Designs on the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

VOGUE.com, October 2015

  RUNWAY

  Spring/Summer 2016 Ready-to Wear—Sauveterre

  When Sauveterre announced two months ago that Head Designer Roland Guipure would be entering rehabilitation for an addiction to heroin, no one knew quite what to expect for the future. As it turns out, the answer is “miracles.”

  When Guipure left for a facility in Greece after showing an Autumn/Winter collection that British Vogue labeled “the kind of clothes a depressed Goth would find too lifeless,” it seemed his label had only two possible paths.

  The house could enter hiatus until his return, or it could draft in a new designer. The first risked incurring heavy financial losses; the second risked losing continuity for a label so closely associated with its head designer.

  In the end, Sauveterre made the only decision that seemed more perilous. They decided to use designs Guipure completed in his désintox for this season’s collection.

  I can’t be the only critic who was concerned after the house announced this plan. But when I entered the Petit Palais, transformed into a stark black cube for the Sauveterre défilé, my worry was replaced by delight, courtesy of the series of exuberant designs that filed down the runway. After last season’s muddy colors and heavy tissus, here was a return to the vivid jersey and bright silks of Sauveterre’s earliest outings.

  Guipure has always excelled at treading the thin line between bold and outré, and here he walked that tightrope successfully once again. These clothes cling to the body with a sinuosity that plays against the square white, almost puritan, collars. The shades are hot pinks, bright yellows, with occasional soft blues and greens to give the eye a rest. The wedding dress at show’s end, long soft rectangles of painted habotai wafting down raw-edged from a loose duchesse bodice, was a masterpiece in the true Sauveterre mold: youthful but elegant, subtle but eye-catching. If this is what Guipure produces when he is half recovered, fashion eagerly looks forward to his full reemergence.

  BuzzGoss, December 1, 2015

  www.thebuzz.com//15121

  He’s baaack! The word on the catwalk is that Roland Guipure left rehab last week and is currently holed up in his atelier. A little bee tells us he’s already started sketching for next year’s collections. It’s looking like a Merry Christmas for Maison Sauveterre!

  Elle, December 2016

  House of Sauveterre has announced that it will not be showing spring/summer 2017 haute couture. Creative Director Roland Guipure returned from an extended stay at a rehabilitation center earlier this month, and a press release from the company explains, “We’re mindful that we don’t want to overtax Roland during a delicate time. We’re committed to continuing to produce the exciting and innovative prêt-à-porter we showed last October, so we’ve chosen to focus on that. Look for new Sauveterre haute couture in July 2017.”

  WWD, March 9, 2016

  Sauveterre RTW Fall 2016

  You would be forgiven for thinking that a designer emerging from recent personal troubles would offer a sober collection to mark the occasion. At Sauveterre, however, Roland Guipure went in the opposite direction, offering a burst of innovation to announce a comeback that most had been eagerly, if tensely, awaiting.

  The invitation to Sauveterre’s defilé announced the show as “A Garden of Possibility,” and it says something that Guipure made this abstract phrase take vivid concrete form. Perhaps channeling Dior’s postwar exuberance, his pieces offered flowers everywhere: in skirts artfully swirled, in high collars twisted into Guipure’s beloved architectural shapes, in sleeves that blossomed at the shoulders. But perhaps hinting at his recent brush with drugs, these flowers were no delicate blooms, but rather fashioned from rough plaids, twists of dark tweed, and in the case of one memorable skirt, intricate purple leather panels made to imitate an upside-down rose.

  It wasn’t difficult to see the connection between this show and the looks the House of Sauveterre presented last season in a defilé made up of designs Guipure had completed while in rehab. There the sculpted collars framed the face; here they nearly swamped it. The princess lines that are an instinctive part of Guipure’s repertoire had allowed the clothes to sinuously frame the body last season; this season they seemed to make the pieces cling to the models like spiderwebs threatening to overwhelm. Everywhere sleek exuberance was transmuted into darker, yet still arresting, echoes of the forms of a few months ago.

