Tongue in Chic

by Kirstie Clements

  Back in the office, I discussed my doubts about Jessica with Alicia, who likewise suspected that she was on the make, and was maybe even a little deranged. There had been a recent staff sale of all the products that came into the office for the beauty department. (Or, rather, of the ones that were left after the beauty editor had picked out all the best and most expensive ones, and sold them at an at-home party for her friends and family, complete with macarons, pink champagne and a yappy teacup terrier. The astonishing amount of products that were sent to the beauty editor, with gifts attached such as iPads, Smythson diaries, and who even knew what else, was one profound pit of largesse it was impossible to keep track of.) Alicia had been keeping the collected cash in her top drawer, waiting for the team’s consensus as to which charity should receive it. Now it was missing, and Alicia suspected Jessica.

  She had also decided that Jessica had more than one screw loose when she had heard her screaming down the phone at a Holden mechanic who hadn’t finished servicing her car.

  ‘Don’t you know who I am, and where I work? I can write an article about you and ruin you!’ she had threatened, while the poor man was, no doubt, wondering when exactly that scintillating article on car repairs would be printed in Chic.

  Katie, ashen faced, broke into our conversation.

  ‘There’s a woman on the phone saying Jess is her part-time nanny,’ she said. ‘Jessica led her to believe she’s your assistant, and that you insisted she come into work today. The baby’s missing and it seems she took him with her.’

  Horrified, I looked over at Jessica, who, having been at work for several hours, was calmly sitting at her desk, shuffling through some paperwork.

  ‘Jessica, do you know anything about a baby?’ I asked her, slightly frightened.

  ‘He’s in the car,’ Jessica replied emotionlessly, as if the question were completely normal, and in a creepy monotone like something out of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. As it turned out, she had left the baby boy in her car, which was parked several streets away from the office. A worried passerby had called the police and, thankfully, the baby had been safely removed from the car and was in the process of being reunited with his mother. Soon Jessica, too, would be meeting with the police.

  * * *

  This was not the first time the magazine had been involved with the police. One afternoon in 2002, I received a call from a very nice young officer, who asked me when the two Harley-Davidson motorcycles that had been borrowed for a shoot were going to be returned to the showroom.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said evenly, anticipating what was coming. At times, people got so overwhelmed by the idea of having their products featured in the magazine, that they would fail to properly check the borrower’s credentials.

  ‘A person came to the showroom yesterday, chose two brand-new Harleys for a magazine shoot and arranged for them to be picked up by truck earlier today,’ answered the police officer.

  ‘Who was that person? Did they have a business card or a letter of authority? What did this person look like?’ I enquired.

  The officer asked me to hold on for a moment as he asked the obviously distressed manager to describe the individual who had tricked him, then told me: ‘He said he was middle-aged. And “flamboyant”.’

  I couldn’t help but smile. ‘Flamboyant? How so?’

  ‘He was wearing high heels,’ the police officer answered politely.

  I was sorry the robbery had taken place, but the mental picture of a middle-aged man in Jimmy Choos on a high-speed Harley chase was priceless.

  That episode had been remarkable for its sheer brazenness, but there was another that was remarkable because of the intricate plotting involved. The fashion office had received a call from a young woman, asking for the address of the studio where the ‘Glamour Girls’ story was to be shot that day. When she was told there was no such session booked, and could she please identify herself, she broke down in tears.

  ‘I’ve been collecting jewellery and watches for that shoot all morning, and I handed them to a man who jumped into a car and left me standing on the street,’ she sobbed. Perplexed, we asked her to get into a taxi and come straight to the office. The story of larceny that unfurled was elaborate, to say the least.

  A well-dressed man of about thirty had been regularly visiting fine jewellery stores for almost a year, passing himself off as a stylist for Chic. He was courteous and personable at all times. On each occasion, he would borrow items, some of them worth more than $200 000, for a supposed ‘shoot’, and they would be returned on time and packed fastidiously. He became a familiar and friendly face for both the stores’ managers and owners, who believed him to be one of Chic magazine’s key stylists.

  Ostensibly looking for an assistant, he placed an advertisement on an employment website. A young fashion student replied, thrilled at the chance to become involved in the industry. She met with the supposed stylist, who hired her on the spot and explained what she would be required to do. He had visited six fine jewellery boutiques, chosen the most expensive pieces, including gold Rolexes and diamond earrings, and requested that the merchandise be set aside for the ‘Glamour Girls’ shoot, which he claimed was scheduled for the following day. He had told the staff that he would be sending his new assistant to pick up the jewels in the morning and she just had to introduce herself to them.

  The hapless girl had followed his instructions and collected all the pieces, and had her excited face captured on all the CCTV security cameras. He had arranged to meet her on a street corner afterwards, and, as she handed the goods over to him, she asked where the shoot was to be held.

  ‘I’ll call you and let you know the address. It’s changed,’ he said over his shoulder, as he leapt into a car and sped off. And here she was, sitting in my office, waiting for the police to arrive, and having paramedics attend to her because she was hyperventilating with panic.

