Fashionably Late

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Karen had never believed that there was a conspiracy of top designers whose styles held women hostage, but in the old days – the fifties and the sixties – there was a general guide that designers had provided. Now, with fashion democratized, anyone could wear anything – and they often did. In a way, Karen thought this had made dressing more difficult for women. Without any boundaries at all, the choices seemed too confusing. At least these women looked confused.

  Defina came on, looking good as always, pushing Tangela, Stephanie, and two other models ahead of her. Tangela plopped down in a seat across the aisle. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Defina asked her daughter. She handed her a ticket. ‘You’re in the back,’ she said. ‘Behind the curtain, along with the others.’ Tangela stuck her lower lip out and Karen couldn’t help but notice how much like Defina it made her look.

  ‘Why can’t I sit up here?’ Tangela asked.

  ‘When you do first-class work, you sit in first class,’ Defina told her.

  Tangela grabbed at her ticket and flounced down the aisle. Two of the other models giggled and followed her. So did Stephanie, who seemed to Karen to be so excited that nothing could dim her enthusiasm. It would be her first modeling in public. Karen wasn’t sure she was up to it, and Defina had said she was certain that the girl wasn’t, but Karen felt guilty about how little time she had spent with her niece and this was a way she could try and make it up to her.

  ‘Hope this plane doesn’t crash with the load of resentment it’s got back in the tail,’ Defina said, indicating coach.

  At last the plane was boarded and ready to move into the long line of flights waiting to take off from LaGuardia at 7 A.M. Insiders called the airport DelayGuardia. With the trunk show scheduled for eleven, and a two-hour flight in front of them, it didn’t leave a lot of room for error, but with the hour time difference and with Casey Robinson as their advance man, Karen figured it would be all right.

  Trunk shows were a lot of trouble. They were part celebrity press-the-flesh, part show-and-tell, and part sales pressure cooker. Karen had to charm her customers while selling the shit out of them. The ladies who lunched descended to a feeding frenzy. Department stores went to a lot of trouble and expense to publicize a trunk show; they advertised, set aside extra floor space, staff, and time, and sent personalized invitations to those clients they felt were most likely to appreciate and buy. They expected to see sales racked up.

  And Karen was good at selling. She enjoyed it. And she was sincere. She never recommended stuff to women that didn’t look good on them. Still, she sometimes wondered if part of what she was doing was immoral. Sometimes there was such a buzz surrounding a trunk show that she felt more like a drug pusher than a designer. Karen knew that fashion – shopping – was addictive to women. It was a healthy normal need that could become an unhealthy, frightening obsession. And after all, most women in America had addiction problems. Most women were addicted to food, and fashion was a little bit like that: overeaters always complained that their problems were harder to handle than alcoholism because, unlike drinking, you couldn’t simply quit eating. You had to do some of it every day. And that was the problem with clothes. Women had to get dressed every day. And if they dressed badly, they had to live with the results all day long. Dressing badly in the morning felt a lot like overeating at breakfast – you were left with a load of self-hate that showed and that you had to carry all through the rest of the day.

  Karen remembered the way Bill Wolper had described what she sold – hope, or the illusion of it. It made her skin crawl. Karen didn’t want to sell hope, or a rotten perfume in a fancy bottle. She wanted to sell beautiful clothes to women who could enjoy them. There was no doubt that the shopping thing had gotten worse in the last decade. Of course, part of it was the eighties mentality of consumerism – shopping as a way of life. But Karen thought there was more to it than that. What had happened in the last ten or fifteen years was that most women had gone to work, and once they left home and were seen every day by others, the pressure to dress well intensified.

  Back in the fifties, Karen imagined, women could stay at home and do their chores in housecoats. Hadn’t Belle worn housecoats? What had happened to them? When women in the fifties went out, it became an event: they wore hats and gloves and high-heeled shoes. But the trouble that they took with their formal appearance was offset by being able to relax so much of the time at home. They didn’t have to dress every morning in the rush before getting the kids off to school.

