Killer Look

by Linda Fairstein

  “How many shows go on at a time?”

  “Once designers started breaking out of Bryant Park, there were four or five different venues, maybe eighty shows in a single week. Last year they were spread out around town—over at Chelsea Piers and in the Meatpacking District, uptown and downtown—anywhere that could offer something special, or someplace shocking. Each one of them trying to outdo the other.”

  “Does Anna Wintour go to all of them?” I asked. “Is that even possible?”

  “Not a chance. But everyone wants her to appear, because it really elevates the status of a show if she blesses it with her presence.”

  “Then there are all the celebrities to account for.”

  “Movie stars and such? Designers pay them.”

  “To come to a Fashion Week event?” I asked.

  “We dress them, luv, and on top of that we pay them to show up and applaud. Pure advertising. I mean, an Angelina Jolie or an Uma Thurman might be there because she actually wears the clothes of a particular designer, but otherwise the houses are scrambling to put their threads and their bling on anyone’s back, because that’s what star power is. That’s what a photo on Instagram can do for a brand,” Tiz said. “And that’s the reason we never hear back from a lot of the headliners we reach out to, ’cause they just don’t need our money.”

  “Was it always that way?”

  “No, luv. There was a time—before all that snow went up my nose—that the shows were great fun. Boy, do I remember those days. I mean, it was a blast. Supermodels who wouldn’t get up off the sofa to pick up a telephone for less than ten grand a day would work the runway at Fashion Week for peanuts. Every one of them you ever heard of wanted in on the action. Things were fresh and designers were all about creating beauty, not becoming the next corporate brand-builder.”

  Tiz ordered another cup of tea. I needed to slow down on the wine.

  “So why did Velly get booted from the tent, right?” she asked. “Is that what we were talking about?”

  “Yes. I’d like to know.” I was curious about whether Wolf Savage had done anything to undermine the classic engine that drove his industry, making more enemies along the way.

  “There’s a big divide within the CFDA organization. Some of the old-timers like Velly wanted to change the whole concept of the week. Make it less exclusive and turn it into a consumer event.”

  “Like the idea of selling tickets to the public?” I said.

  Tiz Bolt leaned in over her teacup as though she had a state secret to give away. “Truth to tell, Alex, there’s so much corruption and so many kickbacks in this business, it’s like an explosive waiting for someone to strike a match.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You could go online tonight and find a cottage industry of brokers selling tickets to Monday’s show. All of them obtained illegally, by the way,” Tiz said.

  “You mean Velly didn’t get his way?”

  “Of course not. There goes the neighborhood, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “February was Velly’s last time under the tents, the last time he was allowed to play in the sandbox with the other designers who fought to hold on to tradition. So he dreamed big, Alex. He set his sights on this museum as soon as the Costume Institute came up with the idea of doing a retrospective on his work. The hell with Fashion Week,” she said. “Wolf Savage wanted his own special moment in time.”

  “Kanye West sold tickets, though,” I said.

  “Face it, Alex. When it came down to being in Kanye West’s camp, or Calvin Klein’s, Velly did the right thing.”

  “You mean he backed off his plan to make his show consumer-friendly? Broadcast it to the masses?”

  “At least he tried to. But by the time he made up his mind to try to mend fences, the scalpers had already sniffed blood, so when Fashion Week started last February, one site listed accommodations at the Plaza Hotel, a VIP shopping trip at Saks, and two tickets to other shows in Bryant Park for $1,500, $2,500. For lesser designers than Velly, that is.”

  “That’s a real break with tradition.”

  “The higher-ups blamed Velly for the idea of letting in the riffraff. I mean, no one expected better from Kanye West, did they? But Wolf Savage? On top of that, someone at Savage proper must have had sticky fingers. Swiped a few tickets, despite orders from the show runners not to. Check it out—I’m telling you that the Savage show in February went for something like $7,500. Stolen tickets—I swear to you. Totally illegal.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  Maybe I could have the office investigate the scams once we were deeper into this. It might be a way for Tiz to overlook my deception.