  I then had the awful task of informing the jewellers that they had been duped, and I couldn’t help but wonder why none of them had wondered why the jewellery had never appeared in the magazine after the ‘stylist’ had taken the pieces for these fictional shoots. It transpired that he explained it away by saying a shoot had been dropped, or the piece hadn’t made it in, or the story was on hold and would be running later in the year.

  It was ingenious, but he left many bruised victims in his wake, none more so than the hopeful assistant who had thought she was getting a foot in the door of this most glamorous of industries. He was subsequently arrested and charged, mainly because of a physical attribute that had made it easier for the police to track him down. He had only one arm.

  * * *

  There were various other pedicured feet that I wished hadn’t stepped through the door, having slipped through the net even though Alicia and I were constantly on the alert for people who wanted to use Chic as a calling card for financial or social advancement.

  On one occasion, Chic had an article, including a photo spread, on one of the country’s most prominent socialites: a tall, surgically enhanced blonde who had married extremely well and now had the requisite attractive children with floppy blonde curls. She was photographed lounging around the family’s palatial mansion, leaning against designer furniture, and posing next to their vast and pretentious art collection.

  She had been prickly and imperious from the start of the project, complaining about everything from the choice of fashion (‘Isn’t there any couture?’), to the marks that may or may not have been left on her whitewashed floorboards after she, begrudgingly, let the editorial team eat their sandwiches in the kitchen and the photographer had put his camera down.

  I had always found that projects that were difficult from the start generally just got more so, and this one was no exception. The socialite demanded to see the story once it was in layout, which was often only a week or so before the magazine needed to be sent to the printers and we were all under the pump. Also, this was a request that the ma
gazine would never grant unless it came from royalty, or a head of state, and even they were never that insistent. She threatened that her husband would take legal action if I didn’t agree to her demands, and so, given that he was one of the richest and most well-connected captains of industry in the country, we reluctantly acquiesced and she was sent the layout. Then the fun really started.

  She was straight on the phone to the stylist to complain: ‘The team has made me look weird. I don’t look like that at all. My mouth and nose look strange, and one eye is higher than the other.’

  I was tempted to grab the phone myself and tell her the truth: Most thin fortysomething blonde socialites who’ve had too much work done look like you. It’s not the work we did; it’s the work you had done. After being placated with much long-winded flattery from Alicia, who was more patient than I was, she was finally persuaded to allow the shots to run. But by this time, she had decided she wanted to join our staff. Clearly, she had some downtime between surgeries and was bored stupid.

  ‘I think maybe she’d be good as an editor-at-large,’ said one of our stylists, Beth, who liked producing ‘at home with the rich and pampered’ stories.

  I raised a quizzical eyebrow—well, raised it as far as I could. I’d always had a bit of a problem with women who marry money, as opposed to making it themselves, which was probably just due to envy because I was bone-tired.

  ‘She’s so connected,’ Beth continued. ‘She could get us inside houses we’d never normally have access to.’

  I agreed, against my better judgment. The socialite, whose husband was in the top three per cent of a major annual list of the richest people in the country, called the office a week later.

  ‘I need business cards,’ she snapped, in her usual entitled manner.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘I mean, everyone knows who you are.’

  ‘I need them for the designer clothes stores. Which ones give you the biggest discounts?’

  For many reasons, I wasn’t surprised to be hearing this. The world of high-fashion publishing is a magnet for so many talented people. And for a whole bunch of people who wished they were.

  6

  Style Queens

  Editing a magazine like Chic meant that, in every area, you had the privilege of working with the best of the best: art directors, photographers, journalists, subeditors and—of course—stylists. A first-rate stylist could shape and even transform fashion, turning what looked to be a regulation pantsuit into something desirable and sublime. The big fashion shoots were essentially what the whole magazine was judged on, by the industry and the readers, despite the fact that they made up only around thirty to forty per cent of the whole book. They were also the thing that management most resented spending money on. If it looked like the model was on a big, happy, stylish holiday, then you and the team must have been on one too. Especially when the invoice for excess luggage came in.

  A good stylist could sit front row at literally hundreds of ready-to-wear shows, and be able to pinpoint exactly which ‘looks’ and trends defined the season. Through research, and by drawing on various historical and artistic references, they would then translate these looks into ‘stories’, creating a theme and a mood for them that would speak eloquently to the reader. The editors would return from the shows and cherry-pick the clothes and accessories, choosing the locations, models and backdrops that integrated them into one elegant and original narrative.

  As a junior staffer at Chic, I loved to watch the fashion editors at work, and marvel at how they made their decisions given the amount of merchandise they had to choose from. In my early days at the magazine when I was on the reception desk, I would gaze, mesmerised, at the amazing volume of product being delivered to the fashion office—racks and racks of gorgeousness wheeled past by eager assistants and cranky couriers.

