Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  “Biggest myth going. And I should know, I’ve been in every municipal pool in south London.”

  “What a creature,” said Penny after Mandy had gone, and then we both fell into silence and thought about Mandy’s methodical passage through the pools of the metropolis.

  Milo phoned in the afternoon to chat about his birthday. He was having a party in his newly “restyled” flat, the look of which was perhaps the third most discussed topic in the fashion PR world that season, after cocaine and the size of you-know-who’s arse. He was having trouble color matching the canapés with the curtains but didn’t want to give too much away. My guess was that there was a lot of piebald going on, which suggested ponyskin everything.

  “The problem is black—there just aren’t enough black things you can eat, once you’ve gone past caviar and olives.”

  “What about squid in its own, or a friend’s, ink?”

  “Nice thought, but doesn’t work as a nibble.”

  “What about the funny black bit you get in fresh tuna? Couldn’t you use that as a sort of sushi?”

  It soon transpired that there was more to Milo’s concern than met the eye. Trouble was brewing between Pippin and the Persian Boy.

  “Pip is just unbearable. He’s shagging anything that moves, just to get at me. Not that I care. And he’s been spreading that rumor about Xerxes. He hates him. That’s why I didn’t invite him for Saturday. I love a scene, but not when I’m in it. But I collided with him at the Met Bar the other day, emerging from a cubicle with some kind of thug, and he’d just assumed he was coming. Must have thought he was so special that he didn’t even need an invite. And I couldn’t then tell him not to come. Would have been horrid. He’d have stabbed me. Carries a Stanley knife, you know. Does it to impress the football hooligans he likes to pick up.”

  “Slashed.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I understand you slash people with Stanley knives, rather than stab them. Ludo’s always confiscating them at school.”

  “Quite. Anyway, if there’s a fight, you will break it up, won’t you? After all, that’s why I asked you along. Are you bringing dear old Ludo?”

  “How could I not?”

  “Mmyeh. Pity. Well, perhaps he could “confiscate” Pippin’s knife, and earn his . . . passage?”

  A good day had become perfect. Milo had asked my advice about his party. Just getting invited made my nipples harden, although I would never have spoken nicely to him again if I hadn’t made the cut, but now here I was being confided in, even given a clue about the famous redesign.

  The party promised to be utterly, absolutely, the best ever. He was squeezing the fifty most important people he knew into his chic Camden apartment. The roll call was impressive: all the fashion editors; one-third of the holy trinity of Japanese designers; a tall, thin American actress, famous for being able to do a perfect English accent without swallowing her own tongue; two rival TV fashion pundits; and Vanessa Eastleigh’s pet poodle, Casper, sent in place of his owner, who would have loved to be there if the party hadn’t clashed with her colonic irrigation. After Milo had rung off, I laughed about that with Penny, whose reaction was unexpected.

  “Who does she go to?” she asked sharply.

  “I’ve no idea. Some crystal-wielding weirdo, I expect. You know what she’s like.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do, which is why I’m concerned. I hope she doesn’t go to my man in Harley Street. I wouldn’t like to get the equipment after her. She doesn’t wear knickers.”

  “Penny! Don’t tell me you’ve been going to colonic irrigation. It’s sooo eighties.”

  “You shouldn’t sneer at what you don’t understand. I find it frees up my creativity. The first time was a bit nerve-racking, though. I held my breath all the way through. And the whole thing’s recorded, you know. I think it’s mainly for their own protection, but they’ll sell you a copy of the video for thirty pounds, if you want it, as a souvenir.”

  “A video of what, exactly?” I asked, astonished. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, they put this miniature camera on the end of the hose.”

  “Yuck! And ouch!”

  “No, no, it’s not painful: they put Vaseline on the lens, which has the advantage of making you look younger on the film.” So spoke the actress.

  A thought occurred to me.

  “Penny?”

  “Yes, Katie?”

  “You didn’t, you know, buy one, did you?”

