The Winner Stands Alone

by Paulo Coelho; Margaret Jull Costa

  Hamid remembers their first meeting, so many years ago now that it seems like an eternity. He had been in Paris for eleven months, made a few friends in the fashion world, knocked on various doors and, thanks to contacts furnished by the sheikh (who may have known no one in that particular world, but had influential friends in high places), had landed a job as a designer for one of the most respected names in haute couture. Instead of making sketches based on the materials he was given, he used to stay at the studio until late at night, working with the fabrics he had brought from his own country. During that period, he was twice summoned home. The first occasion was when he learned that his father had died and left him the small family business. Even before he’d had time to think about it, he was informed by one of the sheikh’s emissaries that someone would be taking over the business and making the necessary investments to ensure that it prospered, but that ownership would remain in his name.

  He asked why, since the sheikh had shown no knowledge of or interest in the subject.

  “A French luggage manufacturer is setting up business here. The first thing they did was seek out local fabrics, which they’ve promised to use in some of their luxury goods. So not only do we already have one client, we can continue to honor our traditions and keep control of the raw material.”

  Hamid returned to Paris knowing that his father’s soul was in Paradise and that his memory would remain in the land he had so loved. He continued working late into the night, making designs with Bedouin themes and experimenting with the fabrics he had brought back with him. If that French company—known for its innovative designs and good taste—was showing an interest in local products, then news of this would soon reach the capital of fashion and there was sure to be a big demand. It was only a matter of time, but news traveled fast.

  One morning, he was called in to see the director. This was the first time he had entered that inner sanctum, the great couturier’s office, and he was astonished to see how untidy it was. There were newspapers everywhere, papers piled high on the couturier’s antique desk, a vast quantity of photos taken of him with various celebrities, framed magazine covers, fabric samples, and a vase full of white feathers of all sizes.

  “You’re very good at what you do. I had a look at the sketches you leave around for all to see. I’d be careful about doing that if I were you. You never know when someone might change jobs and steal any good ideas they picked up here.”

  Hamid didn’t like to think he was being spied on, but he said nothing, and the great couturier went on:

  “Why do I think you’re good? Because you come from a country where people dress very differently, and you’re beginning to understand how to adapt those fashions to the West. There’s just one problem: we can’t buy those fabrics here; also your designs have religious connotations, and fashion is, above all, about clothing the body, although it does inevitably reflect a great deal of what’s going in the soul as well.”

  He went over to one of the piles of magazines, and as if he knew exactly what was there, he picked up a particular copy, possibly bought from the bouquinistes—the booksellers who have been selling their wares on the banks of the Seine since the days of Napoleon. It was an old Paris Match with a picture of Christian Dior on the cover.

  “What makes this man a legend? I’ll tell you: his ability to understand human beings. Of all the many fashion revolutions, one merits special mention. Immediately after the Second World War, when cloth was in such short supply in Europe that there was barely enough to make clothes at all, he started designing dresses that required an enormous amount of fabric. By doing so, he was not only showing off a beautiful woman beautifully dressed, he was selling the dream that we would once again return to a time of elegance, abundance, and plenty. He was attacked and insulted for doing this, but he knew he was going in the right direction, which is always the opposite direction to everyone else.”

  He put the magazine back exactly where he had taken it from and returned, holding another one.

  “And here is Coco Chanel. She was abandoned by her parents, became a cabaret singer, and was just the kind of woman who could expect only the worst from life. But she seized the one chance she had—in her case, a series of rich lovers—and transformed herself into the most important female couturier of her day. What did she do? She liberated women from the slavery of corsets, those instruments of torture that imprisoned the torso and prevented all natural movement. She made only one mistake: she concealed her past, when that would, in fact, have helped her become an even greater legend—the woman who had survived despite all.”

  He put that magazine back in its place too. Then he went on:

  “You might ask: why didn’t they do that before? We’ll never know. People must have tried—couturiers who have been completely forgotten by history because they failed to reflect in their collections the spirit of the times they were living in. Chanel needed more than creative talent and rich lovers to have the impact she had. Society had to be ready for the great feminist revolution that took place at the same time.”

  The couturier paused.

  “Now it’s the turn of the Middle East, precisely because all the tension and the fear that keep the world in limbo are coming from your country. I know this because I’m the director of this company. After all, everything starts with a meeting of the main suppliers of dyes.”

  HAMID GLANCES AGAIN AT THE designer sitting alone on the terrace, his camera resting on the armchair beside him. Perhaps he had noticed Hamid arrive and is now wondering just where Hamid got the money that had enabled him to become his biggest competitor.

