Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  * * *

  At the end of the Irvington lunch, which had been scheduled to dovetail with another appointment, Eileen looked at her watch and proposed that I stay a few minutes longer so I wouldn’t have to wait for my train on the chilly outdoor platform—the train was due in fifteen minutes and the station was only five minutes away. “Do you want to see the living room?” she asked. Old, Rowe, and I followed her into a spacious room with a kitchen at one end and beige sofas and armchairs and side tables with books and magazines and attractive objects on them at the other. Two cats curled up on cushions completed the picture of pleasing domestic comfort.

  I noticed a third cat on the outside of one of the French doors that lined a wall—standing on its hind legs, its paws eagerly pressed against the glass—and asked if I should let him in. “Oh, no, please don’t do that!” Eileen said. She explained that this cat was never let into the house. He was the bad cat. He had once lived in the house with the other cats, but he had fought with the second male cat and peed all over the floor and when the housekeeper threatened to quit he was expelled from the house and now lived outdoors. He was begging not to come in from the cold, Eileen said, but to be fed. When I asked how he survived the bitter winter weather, she said, “He goes under the house. He’s fine. The vet said he’s the healthiest of my cats.”

  * * *

  When I returned to Eileen’s house a few weeks later—this time after lunch—Old and Rowe were on handmaiden duty again, but the interview took place in a different room. A meeting was going on in the room where we had eaten, and I was led to an upstairs room, lined with racks of Eileen Fisher clothes, all in gray, black, and white. Eileen, again, looked beautiful and elegant in a black ensemble of trousers and scoop-neck sweater. “This is what I call my studio,” she said of the room, explaining that it had once been her office but now served as an extra meeting room and as a place where she tried on clothes. The racks of gray and black and white clothes—Eileen wears no other palette—were “the things I’m playing with,” candidates for “my little closet where I keep the clothes I wear every day.” They were also the source of clothes for the public appearances that she now makes more frequently and with less dread. She has gone to China and to meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. But she is still, she says, “finding my voice.”

  In the studio, she spoke of another influence on her design that had almost the significance of the Japanese one: her Catholic-school uniform. “When I came to New York and had to get dressed to look like a designer—whatever that meant—I felt troubled by finding things to wear. So when I started designing clothes I drew on the uniform experience, on the idea that you can just throw that thing on every morning and don’t have to think about it.”

  The school experience itself had been less edifying. “I was fairly traumatized by the Catholic schools I went to,” she said. “I think it is part of my silence thing, of just always feeling it is safer to say nothing than to figure out what you think and what you want to say. It was always risky to speak at school.”

  “Was there punishment?” I asked.

  “There was criticism. There was yelling. They would humiliate you and embarrass you.”

  Eileen asked if I would like to drop in on the meeting downstairs. I would have preferred to continue the conversation about Catholic schools, but with uncharacteristic firmness she said, “I know this will interest you,” and led the way down the stairs.

  In the lunchroom, the long table had been pushed against a wall, and ten or twelve women wearing Eileen Fisher clothes were sitting on chairs arranged in a circle. They spoke in the same coded language that Eileen and Old fell into when they talked about the company. I recognized some of the terms (“facilitating leaders”) and noted some new ones (“delegation with transparency,” “agenda building”), feeling the same impatient incomprehension. What were they talking about? The meeting ended when an elegant older woman held up two bronze bells connected by a cord and rang them. “I ring the bells to remind us of timelessness,” she said. Then an object, a sort of gilded gourd, was passed from hand to hand. Each woman said something as she received it. “I feel lighter,” one woman said. “I feel humbled and honored,” the woman who had rung the bells said. Her name, I later learned, was Ann Linnea, and she is the author, with Christina Baldwin, of a book called The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair (2010). The book proposes that organizations conduct their business in circles. You sit around in a circle. This eliminates hierarchies. Everyone is equal. To focus the mind, there is a three-part ritual of a “start point,” “check in,” and “check out.” When the book debuted, the Eileen Fisher company was already conducting its meetings in circles, with its own specially designed bells to mark the beginning and the end. “It was in the air,” Eileen said of the ritual. “But The Circle Way helped us to refine and more deeply integrate it.”

  * * *

  Back upstairs, I asked two questions I had been somewhat nervously planning to ask. The first—yes, you guessed it—was about the cat. In the weeks between my visits to Irvington, there had been a spell of exceptionally icy, windy weather, and I had thought of him miserably huddled under the house in the low temperatures. Had she relented and let him in? No, there had been no reason to do so. “He has been outside for three years now. He is the healthiest of my cats,” she said again, and added, “The first year he was outside was really hard. It was painful. Every time it would snow or rain I would feel terrible. One freezing-cold day, I thought, Oh, my poor cat, and picked him up. I was going to hug him a little and warm him up—but he was so warm, I couldn’t believe it. On another freezing day, I let him into a stone entryway. I thought I would just let him be there, and he kind of walked around a bit and then he stood by the door so that I would let him back out.”