  “No! Well . . . yes, in a way. But not a copy. I insisted on the original. I didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands. Look, here it is,” she said, pulling a parcel from her desk drawer. “I’d like you to put it out in a bin liner, but mark it ‘Toxic Waste: Incinerate.’ ”

  I put it on my desk, already planning how I would tell the story to Milo.

  The rest of the week dragged a little. My eyes were fixed on the party, and I spent long hours mulling over what to wear. The options fell into three distinct groups. I could go classic, or I could go way-out and funky, or I could try some hybrid, halfway house. For once the middle way looked like the trickiest to pull off: wild-child and Prada-girl are both no-brainers, but looking startling and chic at the same time required a pen and paper and a good two hours with a sympathetic mirror.

  Things had settled down with Ludo. He was relieved that the poem storm had blown over, and I was pleased my fling was safely flung—so far, at least—so we were both on our best behavior. I’d left it properly vague with Liam. There was some talk of having to do it again, but Liam understood the rules, didn’t he?

  He called on Thursday.

  “Hi, Katie.”

  “Oh, hello,” I said quietly, quickly checking the office to make sure no one was within earshot.

  “You don’t sound too pleased to hear from me.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just rather difficult at work—you know why.”

  “Sure, sure. Look, I was just wondering if you’re busy on Saturday. I thought maybe we could grab a bite to eat or something.” Of course, van drivers, even fashion van drivers, would hardly be invited to a Milo party.

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m doing something.”

  “Oh, okay. Maybe another time. How are you fixed up for next week?”

  “Next week’s quite tricky, actually.”

  It was looking annoyingly as if I might have to tell him straight.

  “Look, Liam, I think you’re a great guy, but—”

  “Yeah, I get it—wham, bam, thank you, and good-bye, Li-am,” he cut in quickly.

  “Well, yes, actually, I’m afraid so. Sorry.”

  Whoever first thought of being cruel to be kind should have got an award.

  “Don’t bother. No hard feelings. See you around.”

  Could have been worse. Could have been much worse.

  CHAPTER 9

  Zenith

  “Look, you can leave after half an hour, I really don’t care. But if we don’t turn up together, people will ask, and that’s a waste of good networking time.”

  Ludo was in his usual pre–fash bash bad mood.

  “I just don’t get it. I don’t like them, they don’t like me, but I always have to go. I’d a million times rather sit in the pub with Tom and Daniel. You don’t understand what I have to go through at these things. My insides boil, and I sweat, and I can’t breathe . . .”

  “My God, I thought fashion was full of drama queens. That’s the campest thing I’ve heard since Jasper Conran last pitched his tent.”

  That threw him slightly, and he entered meekly into the sullen acceptance phase of the evening, which is manageable, if boring. There was one final small skirmish, over transport:

  “It’s a ten-minute walk, for chrissake,” he grumbled, “why do we need a taxi?”

  I took off my shoe, a Sergio Rossi of infinite beauty, and waved its lethal heel at him, like a chichi battle-ax from the days of chivalry.

  “This,” I said ambiguously, “
is potentially lethal footwear. These boots,” I added a touch inaccurately, as my gauzy slipper was as far from a boot as Milo’s party was from a hike in the fells, “were not made for walking.”

  The invitation said eight, we arrived at nine, which was still probably twenty minutes too early. It’s so hard to get it right these days. A Vietnamese serving boy opened the door. Milo had brought in caterers, who were doing everything at cost in exchange for the good publicity.

  What I found inside made me gasp. I always knew that I would gasp, and I knew that I was expected to gasp. Gasping was clearly the appropriate physical response, and nothing else would do. The idle or the mute could have come with recorded gasps performed by resting actors to be played on crossing the threshold. A sigh of wonderment, a smile, a round of applause, a groveling prostration, all might signify some degree of appreciation, but the restyle was engineered with one piece missing, and that piece was gasp shaped.