  The man now staring into space and feigning indifference had done everything possible to prevent Hamid from being admitted into the Fédération. He believed Hamid was being financed by oil money and felt that this constituted unfair competition. He didn’t know that the director of the label Hamid was working for at the time had offered him a better job (not that “better” meant his name would appear anywhere; the company had contracted another designer to shine in the spotlight and on the catwalk), nor did he know that two months after this and eight months after the death of his father, Hamid had been summoned to a face-to-face meeting with the sheikh.

  WHEN HAMID ARRIVED HOME, HE found it hard to recognize the city that had once been his. The skeletons of skyscrapers lined the city’s one avenue; the traffic was unbearable; the old airport was in near chaos; but the sheikh’s idea was beginning to take shape. The city would be a place of peace in the midst of war, an investment paradise in the midst of turbulent financial markets, the visible face of a nation that so many people took pleasure in criticizing, humiliating, and stereotyping. Other countries in the region had also now begun to believe in that city being built in the middle of the desert, and money was starting to flow in, first in a trickle and then like a rushing river.

  The palace, however, was the same, although another much larger one was being built not far from there. Hamid arrived at the meeting in an excellent mood, saying that he had just received an excellent job offer and no longer needed the sheikh’s financial help; indeed, he would pay back every penny invested in him.

  “Hand in your resignation,” said the sheikh.

  Hamid didn’t understand. He knew that the business his father had left him was doing well, but he had other dreams for his future. However, he couldn’t defy this man who had done so much to help him—not a second time.

  “At our first meeting, I was able to say no to Your Highness because I was defending my father’s rights, which were always paramount. Now, though, I must bow to your will. If you think you have lost money by investing in my work, I will do whatever you ask. I will come home and look after my inheritance. If I have to give up my dream in order to honor the code of my tribe, I will do so.”

  He spoke these words without a tremor. He dared not show any weakness before a man who so respected other men’s strength.

  “I’m not asking you to come home. The fact that you
were promoted is a sign that you’re ready to set up your own company. That is what I want you to do.”

  “To set up my own company?” thought Hamid. “Did I hear him right?”

  “More and more of the big fashion companies are setting up business here,” the sheikh went on. “And they’re no fools. Our women are beginning to change the way they think and dress. Fashion has had an even bigger impact on our region than foreign investment. I’ve spoken to men and women who know about these things. I’m just an old Bedouin who, when he saw his first car, thought it would have to be fed like a camel.

  “I’d like foreigners to read our poets, listen to our music, to sing and dance to the songs that were passed down from generation to generation by our ancestors, but no one, it seems, is interested in that. There is only one way in which they can learn to respect our tradition, and that is via the world in which you work. If they can understand who we are by the way we dress, they will eventually understand everything else.”

  The following day, Hamid met a group of investors from various other countries. They placed at his disposal an enormous sum of money and gave him a deadline by which it had to be repaid. They asked him if he was ready and prepared to accept the challenge.

  Hamid asked for time to think. He went to his father’s grave and prayed all afternoon and evening. That night, he walked in the desert, felt the wind freezing his bones, then returned to the hotel where the foreign investors were staying. “Blessed be that which gives your children wings and roots,” says an Arabic proverb.

  He needed his roots. There is a place in the world where we are born, where we learn our mother tongue and discover how our ancestors overcame the problems they had to face. There always comes a point when we feel responsible for that place.

  He needed wings too. They reveal to us the endless horizons of the imagination, they carry us to our dreams and to distant places. It is our wings that allow us to know the roots of our fellow men and to learn from them.

  He asked for inspiration from God and began to pray. Two hours later, he remembered a conversation he had overheard between his father and a friend in his father’s shop:

  “This morning, my son asked me for money to buy a sheep. Should I help him, do you think?”

  “Since it clearly isn’t a matter of urgency, wait another week before giving him your answer.”

  “But I have the means to help him now. What difference will a week make?”

  “A very great difference indeed. Experience has taught me that people only give value to a thing if they have, at some point, been uncertain as to whether or not they’ll get it.”

  Hamid made the investors wait a week and then accepted the challenge. He needed people who would take care of the money and invest it as he wanted. He needed staff, preferably people who came from his own village. He needed another year in the job he was doing, so that he could learn what he still needed to know. That was all.

  “EVERYTHING STARTS WITH A MEETING of the main suppliers of dyes.”

  Well, that isn’t exactly true: everything begins when the companies involved in studying market trends (cabinets de tendence in French, “trend adapters” in English) take note of the different things—among them fashion—in which each layer of society is currently interested. This research is based on interviews with consumers, the close monitoring of samples, but, above all, on careful observation of a particular cohort of people—usually aged between twenty and thirty—who go to nightclubs, hang out on the streets, and read the blogs on the Internet. They never look at what’s in the shop windows, even at name brands, because everything there has already reached the general public and is therefore condemned to die.