  I asked my second question: Why were Old and Rowe present during my interviews with Eileen? Eileen promptly answered, “I assume that the reason you are interested in interviewing me goes beyond me. I sort of stand for a whole company, and I want to make sure that people are honored and that I don’t say anything that offends anyone or that hurts anyone.”

  “But the piece is about you,” I said.

  “I know the idea for the company came through me in some way, but it’s beyond me. I planted the first seed, and now I look around and there’s this amazing garden. But I’m just an ordinary person. It’s only because I created this company and these clothes that I’m interesting.”

  Old said smoothly, “Monica and I figure that a lot of conversation will come up about other aspects of the company and other people you may want to meet, and, being ears in the room, we can help make that happen in an easy kind of way. So that’s partly our motivation. It’s wanting to support whatever your process might be.”

  “My story is about Eileen,” I said. “That Eileen Fisher is a real person—”

  “—who puts her cat outside,” Eileen cut in, as we all laughed, perhaps a little too loudly and heartily. I found myself babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism, about the risk subjects take when they let journalists into their houses and the pangs journalists feel when they write their betraying narratives, and saw Eileen and her colleagues looking at me—as I had looked at them when they talked about their company—as if I were saying something weird. We were in different businesses with different vocabularies.

  I turned to Eileen. “When you say ‘It’s not about me’ and that you’re not interesting, that’s a very modest way of talking about yourself.”

  “I grew up Catholic,” she said. “You know, the ‘Nobody’s looking at you’ thing.”

  “That’s part of Catholicism?”

  “That’s what my mother said all the time. ‘Nobody’s looking at you.’ So for me—in Catholic school, around my mother—it was just safer to be invisible.”

  Old, with her characteristic accommodating intelligence, said, “Would it be helpful to you, to both of you maybe, to have some time without other people in the room?”
I was not surprised when Eileen told me a few weeks later that Old had been promoted and was now one of the four highest-ranking executives of this company of a thousand employees that soft-pedals its hierarchy and doesn’t use the word “executive.”

  * * *

  I met with Eileen a few more times: once at my apartment, without Old and Rowe, and with no appreciable difference in the character of our conversation; then at the company’s corporate headquarters, on Fifth Avenue; and, finally, in Irvington, at a celebration in an Eileen Fisher store at the river’s edge, called the Lab Store, which was reopening after being flooded by Sandy. At the celebration, Eileen was waiting for me at the door in an especially fetching outfit of black harem pants, boots, a charcoal-gray cardigan over a gray asymmetrical top, and a light-gray scarf. (Eileen knows how to wear scarves the way women in Paris know how to wear them and American women almost touchingly don’t.) The store was full of people, some sifting through racks of clothes or waiting in line for a dressing room and others conversing, with glasses of champagne in their hands. It was a nice occasion. Eileen made a gracious speech of greeting and introduced a dance performance by students and teachers from a local dance studio. After the performance, people came up to tell her how much they loved her clothes and admired her. A woman with a cane who said she had just turned eighty-five was among them. She was wearing Eileen Fisher clothes from another time, which suited her well—an unobtrusive outfit of slacks, shell top, and jacket of an easy fit. The younger women in the room wearing today’s less self-effacing asymmetrical designs didn’t always carry them off. It occurred to me that Eileen looks better in her clothes than anyone else. What she selects from her little closet and puts on for the day is a work of design itself. In Manhattan, there are small enclaves where almost every woman looks chic—Madison Avenue in the Seventies and Eighties, for example. Almost everywhere else, if you walk along the street and look at what women are wearing, you have to laugh at the disparity between the effort that goes into shopping for clothes and the effect this effort achieves.

  During the dance performance, Eileen pointed out an attractive bearded man standing across the room. This was “the new man in my life,” Bill Kegg, who is a leadership coach, a profession that is “sort of like therapy, but he’s not a therapist. It’s more about moving forward.” Eileen has herself been in therapy for more than thirty years. “It changed my life,” she said. “Without the therapist I had many years ago, there’s no way I could have started this business. She didn’t say, ‘Don’t do that,’ like my mother did. ‘What are you thinking—you can’t even sew.’ But she questioned. ‘What is motivating you? What is it about?’ She saved my life. Without her I would be a totally different person.” In recent years, Eileen has added yoga, meditation, and what she calls “bodywork stuff” to her repertoire of soul maintenance. She described “this thing called breath work”: “You lie on the floor breathing in a specific way, a kind of heavy breathing in that gets you into a sort of dream state. You go through all this stuff and let it go. It’s like thirty years of therapy in one hour.”