  What I did not anticipate was that my gasp would be one of horror: the restyling of Milo’s famous apartment was a fiasco. I was half-right about the ponyskin, which covered the sofa, an armchair, and a chrome-framed recliner. That was part of the problem. In the past week ponyskin had done the thing that every fad does, yet which still manages to catch people out: it had become crap. It had peaked sometime late on Wednesday night, when Jude Law had worn his ponyskin tie to the premiere of a film in which the delectable and hitherto impeccably Merchant Ivory Stephanie Phylum-Crater had performed fellatio on a yellow mongrel dog called Nobby, thereby breaking the last taboo—that English actresses of good breeding only ever perform with pedigrees. Since then ponyskin had fallen faster than a first-time snowboarder.

  But there was more to it than the understandable misfortune of backing the wrong pony. Everything, quite simply everything, in the flat was flayed from the carcass of a dead beast. The flooring was of a curiously textured leather, which may have been trying to create the impression of crocodile but made me think of intestines. The walls were clad in a similar shaded, but untextured, leather. Fur rugs, whether rabbit, or cat, or llama, I couldn’t tell, were scattered on the floor and seating. It was like being at the same time on the inside and the outside of some mythological creature: for some reason my mind came up with the name camelopard, although that couldn’t be right, because I knew that was only an old name for the giraffe. Anyway, it was disgusting. And it was only a season ago that Smack! had attracted headlines in the fashion press for dropping clients who used fur.

  Some of the detailing was impressive: Mies van der Rohe chairs, placed with slide-rule casualness; sixties sci-fi lighting arcing overhead in elegant swoops; kinky padded doors, suggestive of sinful zones beyond. But the irony was too convoluted and layered to be effective, and one was left with a simple, old-fashioned impression of neuralgic bad taste.

  There were only ten or so people there, mainly clumped around Milo and the Persian Boy. Milo was in silver, which I had thought was very last year, but I must have got it wrong, because Milo, at least in the realm of fashion, never did. Perhaps it was the shade of silver. Xerxes looked as absurd and as beautiful as ever in a tight black girlie top with puffy silk chiffon sleeves dotted with dark stars. Kookai and Kleavage were there, in a semiprofessional capacity, making the room look busy in the early stages before the real guests came.

  One of the TV fashion pundits had arrived as well, trying not to look annoyed at being an early bird. I guessed a researcher was going to pay for that. She really was as shockingly ugly in the flesh as Milo had said. Telly is so kind to short, fat blondes. And as for her look, she gave the impression of simultaneously having tried too hard and not bothered enough.

  I noticed Canvey Island in an adjacent cluster. She was telling the story about the maggot-feet man. No one was listening.

  “What do you think of it?” asked Milo. I sensed that his usual armor plating of smugness had thinned to gossamer. He desperately needed reassurance. Somewhere inside, he must have known that it had gone tragically wrong, but to admit it would crush him. He needed the fire walker’s self-belief.

  “It’s simply stupendous,” I said. “It makes me want to cry, it’s so wonderful.”

  Obviously my voice on its own would not have been sufficient to allay Milo’s doubts, but added to the general chorus of sycophantic approval, and finding a natural homeland in Milo’s own towering vanity, it served its purpose, and Milo welcomed me with a convincing show of affection. This time no discommoding tongues or sly nips. I joined the little group and injected some much needed energy into a system clearly approaching entropy (funny what you remember from GCSE physics). Ludo filed off in search of the drinks tray, although his quest for a beer would be fruitless, as for reasons known only to a few initiates, fashion parties have served only sea breezes and champagne since 1995.

  As usual, Milo’s choice of music was abysmal: a plinky-plonky jazz track that sounded like something from a Bulgarian avant-garde animation from the 1960s. You’d think there’d be a lot of cross-fertilization between the music and fashion worlds, but there really isn’t much interchange. Not at my sort of level, anyway, the level where you have to spend money. In fact, music and fashion have two completely different archetypes of cool, neither of which is prepared to acknowledge the other. Ludo, who has a friend who works for some pointless little record label, says it’s like two almost identical warblers singing away in a bush, but they just won’t mate, because one has a brown stripe over its eye and the other olive, or one has a song that goes “pee po pee” and the other goes “po pee po.” I think it’s because you just can’t know about everything. And remember most people in and of fashion are pretty dim, and if they let their attention stray for a moment, then they’d be out of sync forevermore. Ditto, other way round, music.

