“Holy shit,” I whispered to myself, and then picked up.
“Hello?” I said, quizzically but not meaning to sound offensive.
After brief formalities, he got right down to it. “You and your friend Tara were so cute dancing last night, and I thought maybe you could set me up with her.”
Not skipping a beat, I said, “Sure!” perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. After all, I was already dating someone, albeit casually, and besides, Tara was the prettiest and the nicest girl I knew, and I would be delighted for her to have a superhot boyfriend.
So I invited Christopher to join Tara and me at a friend’s dinner party the next night. Tara had a vague idea who Christopher was but was not even a little bit excited by the idea of a blind date. I egged her on and promised she would not be disappointed.
Well, Tara didn’t even give herself the chance to be disappointed. She just flat-out ignored him from the minute he got in the cab with us until the minute he left at the end of the night. Nervous from the responsibility of engineering this total failure of a date, I stood talking to Christopher for the majority of the evening. I kept thinking, God, I’m so American, I can’t stop talking! He even teased me about it.
But then the next day, he called to say thank you for taking such good care of him on an otherwise disastrous evening. By the end of the phone call, he asked me out, just as a friend. It seemed innocent enough—we would meet at the MoMA on Saturday to see the Richard Billingham photography show and then have lunch afterward. We had a good laugh that Saturday and said good-bye casually, if ambiguously.
A few days later, he rang again. This time we met for supper at M&R Bar on Elizabeth Street. Over our meal that night he told me that he was still technically married to his first wife, despite having been legally separated for two years. I also asked him how old he was. “Thirty-seven,” he replied, both of us silently doing the math and realizing that he was a good fifteen years older than me.
That night I went home, walked into my mother’s room, and announced, “I have just had such a nice dinner with the most inappropriate man! He’s fifteen years older than me and he’s separated but still married!” At age twenty-two, no one I hung out with had been married, let alone married and separated. It must have been some subconscious mode of self-protection, because, if I was being honest with myself, I really, really liked him, despite not really being able to accept that I would choose to love someone outside my comfort zone.
Still in denial, we had yet another “friend” date at the movies. We saw Flirting with Disaster at Village East on Second Avenue, after sushi at Hasaki on Ninth Street. Christopher reached over and grabbed my hand during the movie. I was surprised, nervous, and completely electrified. Obviously, I don’t remember anything else about the movie because my mind and my heart were both reeling.
Afterward, we walked out onto the street. My heart was pounding so hard that I had actually broken out in a sweat. The cool evening air was a huge relief. Before Christopher had a chance to suggest what should happen next, I announced that I would get in a cab and head back uptown. He seemed completely accepting of that. But this time, instead of a polite double kiss on both cheeks, he hugged me. A huge, enveloping, lingering bear hug. We hugged for minutes. It was the best hug I’ve ever had, before or since. We disentangled, managing not to kiss, and I quickly got myself into a taxi.
Two days later it was my twenty-third birthday, and I decided to cook lamb curry for about twenty friends at my parents’ apartment. Because Christopher and I were still firmly in “just friends” status, and had been seeing quite a lot of each other, it would have been weird not to invite him, or so I told myself.
Christopher and me heading out to go camping in the Adirondacks, late 1990s.
Christopher came to the party, and the guy I had been dating was also there, and the whole effect was dizzying. It’s easy to look back now and recognize that I had already clearly moved on, but at the time a single, young guy with a good job and an untethered past seemed like the far more sensible option. Shortly after dinner, Christopher came into the kitchen while I was alone and announced to me that he was heading out. When I offered to walk him out, he interrupted me and said, “I’ll say good-bye to you here.” At that moment he grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me on the lips, and then he turned and walked out. It was the single most attractive thing any guy has ever done to me.
A few days later, Christopher made a plan for us to have dinner at a Japanese restaurant on Houston Street, but this time he suggested we meet at his apartment just around the corner beforehand. The second I walked in the door, our hello kiss turned into a romantic kiss, and we kissed for three hours on the couch while listening to Everything But The Girl on his stereo. I can’t tell for sure why it didn’t go further than that, but I’m glad it didn’t. The kissing was intense. It was enough. We walked out to eat dinner and couldn’t make it down one block without stopping to kiss some more. After dinner, he asked me to stay the night, and I declined, shying away from the idea of getting undressed in front of him so soon. Besides, I was fulfilled on every level, having waited so long to find the right moment to let things turn romantic with Christopher and to begin to trust him.
The next day, Christopher rang me at the office, asking if we could get together to talk before meeting up with some friends that night. “Sure,” I replied.
After work, I met Christopher in SoHo next to the N/R subway station on Prince Street. We walked a few blocks and then sat down on the stoop of a building where it was quiet.
“Listen,” he started. “I’ve been having a great time with you, but I don’t think I’m ready for a girlfriend yet.” I was surprised, and I instantly felt vulnerable. I wasn’t even thinking that far ahead yet, but who wants to date someone who doesn’t want anything more than that? Somehow I managed to wrap myself in instant self-protection and say, “Yeah, I don’t think I’m ready for that either.” We agreed to go our separate ways after that night and take a break from seeing each other. I was disappointed, but relieved to have seen the situation through relatively unscathed.