  “It’s no joke,” she said. “This whole concept has changed. The younger guys just starting out in business—and Velly—they’re the ones that don’t do as much couture work. They don’t need the closed doors and exclusivity. It’s social media that destroyed the entire idea of what the shows worked to build for the industry for the last three decades.”

  “Social media?”

  “Sure, Alex. There used to be such incredible curiosity and interest before each event, when fashion editors were on the edge of their seats, waiting to see a new collection. Look, you go to the World Series and when the seventh game starts, you have no idea who’s going to win, do you? You have no idea what will happen next,” Tiz said. “Isn’t that a large bit of the excitement, of the fun of the game? Now, with the first reveal, all the outfits are blasted out to the world on Instagram, like I said. There’s an immediate return on investment.”

  “So the couture houses really don’t like the idea.”

  “They hate it,” Tiz said. “It used to take six months before the images would get out and could be copied for the masses by nameless brands who were hired by department stores. WolfWear could knock off a Givenchy day suit for the next season. Now? Guys with a whole range of lines—like Velly—can go into production in China, for peanuts, within a week.”

  “And that pleases the companies that are buying up the designer names? Backing them?”

  “Of course it does. Cheap copies they can flood the market with, Alex. Not to mention how the pressure has gone up so many notches. It used to be spring and fall collections. Now there’s pre-fall, then fall and winter. Then resort, and pre-spring before spring,” Tiz said. “These guys have to do accessories and shoes and handbags. Some of these big names are even dressing flight attendants with a separate label. You don’t think the global goons care about the designer—about the creative end of the business—as long as there’s something to sell?”

  She must have known about the George Kwan deal. “Kwan Enterprises?” I said. “I’ve heard rumors about some kind of hostile takeover. I guess that Velly didn’t want that to happen.”

  “Heaven forbid,” Tiz said, putting the back of her hand to her forehead and pretending to be faint. “That was entirely a Hal Savage proposition. He and Velly were fighting cats and dogs over George Kwan.”

  “So here I was,” I said, adopting Lily Savitsky’s point of view for the purpose of fishing for information, “thinking Wolf Savage was on top of the world. I couldn’t understand why he’d take his own life. This exhibition—an honor so few designers have had. Monday’s big show. A son to follow in his footsteps. A daughter who was trying to reestablish herself with him. I just didn’t get it. Now you make it sound like it was all doom and gloom around the man.”

  “This glittery fashion world is completely smoke and mirrors, Alex. The stakes are enormously high, and I think Velly knew he was about to have his legs cut out from underneath him,” Tiz said. “He wanted to go out on top is what I think.”

  “By putting a plastic bag over his head?”

  “Painless way to go is what they tell me.”

  Harsh words for a friend.

  “Who told you that?” I asked. “That his death was painless.”

  “Oh,” Tiz said, sounding s
urprised. “Word on the street is all I know. What I read in the papers. Like that.”

  “Have you spoken with Reed? Or with Hal?”

  “No. Neither one. I just left messages with my condolences. I get my working orders from the assistants who handle the front office.”

  “Okay, so Velly rocks the boat by trying to open Fashion Week to the consumer market, and that gets him booted from Bryant Park earlier this year.”

  “Yeah. Kiss of death, I guess. I mean not literally, but I think his whole operation was tanking.” Tiz leaned back and gestured with a thumbs-down motion.

  “I get so much more emotional about these things than you do,” I said, waving to the waitress and asking for a refill. “I admire your sangfroid.”

  “Don’t know what that is, luv.”

  “Sorry. Keeping calm under stressful situations,” I said, thinking of the literal French meaning of the word—cold blood. “Another tea?”

  “Two and through for me.”

  “Is there anything that made Velly plan his revenge at the Met, besides the retrospective of his work?” I asked.

