‘I’ve had barely any sleep,’ said Erica, looking impeccable in a tailored jacket and skinny black pants, as she requested three glasses of champagne, some foie gras and a large bowl of French fries. At this stage of the shows, with only four days to go, all bets were off in terms of food and alcohol—at least, they were off for anyone who wasn’t a model. After seeing so many shows, and so many impossibly thin and beautiful people, and so many clothes we would never be able to afford, I was not the only one who had almost lost the will to live and now didn’t care if I was the fattest person on the planet.
Erica travelled to Paris at least six times a year to attend the shows, and more often than not she would invite one or two top clients to travel with her, providing them with first-class airfares, a luxury hotel suite and a visit to the couture salon, not to mention a car and chauffeur at their disposal 24/7, on the off-chance they felt like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the boutique. On this occasion, she was travelling with a minor royal from Asia, who was normally accompanied by a retinue of staff. The previous night, just as Erica had been drifting off to sleep at 1 am after an arduous day of meetings and a nasty bout of jet lag, the telephone in her room shrilled. It was the client.
‘I need you to call the hotel doctor immediately,’ she demanded. When Erica asked her what was wrong, she replied, ‘I need a bandage changed.’
Erica was puzzled; she hadn’t noticed the client sporting a bandage. Not wanting to pry, she called the concierge and requested a doctor be dispatched urgently. She then waited for a few minutes before making her way to the woman’s palatial suite and knocking softly on the door. A doctor with a face like thunder opened it.
The client was sitting nonchalantly on the edge of the bed, her leg perched on a velvet ottoman. She wanted the bandaid on the blister on her ankle changed. She had never changed a bandaid herself—she’d always had staff to do that—and certainly did not intend to do it herself now.
Erica once had a similarly insane request in Singapore, when a client called her room at 2 am and said in a tone that was whiny, yet vaguely threatening: ‘I won’t be able to sleep, and certainly won’t be able to do any shopping tomorrow, unless someone goes out and buys me a large Starbucks right now, so I can sip it in bed.’
One thing I knew for sure, I could never, ever work in PR, because both of those women would have been discovered the next morning with their dressing-gown cords wrapped around their necks.
And Erica had many other stories to marvel at. There was the client who lived in steamy Hong Kong, who each season would buy a few key pieces of the label’s pricey ski wear, which she would then wear back in her apartment, with the air-conditioning at its maximum chill. There were the clients who would try to return an unused handbag five years after purchasing it, because they had forgotten it was even in their wardrobe and it had discoloured, due to lack of airing. I also adored Erica’s stories of revenge shopping. For example, there was the husband who bought a $10 000 bag for his mistress, only to have his wife visit the shop the next day and the shop assistant naively ask her if she liked the bag. The wife responded by charging ten times this cost to her husband’s credit card, on things she didn’t even want, just to get back at him. Luxury shopping sprees could often be symptomatic of deep unhappiness and ennui. The clients were a fascinating species that was largely unused to the real world.
On one of my first trips to Paris, as a junior fashion writer, I had not been given a car and driver, and was getting to the shows by bus, the Metro and taxi. This particular day I overshot the station, and despite running down the street in the pouring rain like an escaping thief, I arrived just after the Chanel show had started. I waited, flustered and on the verge of tears, on an overstuffed sofa in the Ritz, hoping that the PR would be able to find me a seat at the client show, as otherwise my editor was going to tear strips off me. This was pre internet and missing a show was a code-red emergency. A very attractive, if a little overly taut, coiffed blonde who was clearly a client, and wearing a shaved mid-calf mink and enormous Graff diamond earrings, sat down next to me. She placed her Kelly bag on the Persian rug and struck up a conversation. What was I doing at the show?
‘I’m a journalist,’ I replied.
‘Oh, that must be nice,’ she said, as she glanced at my modest black coat and sensible boots. ‘At least it keeps you busy.’