  When Guipure emerged at the show’s end, dressed all in white and hand in hand with his sister and business partner, it was hard not to think that a talent that had nearly shriveled was now well on its way to a rich reblooming.

  The BoF: Business of Fashion, 24 March 2016

  Deals

  Tokyo, Japan,– CHIEKO Group S.p.A and the HOUSE OF SAUVETERRE today announced their intention to ink a new license agreement for the exclusive development, manufacture and distribution of a new perfume, Lace, by Sauveterre™. The objectives of the new license agreement are to build a successful scent product line linking Sauveterre’s brand recognition with Chieko Group’s manufacturing and production capabilities.

  Sato Asuka, CEO at Chieko, stated that “We are extremely pleased that this agreement is about to reach completion. Chieko is proud to partner with the House of Sauveterre in a relationship that we are sure will bring great mutual satisfaction.”

  A life charted in media, Rachel thought. Rise, fall, and rise again, all of it watched, noted, and judged. Under this constant observation she’d probably have turned to drugs too. It seemed like the only way to get some peace.

  She leafed back through the printouts. She saw Magda’s point. Guipure’s life after rehab seemed charmed: professional acclaim, a chunk of money, all topped off with a celebration of his very existence at the trendiest club in town. She could see him being convinced enough of his own invincibility to take just one hit. She drummed her fingers on the table and bit her lip. Maybe she was wrong.

  She took a deep breath and started to say so, but Magda preempted her. “Now you see. He had a licensing deal in Japan; he was going to make a fortune! And all the reviews of his last show are like that one from WWD. Every single one is a rave. For God’s sake, the critics even loved the clothes he designed while he was in rehab! Plus, no one in any of these articles has a bad word to say about him. I don’t see a hint here of jealous rivals or disgruntled employees …” She corrected herself: “In fact, the reverse, according to the article in the Times.” She took a breath. “On the other hand, he’s at a lavish party at a trendy club, surrounded by friends from the fashion world—not exactly known for just saying no—and probably suck-ups eager to offer him things to make him happy. It sounds like the backdrop for a cut-and-dried celebrity overdose. Even in the bicep.”

  This was no more than Rachel herself had been going to say, but she didn’t respond. She was staring at the cover of Oops! “No, it isn’t,” she said.

  “Oh my God! You just want to win. That’s all this is about. Who would want to m—”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel cut in. “And I don’t know why. But let me ask you a question.” She picked up the magazine, flipped to the article about Guipure, and read aloud. “The left sleeve of his three-hundred-euro Armani shirt was dotted with blood where he’d stuck the needle in his bicep.” She flipped it closed and pointed to the glossy cover, where Guipure was pinning pleats on a bored-looking mannequin, his left hand working busily. “How does a left-handed man inject heroin into his own left bicep?”

  Chapter Four

  Of course it wasn’t as easy as that. Guipure might have been ambidextrous, Magda pointed out. Even if he wasn’t, injecting oneself didn’t require much in the way of fine motor skills; he could have done it with his nondominant hand. Or, in a pinch, he could have injected his left arm with his left hand—she folded her arm in half and demonstrated, jabbing uncomfortably but still accurately into her bicep. He could even have had someone else inject him. He was a famous man in a profession known for its hangers-on: someone at the par
ty would no doubt have been delighted to help him out, and then could have vanished when things went wrong.

  “In that case, why didn’t they use a vein?” Rachel widened her eyes and spread her hands.

  “I don’t know.” Magda’s voice was a shrug. “But I don’t have to know. If a junkie is found dead of an overdose with an injection mark on his arm, the simplest answer is that he did it himself, with his dominant hand, his subordinate hand, or whatever hand he could manage it with. And how often have you said, ‘Occam’s Razor’ to me and insisted that the simplest answer is most likely to be the right one?”

  Many times, Rachel acknowledged. But this time was different. This time there was something …

  Her dissatisfaction must have shown on her face because Magda said, “What’s going on here? I understand that this is like Edgar’s murder, when no one but you believed it was murder. But there you had evidence that suggested he hadn’t just died accidentally, and here you have none. And you don’t know Roland Guipure, so it can’t be that. Your only connection to him is fifteen minutes spent staring at a dress he made. So why does it matter if he was murdered?”