  Today, there was no time for most women to relax at home. They were out there, in the business world, and – unlike men – they were being judged twofold all the time. They were being judged by their appropriateness and also for their attractiveness as women. Men could just put on another suit or sports coat, but women wanted more. They wanted to look appropriate and attractive and they had to do it every day. They had more at stake than ever and less chance of attaining their goals.

  Because at the same time that women had gone to work, the look they aspired to was more difficult to achieve than ever. Models had gotten younger, taller, and thinner in the last few years than they had ever been before. The power of the fashion magazines had grown, the images were more unattainable, and as Karen had seen in the motley passengers getting on the plane, the average woman kept trying – and failing – to look good. Karen thought back to Bill Wolper’s chilling description of the average woman’s life. The women she would meet with today were more affluent than Bill’s disappointed, trapped woman but as far as Karen could see her rich clientele were, in their own way, just as disappointed and trapped. Women spent money at trunk shows with a ferocity that was frightening.

  Last season, a couple of her trunk shows in New York and Los Angeles had actually set records, but that didn’t mean it would work in Chicago. An ever-more-sophisticated city, and one with a lot of wealth clustered along Lake Shore Drive and the Miracle Mile, it still had a patina of Midwestern conservatism: she couldn’t always count on Chicago and the Midwest to understand her stuff. That’s why it was so important now for them to get it. Because, in addition to the profit pressure on her and the expectation that Bernheart’s had, if she ever expected to expand, it had to be out to the center from the two coasts. She was doing this show today partly to test market some of her new designs for Paris. She wanted to see if she’d get a reaction, and this was the only chance for a sneak preview that she’d get.

  At last, the flight took off. Karen sat there, staring out the window at nothing, thinking about last night’s call until the flight attendant offered her a mimosa. Who the fuck drank champagne in their orange juice at seven o’clock? she wondered. She shook her head, and the flight attendant served them breakfast.

  Defina scowled at her. ‘What are you stewing over? Give it up, girlfriend,’ Defina said. ‘You are what you are and we got what we got and it’s good enough. Nothing you can do about it now, anyway, so kick on back.’ She looked down at her plate. ‘Talk about happy meals! Eat your cheese omelet, but don’t touch them little things they call sausages. Even in first class they look like cat turds to me.’

  ‘Eeuw. Dee!’ Karen laughed and waved away all of her breakfast. She never had anything except a dry bagel anyway. She had one tucked in her schlep bag overhead, along with the baby phone. She wondered if it could get calls while they were in flight. Was she missing a chance right now? Well, if she thought about that she’d go crazy. She shook her head as if she could shake the thought of all that out of her mind.

  She tried to focus on the day ahead of her. The Paris line had been developing well. The jackets, as always, were a big hit with the models already. Women, it seemed, could never have too many blazers, and it was true that hers were cut in such a way to hide a multitude of sins. Her slacks always sold and the new Japanese wool blends that she was trying – ungodly expensive at sixty dollars a yard wholesale – had been a great success so far. Although her clientele absolutely had to have natural fabric, this Japanese
miracle stuff had the texture of wool but it didn’t wrinkle. Great for travel. She’d used it for the first time in her last collection and they hadn’t been able to keep the pants in the New York stores.

  It was the dresses that she was more concerned about. She had taken a real chance with them. They were mostly long, almost calf-length, and in tussa silk or the lightest boucle. They had cap sleeves – no woman over eighteen should ever attempt a sleeveless dress. Karen followed Coco on that. After all, who wanted to stare at armpits all day? All of the dresses had optional jackets, and all of them buttoned down the front. Karen thought of them as a kind of thirties farm wife dress, but the long line was incredibly complimentary to most women. And they could go from the office to a dinner party. The best thing about them was that they were easy – no blouse to choose, no scarf to add. Slip into it, zip it up, and you were done. Thirty-second dressing.