  “There’s no bigger stage in this city, Alex. The Metropolitan Museum of Art? What’s more highbrow than this joint?”

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “A few years back, the House of Chanel took over the Palais-Royal in Paris, turned it into a French chateau. Spent five million on re-creating the space and the look. If you want to talk over-the-top, there it was,” Tiz said. “Then it began to happen in New York. One of the major fur houses leased the Park Avenue Armory and re-created St. Petersburg in the days of the tsars. Brought in ice carved from Alaskan glaciers to make everyone feel the chill, develop a yearning for sable.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Maybe to you, Alex, but this industry thrives on outrage. Outrage. Wolf Savage—Velly Savitsky—in the Temple of Dendur at the Met? C’mon. It’s a stroke of genius.”

  The ancient Egyptian temple, created during the reign of Emperor Augustus Caesar in 10 BCE, had been given to the United States in 1965. It was one of the most magnificent structures built in its time—Aeolian sandstone—and saved from destruction in the building of the Aswan Dam by American dollars.

  “It sounds more like an exercise in ego to me,” I said.

  “Don’t you see Velly was trying to go global? He set his show in this fabulous temple from the Roman period in Egypt, in a totally elite venue that can only fit about three hundred seats, in the city’s center of all things highbrow cultural—but it gives him the ability to live-stream an event at the very same time to everyone who wants the grand look but can’t afford the ticket. Flipping the bird to everyone who counted him down and out.”

  “But the temple itself represents—”

  “Yeah, luv. I know. The pharaoh’s offering to the gods,” Tiz said. “Sounds completely appropriate to me. And damn if it didn’t make Velly laugh. The idea of him launching his line to the new global gods of style. What an offering that’s going to be.”

  There’s no accounting for taste, as my mother liked to remind me frequently when I was a kid.

  “I’m just curious, Tiz, but what does it cost to rent the temple—that entire wing of the museum—for Monday night?”

  “I didn’t see the contract myself, but I know it’s upwards of one million dollars.”

  “One million? That’s a staggering number.”

  “That’s just the price for the space, Alex. That’s before you throw in the gobs of flowers and the liquor and the security costs and all that,” Tiz said. “Plus the salaries of the models.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Sixty. Six-oh. In most shows they use twenty girls and make them change two or three times,” Tiz said. “Velly was following the Calvin Klein method. One outfit, one girl. No sweating the quick-change routine backstage.”

  “So where’s the money for that coming from?”

  Tiz held up her hands and pursed her lips. “Don’t know.”

  “It has to be Kwan Enterprises,” I said. “From what I’ve been hearing about the Savage business dealings, there wasn’t the money to bankroll something at this level.”

  “I can assure you George Kwan is not the one underwriting this show,” Tiz said, standing up and signaling for the check.

  “Who, then?” I asked. “Who’s paying the bill for all this?”

  “I haven’t a clue, Alex,” Tiz said. “I thought I could wheedle anything I wanted to know out of Velly, but that’s a mystery I just couldn’t solve.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “I’ve got to go now,” Tiziana Bolt said. “It’s almost six. Taking the elevator down?”

  “Yes,” I said. “How can I contact you if I want to stay in touch?”

  “I’d really like to meet this Lily chick. See why Velly never talked about her.”

  “She’ll be curious to meet you, too.” The Columbia MBA with husband and kids was not what I’d call a chick, but the language fit Tiz’s persona to a T.

  “Got a card on you?”

  “No. I’m on leave from my job, actually.”

  “What do you do, anyway?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Lawyer? Awesome,” Tiz said. “No wonder you ask so many questions.”

  “I’ll give you my cell,” I said, taking out my phone to enter her contact information. “Mind giving me yours?”

  We exchanged numbers and while doing so, I realized that I had forgotten to press the lobby floor. We wound up back on the lower level, where the exhibition was.

  “I just need to pick up my tote and my jacket,” Tiz said. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  As we wove our way through the posed mannequins, I was reminded of her remark that, like the up-and-coming young designers, Wolf Savage wasn’t known for his couture line.