* * *
The worlds of the customer and the journalist were poles apart. While, as journalists, we were privy to a great deal of the glamour, I also always had a rising panic in the pit of my stomach that something disastrous was taking place back in the office.
Proving that point, I had to take a pause from Erica’s stories in order to scan my phone for incoming emails and noted that my CEO had just sent me a memo that when I returned I would be required to cut editorial content costs by a further twenty-five per cent.
‘Will you be buying that divine pink crocodile boot we just saw on the runway?’ I asked Erica in a singsong voice, in a vain attempt to cheer myself up momentarily.
‘Yes,’ she said, covering her toasted brioche with a hefty slice of foie gras. ‘They’re $120 000 US, though, so demand won’t be that great. Maybe just three or four pairs.’
Erica, Marie and I began to discuss upcoming covers and editorial stories: which specific fashion ‘exits’ or runway looks we would use; how all new products must be retained exclusively for us and so not released to our competitors; which models we would try to secure. It was a level of strategic planning the CIA would admire. Because management had little-to-no editorial background, they had no idea Marie and I did this, with every single advertiser, while we were ‘on holidays’.
Erica looked at her phone.
‘My regional boss is asking me if I think we should advertise in this luxury magazine supplement,’ she said, rolling her eyes. It was a guide to secret shopping addresses in Singapore.
‘It’s pretty easy to find that 30 000-square-metre shopping centre on Orchard Road, isn’t it?’ she said drolly. I always enjoyed seeing the magazine world from the client’s point of view. Those in editorial came up with a lot of desperate measures to lure potential advertisers.
We then engaged in a lot of lighthearted chat about people and things before getting back to business.
‘We have Jade booked this Friday,’ said Marie. ‘We have from 2 pm until 5 pm with her, in a studio between shows, which should give us enough time to do a cover and maybe one inside shot.’
Erica and Marie began to run through the logistics of getting two of the next-season looks we had just seen out of the showroom for three hours. It was decided that Erica would sneak them out, bring them to the studio, wait and take them back at 4.55 pm. And what about Laura? Would we still require her too? She hadn’t been booked for many shows at all.
As it happened, I glanced over and saw Laura slouching by the reception desk. I hurried over and invited her to join us. She’d made an appointment with a photographer who hadn’t turned up, so she sat down gratefully and ordered a green tea. She looked wiped out.
‘I didn’t do so well this season,’ she murmured to me, not wanting Erica to hear.
I nodded sympathetically. I did feel for Laura and she was absolutely gorgeous. Still, the luxury houses expected Chic to present their clothes on the world’s most in-demand models; I didn’t want Erica to think we weren’t working with the very best. Really, what on earth were we expecting from these poor girls?
‘I just can’t get any thinner,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t think I can diet enough to be a whole size smaller. It’s horrible; it’s so hard. Even my boyfriend is telling me to stop losing weight. He likes me two sizes bigger. He’d even accept three!’
She was beautiful, she was real and she was miserable. I suddenly felt like her mother.
‘Then don’t,’ I said. ‘Go home, be the size you want and live a different life.’
Then I ordered her a croque-monsieur. Laura resisted strenuously, but
I asked the waiter to bring one cut in halves, and told her I would share it with her. When it arrived, she nibbled on a corner or two, and ate the green salad that nestled on the side of the plate. Still, it was probably more food than she would normally have in a day.
* * *
Later that afternoon, at the Jean Paul Gaultier show, I sat beside a leading fashion editor, Brigitte, who had been in the industry, and worked with all the greats, for more than thirty years.
‘Do you think the models are thinner than ever?’ I asked her.
‘You know, I hate to say it, but I think they are,’ she replied. ‘The other day I saw a girl I had worked with, and I noticed that she had dropped a huge amount of weight. She’d lost her breasts; she had that fine, downy hair on her face and arms that anorexics have. I did actually pull her aside and ask her if something was wrong. I told her I thought she had lost too much weight.’