Except he called at eight o’clock the next morning. Thankfully, I was out for a run. He left a message on my answering machine saying that he missed me. What kind of break is that? I thought. I don’t know how I had the strength to not return his call, but I do know that I have a healthy instinct for self-preservation and if he was telling me that he didn’t want a girlfriend, I was going to believe him and not keep walking down that road. At other times in my life I may have been less willing to leave it all behind, but I was coming off the only two years since my mid-teens that I hadn’t had a steady boyfriend. Until then I had been a serial monogamist—I had had a consecutive series of yearlong relationships over the past five years. After my sophomore year in college I decided I needed to take myself more seriously, so I left boys behind and became very dedicated to doing well in school and gaining independence on my own. Following some recent dating and one brief relationship, I now felt ready to have a boyfriend again, but I was out of practice and feeling particularly vulnerable.
Two days later a package arrived for me at my parents’ house. It was the Everything But The Girl cassette tape that Christopher and I had listened to while making out at his apartment. I still didn’t respond, but I can’t say I wasn’t excited by the attention.
The next week, I forced myself to go out in the evening, having called it off with both Christopher and the other guy I’d been dating. I headed down to Wall Street to see a big art fair that my visual arts teacher from Brown was participating in. There was a long line to get in. While standing there on my own, there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Christopher. On freaking Wall Street, of all random places to be! We chatted, both feeling a bit shy with each other, and he said he’d like to see me again. I knew he was headed back to England in a few weeks’ time for most of the summer, so I asked him what the point of
that would be. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to—I was dying to. But I was untrusting now. He had turned me down once, and it hadn’t felt good. In fact, it felt awful. But I was grateful to have that shock in the early days before I’d really put my heart on the line. “Well, when I’m back in the autumn, it would be great to see you. But I’ll let you call me.”
“I’m not going to call you” was the last thing I said to him.
The very next night, Nadine Johnson rang and asked me to supper at her house. This was a whole new level of friendship for us, and I was flattered.
You won’t believe who Nadine sat me next to.
Yes.
Christopher.
I had no idea that Christopher knew Nadine, and she had no idea that we knew each other.
Chalking the whole evening up to fate, we went out to the garden after dinner and kissed. Then we kissed some more in the bathroom. Then we went home together and never looked back. I went to Europe three weeks later to spend my summer vacation with him. We went to his friend’s wedding together in Paris and then came back to England to spend a week on the farm where he grew up.
That was eighteen years ago.
Our road to dating and then living together and then marriage and then children was bumpy. Really bumpy, at times. It took quite a few sessions with a relationship therapist and a life coach to get us to where we are in our marriage today, but here we are.
The reason I am telling you this is because it was, and is, the most important thing that happened in my life. Creating and maintaining a life with Christopher can be very challenging at times, but it is the thing I care most about in the whole world. If nothing else happened in my life, I would feel accomplished simply for the family, the love, the support we have created together. This sense of place I found at a young age gave me a base, a foundation, a sense of security from which to figure out the rest of my life.
Coco, Zach, Christopher, and me posing for the J.Crew catalogue, 2009.
I have changed direction many times in my career. I have worked for big corporate companies and little tiny start-ups, I have earned impressive salaries and also traded work for clothes, I have taken risks and encountered failure, I have reinvented myself through clothes again and again. If I had allowed my career or my clothes to truly define me, I think I would have gotten lost along the way. And actually I have gotten lost a handful of times. But I haven’t lost myself, because I always have the same person who loves me despite those experiences to return home to and to remind me of who I truly am.
STYLE INFLUENCE
CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN
Christian and me drinking champagne on the dance floor at Natasha Fraser’s wedding in Paris, 1997.
I WAS twenty-three when I met Christian, and I remember it was the first time as an adult that I felt glamorous. Having worked for Patrick Demarchelier on and off for three years, I had been exposed to many fabulous people and places, but I never associated them with myself. In those days, my body was pretty shapeless, I was always dressed like a tomboy in Levi’s, a tank top, and Converse All-Stars, and I spent most of my time hauling studio lights and loading cameras. I was also growing out my drastic Jean Seberg haircut.
After only a week of dating Christopher, he invited me to go to a wedding with him in Paris. Why not? I told myself. Only issue? What to wear. I packed a gray bias-cut slip dress from Zara to go with a feather-covered Jamin Puech bag I had bought on a whim in Paris a few months before. The only thing missing was shoes to wear with the outfit, but since we had a few days in Paris before the wedding, I thought it’d be a fun excuse to go shopping.
No such luck. It was the night before the wedding and I still hadn’t found the right shoes. We went to the rehearsal dinner at a trendy restaurant called Natacha. I was intimidated because I didn’t think I would know a soul there. I hardly even knew my boyfriend! After a lap around the room, I ran into my friend Olga, who I knew because her boyfriend had gone to Brown with me. Instant relief. She came and sat with us, and introduced me to lots of her friends. When I told her about my shoe dilemma, she pointed across the room at a guy in a yellow-and-purple-checked shirt and said that he had the best shoe shop in Paris. She would take me there the next morning.