  Because I know, Rachel wanted to shout. But it would have gained her nothing. Although Magda had plenty of time for sudden convictions and illuminations (which she put under the heading of inspiration), she’d never shared Rachel’s faith in the validity of feelings, her belief that sometimes instinct is telling you a truth that will only be proved later.

  Still, Rachel gave it a try. “I know.” Her voice sounded weak, even to her. “I just know.”

  Magda shook her head. “Well, I don’t.” She crossed her arms mutinously.

  Rachel was silent for a long time. Then she said, “Remember that time when you said you could pierce my ears with an ice cube and a needle, and I let you?”

  A reluctant nod.

  “And remember that time when you insisted that you’d seen Alain Delon go into the supermarket across the street, and we ended up following that man who was not Alain Delon all around the store?”

  “You thought he was Alain Delon too,” Magda said sulkily.

  “I did not. But I said I did because I knew you loved Alain Delon. Just like I still know Alain Delon’s birthday and the names of all his children. I learned them because it was important to you.”

  Magda bit her lip, but she didn’t say anything. Rachel leaned across the table and looked at her so intently that she actually felt her eyes hurt. “Give me two weeks. Give me two weeks because the ice cube did not numb the pain, and the holes in my ears are lopsided, and Alain Delon’s birthday is—”

  “The eighth of November. Fine.” Magda inhaled through her nose. “Two weeks. I’m with you for two weeks. But after that, if there’s nothing, you’ll give up?” Rachel nodded. “Okay. But what I said still applies. You don’t know Roland Guipure. Or any of his friends or family. So I don’t know how you’re going to be able to find anything out.” She gave a little shake of her head. “This isn’t like our last case, where you found the body, or even like Edgar Bowen’s murder, where you already knew the victim and his family. You don’t know any of these people, and they don’t know you. Our lives and the life of the alleged victim don’t intersect anywhere.”

  Now that was a good point. And a fair one. Or—wait. Magda’s mention of Edgar Bowen reminded Rachel that she did have one possible source for inside information on Roland Guipure, a source that she’d used when Edgar died. Her friend Kiki Villeneuve knew everyone in the Paris haute bourgeoisie, that world of old families whose names and connections stretched back for centuries. Hadn’t one of the articles she’d just seen mentioned something about Guipure’s grandfather being a war hero?

  She flicked back once again. There it was: “a quiet hero in France because of his fair dealings with Jewish customers during World War II.” Okay, not really the same thing—what exactly was a “quiet hero”?—but if Maximilien Sauveterre had enough money that his grandchildren only needed to cash in some of it in order to start a multimillion dollar business, it was just possible that he had entered Kiki’s world at some point, in some way.

  Besides, she concluded, she had nowhere else to start. And if she wanted to prove to her best friend that her instincts were sound, she had to begin somewhere.

  Chapter Five

  Kiki Villeneuve was Rachel’s oldest Parisian friend. In her late sixties now, she had first met Rachel twenty years before, when she had been the hostess of a cocktail party and Rachel had been one of the catering staff. Madame Villeneuve, as Rachel had thought of her that evening, had been as warm and welcoming to the servers as she had been to her own guests, and somehow—the exact steps were now lost to Rachel’s memory—they had struck up a friendship. Through Rachel’s first years in Paris, the eighteen years of her marriage to Alan, her change from a stumbling foreigner to an established Parisian resident, plump Kiki had been a loving source of support and extremely enjoyable gossip. Kiki liked, she once told Rachel, to think of herself as Rachel’s mother in France. And although Rachel adored her own confident, briskly capable American mother, she acknowledged that Kiki’s soft hugs, her fascination with the minutiae of Rachel’s life, and her absolute conviction that Rachel would succeed at whatever she tried filled some unspoken need in her. After all, she thought as she sank into one of the overstuffed sofas in Kiki’s salon, who doesn’t need a second family sometimes, to fill the gaps left by the first?