  The problem was that most women wouldn’t try on dresses, so the pieces they had brought might just hang on the racks. Karen knew she was bucking her own image with something as different as the dress, but she was sure she could make women understand. All she needed was the opportunity to get with her audience.

  That was the other thing that trunk shows did: they put her in intimate contact with the actual customer. Karen knew that every designer is limited by the time in which she lives and the kind of women to whom she sells. She liked to watch normal women – not models or social ex-rays but normal, everyday women – try on, select, and discard her designs. Karen felt she needed to know exactly who it was who could afford to buy her nineteen-hundred-dollar jackets and her nine-hundred-and-eighty-dollar casual dresses. If she didn’t know, how the hell would she be able to do the right thing by them? Were they working women? Were they young or old? There weren’t many women under thirty-five who could afford to spend that kind of money. What was the price point beyond which they wouldn’t go? Could they only justify the cost if it was a work costume or if it was a party dress? And most importantly of all, what was it that they felt they lacked? What was it that once they saw they would not be able to resist? Whatever she learned, Karen moved on and incorporated in the less expensive bridge line. And there wasn’t a trunk show Karen hadn’t learned from, although she had to admit that the lessons had sometimes been painful.

  She had bet on the dresses now because they were both new and classic and because they were simple to wear – just slip it on with pantyhose and a pair of shoes and you were dressed. Simplicity and ease were her fashion religion. But this would be the acid test.

  When they had landed, O’Hare was the usual hell, and it took them almost twenty minutes to find their limo. The driver should have been standing at the gate exits with Defina’s name on a sign. Instead, he had waited at baggage claim, although they had no baggage. At last, seated in the automobile, they made the long drive on the JFK Expressway, which could more accurately have been called the JFK parking lot. The problem with the seven o’clock flight from LaGuardia was that it got you into Chicago just in time for the worst of the rush-hour traffic. But, at last, they pulled onto Michigan Avenue. It was nine-thirty and it gave the girls more than an hour to primp while Karen and Defina could use at least that much time to schmooze with management before they had to begin schmoozing the retail customers.

  But when they arrived they were met by Ben Crosby, the vice-president, who told them he’d already gotten a call from Mercedes Bernard. ‘She set up an interview with Mindy Trawler of the Chicago Herald. She’s going to do the cover story in this week’s style section. She’s waiting upstairs.’

  Crosby, a small, round, very neat man, was obviously excited, but then he was new to the job. He was the type Defina would witheringly refer to as a marchand de frontage – a cheese-seller. Karen felt like sighing but managed a smile. Christ! She needed some time to get ready. Karen’s whole business depended on her relationship with the retailers. She was always fighting for floor space against the other designers. Ralph Lauren was virtually the only designer who didn’t have to kiss retailing butt. With his sixty independently owned shops, and his twenty-four factory outlets, plus his New York Rhinelander Mansion, he could keep busy just filling up his own stores! Karen didn’t have that luxury. No wonder all the other designers were jealous of Ralphie.

  No matter how good Karen’s clothes were, if they weren’t displayed and promoted by the retailers, they wouldn’t get bought. So she would do her best to make Crosby happy. And PR was important, but the interview should’ve been done over the phone and scheduled for a couple of days earlier so that it would run today and draw people to the store for the show.

  Exposure – the right kind of exposure – was everything in her business, and there was no doubt Mercedes had helped buy it for her. Without good press and lots of it, even the best designers were crippled. Karen thought of Geoffrey Beene. Everyone in fashion knew he was the greatest fashion artist that America had produced but Women’s Wear Daily hadn’t covered a show of his in years, not since John Fairchild began feuding with Beene.

  At the other extreme, Donna Karan had a talent for speaking to the press that was a true gift. She had a warmth that made even a stringer from a second-tier magazine feel as if Donna truly liked her. Who knows, Karen shrugged, maybe Donna actually did. But Karen did not, and it was hard for her to pretend.

