothes from the stockroom—while movies such as The Devil Wears Prada perpetuate the myth that a fashion cupboard at a magazine is one colossal free-for-all, this was certainly not the case at Chic. Everything had to be returned immediately after a shoot, in tissue and intact.

  There was lots of delicious gossip over the years about staff at other magazines borrowing from the press rack without permission and then being photographed wearing the outfit at a function. Their deception would be uncovered by a PR who, while idly flicking through the social pages of the paper over breakfast on a Sunday morning, was shocked to see the piece that had been put aside for a shoot with a famous actress being worn by a junior fashion assistant, who would then return it smelling of tobacco.

  The Chic staffers were generally trustworthy and honourable. But, in some cases, greed became an issue and the clients were often too polite to tell me that a staff member was on the take. While I had a good instinct for who was likely to exploit his or her position, the avarice in some people was so transparent it was almost comical.

  There was the advertising executive who had been at the magazine for a month and still hadn’t sold a single page, who then walked into my office, rubbed his hands together and said, ‘When do we start to get all the free stuff?’ There was the woman applying for a subeditor’s position who, during her interview, looked directly at me and asked, ‘What is the potential for travel?’ I suggested the biggest distance she would be travelling was that between her desk and the photocopier. Or there was the features director who facilitated an all-expenses-paid trip (during the summer holiday season) to an obscure Pacific island because she wanted to investigate her family ancestry and apparently thought the resulting story would be thrilling for the readers. It wasn’t.

  There was the beauty editor who scammed a trip to New York, allegedly so that she could write a four-page story on blusher, but really so she could have an affair with a famous American actor she’d met at an airport. I had been told that a cosmetics house, also a major advertiser, would be picking up all the expenses, and was under the impression that they had asked for the story, and it wasn’t until I received the five-star-hotel bill that I realised I’d been conned.

  There was also a famous actress who accepted from a travel PR a trip to Bhutan in exchange for an article, so she had her agent call to inform me that the star would be writing a story for Chic. I had had no previous contact with the actress in question, and, after calling a few people in the industry, discovered that she was a terrible writer who refused to be edited and a complete bitch. The actress was already on the plane by this time, and I derived great pleasure from telling her agent I didn’t want the story, we had never commissioned the story in the first place and bon voyage.

  * * *

  Then there was the incident we came to refer to as Puccigate. One day the fashion assistant came to me, concerned that the PR for Pucci in Milan had emailed requesting that we send their wedding dress back. It was an archival piece that had been worn by a supermodel for her wedding the year before, and was one of the house’s most recognisable pieces. The problem was that the fashion office had never called the dress in—we weren’t shooting any bridal stories. A subsequent check of the paperwork revealed that a young woman by the name of Hilary, who worked in the marketing department at Chic, had requested the dress. She had apparently emailed the PR in Milan claiming to be from the editorial team and asking for the dress to be couriered to us for a ‘retrospective’ editorial, and the PR had duly sent the dress via international courier. And, who would have thought, it turned out Hilary was getting married very soon.

  Hilary was then on annual leave, so Alicia, who loved an intrigue, called her. Did she by any chance have this dress, the cost of which was probably in the vicinity of $15 000 and the loss of which would spoil our relationship with Pucci forever? Hilary at first claimed she had no idea what Alicia was alluding to.

  ‘So, if I went to your house, the dress wouldn’t be in your cupboard?’ Alicia asked. Hilary said that no, it wouldn’t. We stalled the Pucci PR for a day or so while we investigated.

  Alicia called Hilary again. This time, Hilary admitted that she had called the dress in for a shoot but said that it had been sent back. We knew the shoot was non-existent and were planning to get to that lie later, but in the meantime we wanted to know if we could have the tracking number of the delivery. Ah, no. It turned out that, after the initial phone call from Alicia, Hilary had run to the post office, shoved the exquisite handmade lace gown into a padded envelope and posted it.

  Our fashion office manager, Helen, had a mild heart attack on hearing this, and the package ended up stuck in customs in London. All this meant four weeks of panicky excuses, so as not to lose face with Pucci. I was furious, but when I mentioned the incident to Hilary’s manager, the response was: ‘Is it that big a deal?’

  They simply had no idea how seriously we took our relationships with clients. Hilary eventually resigned, although probably out of embarrassment rather than shame, and went to work for an online start-up, god help them.

  * * *

  Another obvious red flag was when a new employee started indulging in that most obnoxious of all behaviour: name-dropping. Overhea
ring the words ‘Don’t you know who I am? I work for Chic!’ made me cringe. I never uttered those words in my entire magazine career; I never used them to get a table in a restaurant, a hair appointment or anything at all. So when I overheard Bernard’s newly appointed part-time assistant, Jessica, speaking haughtily into the phone and saying, ‘Do you know who you’re speaking to?’ I sensed trouble.

  I’d had my doubts about the girl from the beginning. She was overly helpful to the point of ingratiating and came in on days when she wasn’t even supposed to be working, especially at weekends, when no one else was around. She wanted to know about everyone and everything in the office. She told elaborate stories about herself: that she had lived in New York, came from a monied family, and that her last roommate was one of the world’s top models. She pinned postcards, covered in sappy hearts and kisses, from this top model next to her desk, so people could read them. I smelled a fraud. She was dowdy and unglamorous, could never look you in the eye and seemed a little volatile. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth when she spoke to senior Chic staff, but she was unspeakably rude to others. As with people being nasty to waiters, this is behaviour that indicates to me that someone might be unhinged. But Bernard dismissed my uneasiness, choosing to turn a blind eye because the girl was just so damn efficient.

  One weekend, I was invited to attend a very exclusive luncheon at the polo. As I walked into the area where the VIP guests were cordoned off behind red ropes, sipping Bollinger and comparing the size of their South Sea pearls, I spied Jessica at the bar trying to mingle, but wearing cheap scuffed shoes and an ugly floral picture hat. Bernard was in Portofino, and she had obviously pilfered his invitation. When she saw me, her face froze and she quickly disappeared into the crowd.