  “So, Katie, tell us some filth, you know you want to,” said Milo after a while.

  I’d come prepared.

  “What do you want, politics, show business, or the law?”

  “Katie Castle, if you had a cock, you’d be mine,” said Milo excitedly. I wondered if his latest cocaine fast had been broken already. “Let’s raise the tone; give us some politics.”

  So I told them about the opposition front-bencher, who’d been buying his mistress—and when I say mistress, I mean breast enhancement, bum tattoo, collagen implants, high-pitched giggle, the works—one of our silk shantung slip dresses, when who should walk in but his wife, a city fund manager and long-standing customer of ours.

  Milo exploded: “But that’s impossible, he’s notorious! He’s mauver than mauve! He’s been seen rampaging through every gay pickup in London and Brighton. He has his own bush on the Heath. It’s common knowledge that the Tory Party fixed him up with a suitable wife who had . . . other concerns, and who didn’t mind.”

  “Yes, that’s what he wanted the world to think, but it turns out that it was all just a cover for his rampant heterosexuality, and now he’s been outed as straight.”

  “What did his wife say?” asked someone.

  “Oh, nothing at all; just turned to ice. But she won’t be doing a Mary Archer. No standing by her man. Look in the Mail tomorrow.”

  After my little coup, things went joyously. All the new arrivals found me at the hub, acting almost as co-host with Milo, and I felt the shares in katiecastle.com rise on the back of it. The Persian Boy objected to my usurpation in the only way he could, by hissing through his clenched teeth and flashing Zoroastrian fire from his lovely eyes. But I didn’t mind. I was no longer peripheral. Almost everyone knew who I was before the party (except for two Australian lesbian concept artists, whose latest installation, a set of obscene pink udders purchased from a bemused abattoir, supposedly depicting society’s worship of the mother, protruded from the wall in Milo’s otherwise aseptic kitchen), but now I was viewed with more calculation. Suddenly I was a person who might be able to do them harm; someone who should be courted.

  The caterers eased around the party with noiseless efficiency. Dr
inks would appear at exactly the right moment, and canapés, should one have been of a mind to eat, arrived just as a hand was freed to select one.

  The actress came, along with an unexpected prize mullet, who may have been her manager. I heard her say something about Jude Law weeping outside, having been turned away by the concierge on the grounds of overfamiliarity. I had no time for such luxuries as bantering with the famous: my job was working on the influential. I worked the fashion editors like a pro, coaxing smiles from the nicotine-tanned faces with twelve-bore flattery, scattering hints about well-known customers who could be name-dropped in articles and suggesting features on the clothes worn by e-businesswomen. Broadsheets, mushy middlebrow tabloids, and glossy monthlies all fell before my onslaught, and I felt like a much, much prettier, and only slightly less ruthless, version of one of my favorite A-level characters, Tamburlaine.

  And you must bear in mind that this wasn’t all pure self-aggrandizement. Success for a fashion company depends on lots of different factors, and making good clothes is only one of them, and far from the most important. Have you ever wondered why certain names always crop up in the fashion pages? Why some collections steal all the limelight? You’ve looked at the clothes and thought, well, quite nice, or foul, or plain silly, but you’ve never quite worked out why them and not someone else. Well, I’m afraid it’s because the designer or the PR put in the time at parties like this one. They charmed the leathery editors; they scammed and they schemed.

  And please don’t think that this is some kind of exposé, a katie castle tells the awful truth about fashion. Because as far as I can see, there’s no other way you could do it. There are so many clothes clamoring for attention, there just has to be a way of filtering it into interesting and uninteresting. And the way that happens is by being there with a tactical Silk Cut when the dwarfish fashion supremo at the Daily Beast finds that the nicotine-impregnated chewing gum, patch, and suppository have done nothing to quell her craving, and baubles of quicksilver sweat stand glistening amid the faultlines around her mouth, and her lips are peeling back from her red gums in a rictus of horror.