Four hundred and fifty dollars for a pair of shoes?!?!? I’d never seen such a thing. But I loved them, they went perfectly with my dress, and I was in real trouble without them, so I swallowed hard and put down my credit card. They were strappy burgundy silk stiletto sandals with a small gold ring around the skinny heel. I wish I still had them now to show you.
I arrived at the party that night wearing my new Louboutin shoes, and Christian himself was the first person at the party to come speak to me. He was funny and engaging and incredibly friendly. We later found each other on the dance floor and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the night.
My second pair of Louboutins were much more easily acquired, at least with regard to money if not time. A few months after meeting Christian, I was back in my office at Gagosian when he called and instructed me to look out the window toward Madison Avenue. He explained that he was staying across the street at the Carlyle—in Diane von Furstenberg’s apartment—and he wondered if we could see each other from the windows. We giggled as we tried to spot each other, to no avail. So instead we made a plan that I would go over to visit him on my lunch break that day.
When I arrived at DVF’s apartment (feeling right at home, having spent time there when I dated her son, Alex), my heart leapt as I got a glimpse of the entire living room floor covered in shoes! Christian was holding his market appointments with all the big department stores—Saks, Neiman, Barneys—there over the next few days, and he had all the best pairs from his new collection lined up in perfect rows. I loved feeling that I was among the very first people to see all these amazing designs, before the rest of the world—the editors, the buyers, and the customers. In retrospect, I realize that might have been the first time I felt the behind-the-scenes rush of new fashion bursting forth into the world—surely an omen of things to come just a few years down the road in my career.
“Go ahead! Try them on!” Christian insisted.
I happened to be the sample size, and each pair fit perfectly. Red satin dominatrix sandals, black suede pumps with just the right toe cleavage, soft leather flats with perfect roundness in the toe, evening stilettos with a dramatic bow draped diagonally over the foot. I must have been lost in thought or overcome by lust, because I remember Christian’s voice piercing the silence when he announced, “I have a thought! Why don’t you be my shoe model this week? Come over on your lunch break and try on all the shoes for the stores.” I couldn’t think of anything more exciting.
The next day and the two that followed, I snuck out of Gagosian at lunchtime, headed over to Christian’s impromptu showroom in the Carlyle, and walked back and forth across DVF’s living room showing off the most beautiful shoes I had ever seen, let alone worn. It was heaven. And I felt so lucky.
After the last appointment, I kissed Christian good-bye and on the way out the door he handed me the sample pair of the red satin dominatrix sandals—a gladiator-inspired stiletto way before gladiator shoes were ever cool—as a gift for my time. I still have those shoes, and I was so proud to wear them fifteen years later when we celebrated Christian’s book launch at Barneys.
Four years after my shoe modeling days, I married Christopher, and Christian made my wedding shoes (and my bridesmaids’) as a present. When asked by the New York Times how we met, here’s how he replied:
Mr. Louboutin said it was appropriate he was celebrating Ms. Cutter’s wedding, since their friendship began at a wedding years ago. “I was so impressed because she was the only woman I didn’t know at the wedding, and I know everybody,” he said, “but also because she could dance and dance in these gorgeous six-inch heels as if they were sneakers.” He paused. “Of course, they were my shoes, so that w
as also a great source of pleasure.”
The red Louboutins I wore to the rehearsal dinner of my wedding, 2001.
I took this photo of Issy at a dive bar in Paris, 1999.
STYLE INFLUENCE
ISABELLA BLOW
ON THAT same first trip to Paris with Christopher, he took me to Brasserie Lipp to have dinner with an old friend from England. I thought it would be a pretty chill dinner and made no effort to look “fashionable.” As we walked in, the first person who caught my eye was a woman in a perfectly tailored suit, with cleavage on full display and a veil covering her face. I had no idea who she was and I had never seen a woman dressed so meticulously, so dramatically. Where I came from, style was more discreet, more innate, and this woman drew my attention.
As soon as she saw us, Issy jumped up and shouted, “Looks Brooks!” using that same nickname left over from Christopher’s teenage heartthrob years. I was intimidated by the situation and embarrassed by my boring outfit, and I assumed this exotic creature would talk about herself the whole evening.
I was wrong. Issy was warm and engaging and wanted to know everything about me. Her enthusiasm for creativity and talent was apparent from the first moment we spoke. When I mentioned that I had been a photography major in school, she insisted I send her pictures from my portfolio. (When I did, weeks later, she immediately called me and encouraged me to pursue photography as a career.) Later that evening, Issy asked us if we’d seen Alexander McQueen’s Givenchy show. When we said we hadn’t, she insisted on walking us through the showroom herself that very night! The way she talked about clothes with such knowledge and passion confirmed to me that clothes were more than just pieces of cloth you put on your body. Clothes had deep social, emotional, cultural, and personal meaning to Issy, and I felt compelled to listen carefully. From Issy I learned to feel empowered, not shy, when making a big fashion statement, as I would grow more comfortable in doing in the following years.
Always Pack a Party Dress: And Other Lessons Learned From a (Half) Life in Fashion Page 6