  She had other things to attend to, but Mindy Trawler would not wait. Oh, well. She guessed that some day the clipping from this interview would look good in her scrap-book, if she ever got around to pasting one up. And maybe Belle would get a copy sent to her from some Chicago friend. Hadn’t Belle lived out here in her youth? Karen got a sick feeling all at once in her stomach. Had she, herself, lived somewhere around here? For all she knew, one of the women who turned up today might be a relative.

  As she crossed the main floor, an odor wafted toward her. She looked up. Oh God! It was Norris Cleveland’s goddamned perfume. The store was running a big promotion on it, and already there was a gaggle of demonstrators dressed in Norris Cleveland yellow, spraying the stuff into the air. A huge display had been set up, lit from above as if the bottles contained frankincense and myrrh. Well, at least Karen wasn’t reduced to selling reek in a bottle. But it bothered her that both she and Norris were the blue-plate special today.

  She didn’t have time to brood about it. She turned to Defina. ‘You do the work and I get the glory,’ she said. ‘Can you get things organized while I do the interview?’

  ‘I’d rather do ten shows than have to talk to one of them fashion bitches.’ Defina shook her head. The fashion press was notorious for being difficult and small-minded. Well, when one thought about it, what kind of person would dedicate their life to writing about a drop in hemlines or the new smock tops? Too often Karen had found they were envious people who had wanted a career in fashion but were too frightened or not talented enough to go for it. It was a variation on an old adage: those who can do, and those who can’t write criticism. ‘Hope you got some freebies ready for the bitch,’ Defina added darkly. Fashion journalists were also notorious for taking everything they could, from free meals to fur coats. Karen shrugged.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll have something she likes,’ Karen purred.

  ‘Yeah. Let’s just hope it isn’t one of the two-thousand-dollar jackets. You know, Karen, you can’t do everything. Your plate’s too full. One day you’re going to try to fit in one little bit more and pop like a balloon. We’ll be picking up shreds of you from down in the budget hosiery up to the bridal salon.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’ve got key man insurance. You’ll get a nice pension.’

  Defina rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I can’t tell you what a comfort that is to me,’ she said. She turned to the models. ‘Let’s go. We got an hour to turn you into good-looking women. I pray to God it’s enough time.’ She trooped off with the four girls while Crosby ushered Karen upstairs to the buying office.

  Mindy Trawler was in the stereotypical black dress that every fashion writ
er seemed to wear. Working at a second-tier paper in the second city would probably make her defensive, which would make for a difficult interview. Karen hadn’t really liked a fashion reporter since Ben Brantley, but he was just a great journalist who had burned out on fashion and now covered politics or something even dirtier. So Karen threw down her schlep bag and reached out to shake Mindy’s hand. It was then, when the girl stood up, that Karen saw the big belly she was carrying. How pregnant was she? For a crazy moment Karen looked down at the girl’s hands to check for a wedding ring. Yeah, right! Like I’m going to get to adopt this baby! She forced the smile to remain on her face. She was definitely going crazy, but knew that her irrelevant look for a wedding band had just been a way to avoid the sweep of envy that shook her now. Funny. Just a few minutes before Defina had been telling her how these women were always jealous of her. Well, this was a full turnabout. Karen knew she had to conceal her pain, but for a moment it was so real and so strong that she almost fell into the seat.

  ‘When’s the baby due?’ she asked, trying to make her voice pleasant and casual-sounding.

  ‘Next month, but it feels like I’ve been pregnant for a decade.’

  Karen nodded sympathetically, as if she had a clue. ‘This is so great!’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you’ve made time to interview me. Is there anything I can do to make it more comfortable for you? It can’t be easy for you to be on your feet much right now. Do you want an ottoman while we do the interview?’

  Mindy shook her head, as if she were annoyed by the attention. She got right to work. ‘So, let me ask you: A lot of designers feel Chicago is a second-class town from a fashion viewpoint. Do any of your favorite clients live here, or do you only like to dress the Elise Elliots of the world?’