  The trend adapters want to know what will be the next thing to capture the consumers’ imagination? Young people don’t have enough money to buy luxury goods and so have to invent new ways of dressing. Since they live glued to their computer screens, they share their interests with like-minded others, and these interests can often become a kind of virus that infects the whole community. Young people influence their parents’ views of politics, literature, and music, and not, as ingenuous adults believe, the other way round. However, parents influence young people’s “system of values.” Adolescents may be rebellious by nature, but they always believe the family is right; they may dress strangely and enjoy listening to singers who howl and break guitars, but that’s as far as it goes. They don’t have the courage to go any further and provoke a real revolution in behavior.

  “They did that in the past, but, fortunately, that particular wave has passed and returned to the sea.”

  All these studies of market trends show that society is now heading toward a more conservative style, far from the dangers posed by suffragettes (the women at the beginning of the twentieth century who fought for and achieved the right to vote) or by hairy, unhygienic hippies (a group of crazies who believed that peace and free love were real possibilities).

  IN 1960, FOR EXAMPLE, THE world was caught up in the bloody wars of the post-colonial era, terrified by the threat of nuclear war, and although we were also living through a period of economic prosperity, we were all desperately in need of a little joy. Just as Christian Dior had understood that the hope of future abundance could be expressed through clothes using yards of material, the designers of the sixties went in search of a combination of colors that would lift people’s morale and came to the conclusion that red and violet were simultaneously calming and stimulating.

  Forty years later, the collective view had changed completely: the world was no longer under the threat of war, but of grave environmental problems. Designers were opting for colors drawn from the natural world: the sands of the desert, the jungles, the sea. Between these two periods, various other trends—psychedelic, futuristic, aristocratic, nostalgic—arose and vanished.

  Before the great designer collections are fully defined, these studies of market trends are used to give a snapshot of the world’s current state of mind. It seems now that—despite wars, famine in Africa, terrorism, the violation of human rights, and the arrogant attitude of certain developed countries—our main preoccupation is saving poor planet Earth from the many threats created by human society.

  “Ecology. Save the planet. How ridiculous.”

  Hamid knows, however, that there’s no point in fighting the collective unconscious. The colors, the accessories, the fabrics, the so-called charity events attended by the Superclass, the books being published, the music being played on the radio, the documentaries made by ex-politicians, the new films, the material used to make shoes, the new bio-fuels, the petitions handed in to members of parliament and congressmen, the bonds being sold by the largest of the world banks, everything appears to focus on one thing: saving the planet. Fortunes are made overnight; large multinationals are given space in the press because of some completely irrelevant action they are taking; unscrupulous NGOs place advertisements on the major TV channels and receive hundreds of millions of dollars in donations because everyone seems obsessed with the fate of the Earth.

  Whenever he reads articles in newspapers or magazines written by politicians using global warming or the destruction of the environment as a platform for their electoral campaigns, he thinks:

  “How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can’t destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don’t they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?

  “Because ‘saving the planet’ gives a sense of power, action, and nobility. Whereas ‘not letting the planet destroy us’ might lead to feelings of despair and impotence, and to a realization of just how very limited our capabilities are.”

  However, this is what the trends reveal, and fashion must adapt to the desires of the consumers. The dye works were already busy producing what were deemed to be the best colors for the next collection. The cloth manufacturers were on the hunt for natural fib
ers; the creators of accessories such as belts, bags, glasses, and wristwatches were doing their best to adapt, or at least pretend to adapt, by publishing leaflets printed on recycled paper explaining the lengths they had gone to in order to preserve the environment. All of this would be shown to the major designers at the largest of the fabric shows—closed to the public—and bearing the evocative name of “Première Vision.”

  After that, each designer would apply his or her creativity to the new collection and feel that haute couture was something inventive, original, and different. Not true. They were all merely slavishly following what the market trends dictated. The more important the brand, the less willing they were to take any risks, given that the jobs of hundreds of people around the world depended on the decisions of a small group of people, the Superclass of the haute-couture world, which was already weary of pretending that it had something different to sell every six months.

  THE FIRST DESIGNS WERE MADE by “misunderstood geniuses” who dreamed of one day having their own label. They worked for approximately six to eight months, at first with pencil and paper, then with prototypes made out of cheap fabric, which could be photographed on models and analyzed by the directors. Out of every one hundred prototypes, about twenty would be chosen for the next show. Adjustments were made—new buttons, a different cut of sleeve, or some unusual stitching.

  Then more photos would be taken, this time with the models sitting, lying down, or walking, and still further adjustments, because remarks such as “only suitable for the catwalk” could ruin a whole collection and place a particular label’s reputation at risk. During this process, some of the “misunderstood geniuses” were summarily dismissed, with no right to compensation because they were only there as trainees. The more talented of those who remained would have to rethink their creations several times, aware that, however successful the design, only the name of the label would be mentioned.