  But there were at least a dozen formal gowns on display, and Joan Stafford and I each owned a couple that boasted a couture label.

  “Hasn’t Velly’s formalwear been a successful part of the division?” I asked.

  “You seem to know your French, luv—like with that ‘sangfroid’ line,” Tiz said, imitating the way I talked. “Don’t you know about haute couture?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “You being a lawyer and all, I’m surprised. In France, there’s a commission that regulates which design houses can use the haute couture label,” Tiz said. “It’s all firmly written into the laws.”

  Sometimes a bit of the Bronx seeped through the fake British accent, especially when she was trying to speak French. I could see why that put-on had failed her.

  “You mean, you can’t just be a great stylist, do made-to-order work with expensive fabrics, and call it couture?”

  “No way. There are specific rules in France. Government legislation about haute couture,” she said, stuffing her papers into a worn-looking Vuitton Neverfull bag. “Special fittings are required, and an atelier—you know, what that is, Alex?”

  “Yes. A workshop,” I said. “A studio.”

  “That workshop has to have at least fifteen staff members and twenty full-time tech people. And the label has to present at least fifty original designs twice a year—eveningwear and daytime. On and on like that, and well, Velly never made the cut, despite the fact that he sucked up to the French like it was the way to go.”

  “I’m so surprised.”

  “Let me tell you, the man didn’t deal with rejection well. The likes of Chanel, Dior, Gaultier, Armani, Valentino, Versace—they’re legitimate French couture houses, designated by the government. It isn’t a club that wanted Velly Savitsky.”

  “Is it different in America?” I asked.

  “Sure. Here you just sketch out a pretty design, limit the numbers of it that you produce, and slap on a label that says the word ‘couture.’”

  “I’m pretty sure I have a couple of old WolfWear gowns in the back of my closet,” I said. “I know the label had a fancier name, but certainly no fittings and no
studio.”

  Joan and I had bought them together at a sample sale for some charity benefit. They’d been remaindered at some upscale department store and we got bargains, we knew, while the money went to a good cause.

  “Haute Sauvage?” Tiz said, laughing. “You? Really? Let me guess. Something with long sleeves and a high neck. Very lady lawyer–like.”

  “What you see is not always what you get, Tiz.”

  “What style? I know most of the lines.”

  “It was a toga. Sort of a Roman toga—white chiffon with a long scarf of the same fabric that kind of draped over the shoulder.”

  “Hail, Caesar,” Tiz said, grabbing me by both elbows. “I know the dress! It was from the collection about five years ago, right? Strapless, with a band of gold trim around the top and a gold rope belt that looped at the waist. Do I have the one? A slit on the left leg up to the thigh. Right?”

  We were both laughing.

  “That’s the one I own. My friend made me buy it.”

  “Did you wear it to an orgy? Please say you did.”

  “To a Halloween party, I think. Bad mistake, that one.”

  “Damn. I wish I could get you a pass into the show on Monday. You’ve got to wear it, Alex. I think we’ve got one of those—in aqua—on the runway. What a hoot,” Tiz said. “All those Park Avenue social X-rays always come in their old favorites. Let me snoop around and ask for a freebie. You’ll fit right in.”

  “Don’t ask, Tiz. I’m not going to be there, and I will never wear that dress again.”

  She was too open, too nice. A free spirit with a big personality. I didn’t want her head to roll if she mentioned my name to Hal or Reed Savage. Not to mention anyone finding out that a prosecutor had taken a comped ticket to get into a top-price event.

  She was sashaying down the hallway, zigzagging between the mannequins, pretending that she was swishing a chiffon skirt to either side of her legs.

  “Will you indulge me in a silly question, Tiz?”

  “You’re a lawyer. They’re mostly silly, aren’t they?”

  “Got me there,” I said. “In all your time modeling and around fashion houses, how many of the women had breast implants?”