  Eileen left the Catholic Church during college, and now attends weekly meetings of the Westchester Buddhist Center (the meetings are held at her offices in Irvington). Four years ago, she went on a weeklong meditation retreat in Colorado with her children, now twenty and twenty-four. When I said I was surprised that she took the children, she said, “The kids loved it. They don’t like to talk. They’re like me.”

  Eileen has always been good with money—she says it comes out of her early affinity for math—but she doesn’t care about it for its own sake, and she isn’t a big spender. “My accountant always says ‘Spend more money.’ I love my home. I’m comfortable there. But I don’t have a lot of needs. Maybe because I grew up the way I did. I like what I like. I travel a little bit. But I had to be talked into traveling first class. I just see myself as ordinary, one of the group. Being treated as special feels a little weird to me. It’s something I guess I have to get over at some point.” (It could be argued that Eileen has got over it. She tore down the perfectly good house that was on the site of the present one to build a house she liked better, and in many other respects enjoys the privileges of the 1 percent. It should be added that she is a political liberal.)

  * * *

  At the Eileen Fisher headquarters, she and I and Old and Rowe sat in a circle with five other women who had been assembled to talk with me about their functions and had titles such as Facilitating Leader of Design Process and People and Creative, Inspiration, and Research Director. The meeting started with the obligatory ringing of a bell (this one was a flat metal thing encased in wood, and was struck like a gong) and a moment of silence, with eyes closed, like the moment of silent prayer in a Protestant church service. The bell was struck again to end the silence. The women were likable and interesting. Helen Oji had been a painter before she joined the company, Candice Reffe a poet, Rebecca Perrin a dancer. The feeling of camaraderie that often arises when women gather in a group arose from this gathering. At one point, I asked a question: “Eileen said there was a ratio of eighty percent women to twenty percent men in the company. But I don’t see any men around here. Where is the twenty percent?” “In Secaucus,” someone exclaimed, to hoots of laughter from the rest. There is a warehouse in Secaucus where the men apparently are kept.

  Eileen talked about a conference from which she had just returned, of heads of what she called like-minded companies, such as Whole Foods and the Container Store, held at the Esalen retreat, in California. Fifteen men and seven women had been invited, and on the second day one of the men observed that only one woman had spoken during the entire proceedings. “It wasn’t me,” Eileen said, as the group laughed. She went on, “I thanked him for saying that and said that I had felt frozen and incapable of speech. I know that some of this is me and comes from the way I was brought up. But I also think that men and women talk differently. I don’t understand it exactly. Men talk faster. There’s more like a debate style. I felt I wouldn’t think fast enough.”

  Eileen took me to the tenth floor of the building, where designers and merchandisers do their work, a vast loft space of calm, complex activity. As we walked through the “amazing garden” that had arisen from the seeds she planted twenty-eight years earlier with her four linen pieces, Eileen would pause before a rack of clothes to touch a sleeve or take the fabric between her fingers, making appreciative murmurs, as someone on a garden tour might make standing before an especially handsome specimen. There was nothing in her manner to suggest that she was anything but a pleased tourist.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, I returned to 111 Fifth Avenue to take a closer look at the tenth floor. My guide this time was Monica Rowe, who took me down a long central corridor lined with racks of sample garments and flanked on both sides by large partitioned spaces with windows, where designers sat at computers or drafting tables or in discussion groups around conference tables. These spaces—with one conspicuous exception—were in keeping with what one thinks of as the Eileen Fisher aesthetic of elegant plainness. The exception, called the “trend and color studio,” was like a mocking rebuttal of this aesthetic. The room was full of brightly colored images and objects, among them reproductions of master paintings (Bruegel’s Harvesters was one, and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring another), a mobile of pictures of birds of brilliant plumage, bins of jumbled fabrics such as you might riffle through in a thrift shop, innumerable small things you might find in the home of a hoarder of small things, baskets overflowing with sparkling ribbons and lace, and a huge ball made of orange cotton strips wound around each other that Chris Costan, the ruler of this domain of color and excess, had found in a market in India.

  Costan is a small, pretty woman who is also a painter, and who repudiates the Eileen Fisher aesthetic as decisively in her person as in her surrounding. Her outfit on the day of my visit—a short, puffily pleated beige cotton skirt worn with a horizontally striped pinkish-be
ige-and-black jersey top and black tights—was clearly not of Eileen Fisher provenance, and her jet-black hair was arranged in one of the most complicated hairstyles I have ever seen, involving a long braid over one shoulder, a high pompadour rising from the forehead, and an assortment of fancy combs and clips appended at irregular intervals to the braid and to the back of the head.

  Costan’s title is Color Designer, and her job is to create a palette for the clothing line for each season. She draws inspiration, she says, from the fabrics and pictures and tchotchkes she collects, as well as, though to a lesser degree, from books that forecast color trends in fashion. Her palettes are represented on “swatch charts”—sheets of paper on which tiny squares of colored fabric are pasted—that are shown to the designers and merchandisers, who may or may not accept them in their entirety.