‘And what did she say?’ I asked. I have never heard a woman admit she was too thin. I remembered a recent lunch where one of the other guests was an incredibly buff and toned gay man. I asked him if he was going to order dessert and he leaned back, patted his rock-hard stomach and made a face. Someone at the table started to make the usual polite protestation along the lines of ‘Oh, but you can order sweets, look at you,’ and he replied, ‘No, obviously; I know I’m not fat. I’m just full.’ Said by no woman ever.
Brigitte answered, ‘She said, “But this is how the photographers and stylists want me to look. I don’t get booked otherwise.” You know, I hate to think that maybe I just ignored it all these years. But I truly remember that the models used to be fleshier.’
She began her career in the late seventies and, the weight question aside, had seen some reasonably bad behaviour from models, mostly to do with drugs and partying.
‘Oh yes, I would have to go to their apartments and physically drag them out of bed, because they would sleep through the wake up call,’ she’d once told me. She could remember shoots when models had climbed out the windows of the studio at lunchtime, so they could go home and do a line of coke. This was at least better than the girls going home and smoking grass because if it were the latter, they’d forget to come back.
But the modelling industry evolved and changed, and by the nineties, the antics were wound back. This was big business, big money. Nobody wanted to upset the all-powerful editors and photographers, and tears and tantrums were few and far between on set at top shoots. This kind of thing was more likely further down the food chain, at the more unprofessional end, with the pretenders and the amateurs.
* * *
At any rate, Marie and I still had a cover to shoot. We decided to pass on poor Laura, who did indeed decide to give up, go home and eat three meals a day.
I always thought that if you didn’t hit the big time in modelling in your first few years in the industry, it was far better to go and be a spectacular-looking something else. A lawyer, a scientist or a real estate agent. But modelling is so alluring to most young girls, and sometimes even more so to those who were not even remotely right for it. Over the years, I received in the mail many unsolicited photographs and CVs from young women who were desperate to be models, their flowery handwriting proclaiming they had what it took to be a Chic cover girl (their mothers often added a little paragraph of gushing endorsement). Every single one of them was wildly unsuitable for modelling, but you couldn’t help admiring their healthy self-esteem. And yet, some of the most beautiful women on the planet were also the most vulnerable, and a rejection from an insensitive casting agent or photographer could leave them filled with self-loathing.
The high-fashion world wasn’t helping, I thought to myself when Jade arrived at the cover shoot, dragging on a Marlboro Light. You could open a bottle cap on the bones of her shoulders, her hair was thin and brittle, and she was as pale as frost. But, that season, she’d opened more shows than anyone else.
3
Weighty Matters
Rushing into my office on my first day back from the RTW season, just before 9 am, I dropped my new Chanel bag and my skim latte simultaneously onto the desk. Another Chic day was starting and the magazine’s staff had just begun to trickle in, much like the coffee that was now dripping onto the floor. Normally my perky executive assistant, Katie, would be there, mopping up the spill with smooth efficiency but, unusually, she was not yet in.
I marched to the kitchen to look for paper towels; it was an unfamiliar area to me, as most of my working lunches were spent in pricey restaurants. Something smelled a little off. Then I saw that stacked on the not-exactly-clean bench top were five Tupperware containers marked ‘Melinda’, full of pale green liquid. Ah, the cabbage-soup-only diet had made a comeback—which was unfortunate for those situated anywhere near Melinda’s desk.
At a glossy women’s fashion magazine like Chic, someone was always watching their weight. Or watching someone else’s. It was not the sort of environment where eating sensibly and exercising regularly were considered—even remotely—to be the path to weight-management success. An uneasy relationship with food was almost a prerequisite for being a member of staff, especially in the fashion department. The fashion department’s office was always littered with detritus from the latest diet schizophrenia—macrobiotic salad containers nestled against open bags of salt and vinegar crisps or jelly pythons (although the pythons had all-natural flavouring, of course). Given that most of our working hours were spent deliberating on models and actresses, on how they looked and whether they were perfect enough for us to book them, an obsession with body shape was unavoidable.