  Nothing was ever done by halves. A standout white lace dress and a general Victorian trend on a runway would spark a Miss Havisham from Great Expectations narrative, with the stockroom becoming filled to the brim with delicate Dickensian dresses, blouses and skirts, the floor covered with leather boots and satin evening slippers and drawers spilling over with jewellery, purses and headpieces. But this was not just about recreating costume drama—the goal was to feature the new season’s fashion underpinned with another layer of context. I would listen to the editors run through their inspirations—whether it was turn-of-the-century tennis, the Hungarian photographer Brassaï’s documents of the louche bar patrons of thirties Paris, Elvis in his Vegas period, Sophia Loren in Two Women, or a sixties Graham Greene novel—knowing that the result would be an Aladdin’s cave, including props and furniture and fabrics, of utter delight. The editors would decide on their story, turn to the assistants and grandly announce the theme, which meant they were to get cracking on finding the relevant items. To a clever and creative assistant, this was not only a challenge but a joy, although I had certainly witnessed my fair share of nitwit behaviour.

  ‘What’s Bloomsbury?’ I recall a fashion assistant called Danielle asking me one day.

  ‘Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Sissinghurst; anything ringing a bell?’

  She looked at me blankly. It took rather a lot of explaining and the suggestion that perhaps she should visit a library (this was pre-Google) for her to understand the ins and outs of the Bloomsbury Group. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so judgmental. And perhaps I shouldn’t have enlightened her. This same woman, who was evidently unaware of seminal periods of English culture, later became the editor of a magazine herself. Danielle had also once stated loudly at a production meeting that, since we were doing a Woodstock story, she had to go out and find a ‘puncho’. I recall the uber-intelligent and refined chief copy editor, Vera—who made sure that the word ‘polyester’ never appeared on the pages of the magazine because she considered it déclassé—was wide-eyed with amazement. Mind you, you’d be hard-pressed nowadays to find someone under the age of thirty who can even reference Woodstock, let alone the Bloomsbury Group, so in the new world order, Danielle is no doubt considered to be Diana Vreeland.

  Over time, a genre of stylists appeared who had a far different approach to calling in clothes for a shoot than did the stylists I was used to. Given the strict financial constraints in the new world of publishing, they had not had the opportunity to be trained, or even to be assistants. They were hyperaware of what was ‘hot’ in current trends, designers and top models, thanks to being able to hit the internet and absorb all the critical appraisal. As the new ‘stylists’ tended to form the same opinion as the critics a nanosecond after reading their reviews, they were taking part in the universal consensus and were, therefore, experts. It was all just a chorus of: ‘I loved Balenciaga, Wang was amazing, I’m dying for those Céline shoes.’ It was the rare newcomer who said something against the flow, like ‘The Alberta Ferretti coats were gorgeous this season,’ which they always were.

  When it came time for them to do a shoot, they tended to call in ‘exits’ only from the ‘hot’ designers, and only approximately the same number of looks as there were expected pages. I remember being flabbergasted when one day I walked into a yawningly empty stockroom to inspect the clothes that one freelance editor was preparing to shoot. It was supposed to be a ten-page story, and the stylist had assembled on a rack ten looks that were not themed and didn’t even remotely relate to one another, but they were all from the ‘hot’ labels.

  ‘And what if one of them doesn’t work on the day?’ I said, mildly, although I really wanted to throw a shoe at him—if there’d been a spare one to throw.

  The stylist was nonplussed.

  ‘How would it not work, when most of it’s Givenchy or Balenciaga?’

  Clearly he was clairvoyant, I thought crossly. In my experience, any amount of things could, and usually did, go wrong on the day of a shoot. You needed contingency planning.

  ‘What shoes do you have?’ I continued.

  ‘I couldn’t get the Yves Saint Laurent s
hoe I really wanted, because another magazine has it. So we’re just going to crop most of the shots.’

  ‘And you’ll be shooting where?’

  ‘In a studio.’

  It would be easier, not to mention cheaper, simply to run images from a lookbook, the catalogues that designers sent out each season with each exit photographed against a white wall. This attitude, lazy and egotistical, summed up everything I detested. It largely came down to a lack of creativity—with certain stylists, if they didn’t have the exact shoe that was big in the particular season, they had no idea of what to use as a substitute, of how to take a basic theme but add a twist of originality. They showed no interest in providing the reader with any choice of things to buy. She wasn’t given a moment’s thought; they were shooting only to impress their peers.

  Of course, this stylist was far from the only culprit.

  ‘Marie, have you seen the shoot Mimi did that just arrived in the art department?’ I said one day.

  Marie was sitting on the floor of the office, sorting through thirty different styles of espadrilles and sandals to find exactly the right one for her Picasso-inspired shoot. Aside from being the fashion director, she was a meticulous old-school editor, who had never rated Mimi, a freelance stylist who loved the imperious skank look and had never seen a tight ponytail or a pair of rubber leggings she didn’t like. But, as budgets had tightened, I had been relying increasingly on a certain number of freelance stories.

  When we looked at the shots, we saw that the model, a fairly famous name, had been Photoshopped to the point that you could no longer tell who she was. Her waist had been narrowed, her legs lengthened, all expression wiped from her face. Mimi had also, for reasons unknown, decided that a skirt with a cutaway crotch was the must-have for the girl about town, especially when teamed with a futuristic wide-shouldered jacket of reflective silver foil, a sports singlet, a Bulgari necklace and heels that appeared too high to walk in.