  No sooner had Kiki poured their tea and put the plate of cookies in a prominent position, than she pointed to a copy of Le Figaro on her coffee table, folded back so the headline of Roland Guipure’s obituary showed.

  “You know about this, I suppose?” Rachel nodded. “All week I’ve been picking it up and rereading it. It’s terrible when a young person dies.”

  Rachel hesitated, but then said gently. “Forty is hardly young.”

  “It’s young to die.” Kiki sighed. Late afternoon sunshine streamed through the windows, turning her pale yellow walls gold. She shook her head. “I danced with his grandfather once, and now the boy is dead. It’s too fast.”

  “So you knew the family?” Rachel tucked her stocking feet under her on the sofa.

  “Well, I met the grandparents a few times. Maximilien and Marthe Sauveterre. But I didn’t really know them. They were closer to my mother’s generation.”

  “And how did she know them?”

  “Through her family. They moved in the same circles.”

  “In Moncontour?” This was Kiki’s childhood hometown, not known for producing notable families.

  “No, no, here. Remember, I told you that after my father died we moved back to Paris to be near my mother’s family. When they heard she had a daughter of marriageable age, they decided to do their duty by me and introduce me into society. The summer I was twenty I went to all the debutante bals and teas. Parents were the chaperones, so my mother also attended, and so did the Sauveterres because their daughter was making her debut.” She took a thoughtful bite of her cookie. “Geneviève Sauveterre. I lent her my lipstick once. Anyway, my mother introduced me to Maximilien and Marthe Sauveterre, and at one bal Monsieur Sauveterre asked me to dance.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was in his seventies then, so to me he was just old. But still galant.” Kiki cocked her head to one side. “I think my maman would have been delighted to be seduced by him, but he was famous for his devotion to his wife. They were married for more than forty years, and my mother said that in all that time she didn’t hear about more than one or two little affairs.” She snorted a little laugh. “I remember my grandmother was horrified that their daughter was a debutante. She was a terrible snob, my grandmother; she never got over the fact that her father was the grandson of a chevalier. She used to say Maximilien Sauveterre’s grandfather had been a commerçant, and nothing he did in the war could change that.”

  A bell chimed in the back of Rachel’s mind. Here was a chance for clarification. “Yes, I rem
ember the obituary called him a ‘quiet hero.’ What did he do in the war?”

  Kiki leaned forward and lowered her voice, as if about to share a secret in a crowded room. “He bought art from Jews.”

  Rachel was confused, and she must have looked it, because Kiki held up a hand. “It might be easier to start further back. Alors. Maximilien Sauveterre’s grandfather owned an art supply store in Besançon in the 1800s—this is what my grandmother couldn’t forgive. This man’s son, Monsieur Sauveterre’s father, apparently had a very good eye, and he turned the business into a gallery and moved it to Paris. When he died, Monsieur Sauveterre took over. It wasn’t a very grand place—Rosenfeld had a much grander one only a few doors down—but it was solid, and it had a good reputation. And during the drôle de guerre, the phony war, and then after the Germans arrived in 1940, many Jews were looking for reputable dealers who would buy their valuables. They wanted to pay for emigration or to be able to live once they emigrated. Many dealers took advantage—”

  “—And bought at knock-down prices.” Throughout her childhood, Rachel’s mother and grandmother had told her stories about what had happened to their European relatives during the war: Great-Aunt Sara who had sold her silver cutlery to buy her way out of Austria before it was too late; second Cousin Hans who had refused to sell the collection of Steuben glass he prized and hadn’t made it out at all.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot. Of course you know all this.” Kiki looked abashed. She sipped from her cup, then picked up her thread. “But Maximilien Sauveterre didn’t buy at such prices. He paid fair market value all through the German occupation. And then he held on to the paintings until the war’s end so he could sell them back at the same price when the owners returned. Only …” she trailed off awkwardly, but Rachel understood. Only the owners never returned.

  “But that’s a good thing, surely. So why didn’t the paper just say it directly?”