Early in my career, I had mentioned to one of the fashion editors, Sophie, that I thought a model who had just come into the office on a ‘go-see’ was incredibly beautiful.
‘She had very chunky legs,’ answered Sophie, with what looked like a grimace. ‘She had no ankles. She looked like a potato farmer.’
This same editor talked endlessly about food and what she was going to cook for dinner, but in ten years I never saw her eat anything except for, once a day, two crispbreads topped with avocado and sliced tomato. She and I once travelled to Austria on a photographic trip, and all the way there she was raving about the pâtisseries and tea houses and restaurants we would visit. Once we’d arrived, Sophie would sit beside me, perusing the menu, talking up every wonderful and fattening item on the menu—‘Ooh, look, schnitzel; oooh, Sachertorte’—so that I would be salivating with hunger and gleeful anticipation. The waiter would arrive and Sophie would ask everybody to order before her. I would excitedly order something she had encouraged us to have, thinking we were all going to enjoy a sumptuous meal together. When it came time for her order, she would ask for a small plate of steamed spinach. Then, when my plate arrived, piled high with creamed potatoes, gravy and crumbed deliciousness, she would look at me disdainfully and say, ‘Are you really going to eat all that?’
If you didn’t already have an eating disorder, Sophie was more than capable of giving you one. Her mission would not be complete if there was one size 12, or over, woman left on the planet who was happy with her body shape.
* * *
I now made my way down to the fashion office. I found the manager, Helen, in the stockroom, packing up return deliveries of clothes and accessories. Helen was responsible for organising the fashion shoots, booking the teams and locations, and interviewing the models, choosing the ones she thought would be suitable for the fashion editors to see. Perhaps due to the stream of gorgeous sylphs wafting in and out of the fashion office on a constant basis, Helen had decided that she too needed to be wafer-thin, and had thus embarked on a very successful weight-loss program that consisted solely of eating raw carrots. She and her plastic bag of carrots were a ubiquitous sight, and most editorial meetings had become punctuated with loud, if sporadic, crunches. The upside was that she could always be counted on for a mid-afternoon snack.
As Helen stood up from the box she was packing, I did a double take. She’d lost kilos�
�her navy blue trousers were swimming on her tall frame. What’s more, they were held up by a new belt and a sweater was tucked into them. A tucked-in sweater is a challenge for any woman.
‘Helen, you’ve lost sooo much weight!’ I exclaimed theatrically, and—it pains me to acknowledge—with a degree of jealousy.
‘I know,’ nodded Helen with delight. ‘I’m practically gaunt.’
Calling someone gaunt was the greatest compliment the staff could pay one another. The year before, I had been bedridden for a full week with a nasty gastric illness, able to eat no solid food for the entire time. Halfway through a staff meeting held after my return, the features director turned to me, sucked in his cheeks and made slicing gestures with his fingers down either side of his face.
‘Gaunt,’ he mouthed, admiringly.
Unfortunately, Helen’s carrot-diet success would come to an inevitable halt when the palms of her hands turned a disconcerting shade of bright orange, and we all, including her GP, told her she should stop. So she moved on to a more traditional approach: Diet Coke, black coffee and cigarettes.
By this stage, I had long let go of the idea that I needed to have a model figure. As an editor-in-chief and a mother of two children, I was already stressed, and being hungry, dizzy or cranky just made it worse. But, being a lover of fashion, I did have my red flag moments. One season, at the Milan RTW shows, post pregnancy and a tad out of shape, I couldn’t get into a size 44 (around an Australian size 12) at Prada. The frothy heart-printed silk chiffon shirt was pulling over my bosom, and nothing could have made me feel more blowzy and middle aged. There really aren’t any 46s in Prada stores—and even if there were, I didn’t want to admit I needed one.
Tongue in Chic Page 4
