Tongue in Chic Read online

  I had been attending the RTW since the early nineties, and in previous years what I wore was more practical than anything else—black cashmere sweaters; tailored pants or skirts; a warm, classic coat; a white shirt, if the weather was unseasonably warm; flat shoes or sandals; a new-season handbag. Done. I was a journalist. I never wanted to be noticed and I still don’t. I trusted—or, at least, hoped—that my track record was enough.

  But my fashion editors now had to stress endlessly over what they were going to pack, as it seemed their professional reputations could be ruined if, god forbid, they wore the wrong Givenchy shoe. It was vaguely depressing, or perhaps just ironic, to watch a very talented and seasoned fashion editor pick her way—bemused and invisible—through a throng of street photographers who were busily snapping a young counterpart at another magazine, someone who had questionable styling ability but was dressed in new-season Isabel Marant. Those individuals who were more focused on the clothes on the runway than on being in the spotlight themselves were starting to appear just a little passé. I could see the key to success was to focus both on the runway and on oneself, but that seemed exhausting to me. I used my Twitter account to follow news feeds, as opposed to tweeting ‘OMG Kate Moss is in the house!!!’ or posting photographs of my invitation to the Chanel show. All I could think about was arriving in Milan, and heading for Marni, or Gucci or Pucci shows. That was the exciting part for me. I wanted to see the clothes, to see what glorious new look we were going to shoot next season. The last thing I wanted to do was take a picture of myself.

  It was 2011 and I was paying a visit to the office of Chic’s fashion director, Marie, to check on her packing progress, as we were due to leave for the shows in two weeks. She was modelling a new Proenza Schouler shoe that had just arrived from net-a-porter. The shoe had a lethal fifteen-centimetre heel and she insisted it would be a good, super-comfortable day option. The likelihood of me tramping in high heels through the mud in the Tuileries to get to a show was zero, but I nodded encouragingly. I suspected I was vaguely embarrassing to her when we walked into shows together—me in my sensible low heels, with no special nail polish to contrast with my brightly coloured clutch bag, no kooky, pretentious sunglasses, no dazzling coloured coat draped over my shoulders.

  My personal assistant, Katie, appeared in Marie’s office and let me know the CEO wanted to see me. He would always make me feel as though Marie and I were taking off on vacation for a month after having stolen the corporate credit card. ‘How long will you be away? Do you think you should be away for that many days?’ He acted as if I had invented the RTW schedule for my pleasure. He had no idea how gruelling the month was. I knew from experience that by the end of the jam-packed circuit, and after a probable bout of food poisoning from a par-cooked duck, no one, not even the French, wanted to be in Paris for the final ten days. The implication was that I would be out of range, like I was headed for the darkest jungles of New Guinea, and that the magazine would grind to a halt, apparently forgetting that we had these new-fangled gadgets, like iPhones, that kept me in touch with the office 24/7. (Actually, after one bill of about $10 000, when I had committed the ungodly sin of using my phone and calling my deputy regularly to check on business, they had shut off the global roaming anyway.)

  * * *

  When the day of our departure came, Marie and I arrived at the airport in a fluster, dropped off by passive-aggressive husbands and consumed with guilt at leaving our children for four weeks. We were generally also farewelled by colleagues with the words: ‘Have a lovely holiday, you lucky things.’ It was enough to turn anyone into a mess, even without the Stilnox and the champagne drunk while on the tarmac. Also, any inflight movies involving children or animals had to be avoided at all costs, as they could trigger emotional breakdowns, as did most food because we were about to boldly enter a land where you couldn’t be too thin, or too vain.

  Our first realisation on arrival in fashion central was, inevitably, that we hadn’t packed the right clothes, and that everything we owned was so last season; I’d been lucky to find the time to throw a few things in a suitcase. Added to that was the extra three kilos of fluid—each—that had magically appeared during the long-haul flight and meant that every waistband felt tight. Now that the crowd at the shows were more groomed and styled than the models, this was an issue.

  It was a big call to compete with fashion personalities such as Carine Roitfeld or Anna Dello Russo, or the exotically dressed blogger Bryanboy, who changed their outfits three or four times a day and were the paparazzi’s darlings, but most people were trying to. It had always been hard enough to make it into the shows, given the traffic, the inclement weather, the grumpy ‘cravat rouge’ bouncers, as they called them in Paris, and the crowds of people with ‘standing only’ invitations clustered hopefully around the narrow entrances, but the show sites were now also clogged with street photographers and bloggers, taking photos of anything that moved, especially if it was dressed in hot-pink marabou and had really long legs. There were, of course, also the craftsmen, who knew what they were looking at and could spot the truly stylish—photographers such as The New York Times’ Bill Cunningham, and Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist—but it had basically become a messy free-for-all, where someone merely wearing numerous primary colours at once could inspire a frenzy of photographers’ clicks.

  ‘I really hate this bit now,’ I grumbled to Marie at one Milan show, as we tried to navigate our way through the plethora of preening to find our seats. We then had to suffer through the scrutiny of a grim-faced Schuman, who was pacing up and down the front row, training his lens on the perfectly polished few, and striding past the less photogenic mortals. It felt like rabbit season, even though I accepted that I was not one of the bunnies chosen to be shot.

  Although I was a successful middle-aged businesswoman, it now felt as if I were trying awkwardly to fit in at a teenagers’ social gathering. Given that I had to sink to this level of immaturity, it became vital that, as editor-in-chief of Chic, I at least had a better seat than Caroline. I always pitied the poor press attachés who had the—ultimately impossible—task of creating a seating plan where everyone’s allocated place matched their delusional levels of self-importance. The PRs would often greet you with an air of spiralling despair and this was indeed the case this year, when a pale and flustered Annabel, the PR organiser, appeared and ushered me to my front-row seat. I glanced at the nametag on the seat next to me. Not Caroline. Hopefully, she would be placed in the row behind me—that would really spoil her day. Annabel, whom I liked, was intelligent, down to earth and reasonably unflappable, but on this occasion she looked like she needed oxygen.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, and she gestured to a crumpled invitation that had been thrown on the floor.

  ‘I shouldn’t be saying this, but Caroline didn’t like her second-row seat,’ said Annabel, on the verge of tears. I was aghast that Caroline would actually storm out. Sure, I could understand it would have been a momentary wound to the pride, but we were here to see the show.

  Annabel, unusually indiscreet, continued: ‘Honestly I can’t take the egos anymore. This hysteria over who sits where. It’s a fucking fashion show. Not everybody can be front row.’

  After many years of hosting press lunches at pricey restaurants in Milan and being polite to self-entitled nobodies who wouldn’t so much as buy her a coffee, she had finally hit a wall. She resigned after that season, departed on a fourteen-day juice fast in Turkey and then spent eighteen months working as a volunteer in a children’s orphanage.

  The show began and the few lucky models that had been deemed the most beautiful women in the world began to stride out sulkily.

  ‘Gee, they’re thin this year, no?’ I murmured to Marie over my shoulder.

  ‘Not especially,’ she replied, too busy taking in every detail except their weight, and happily clocking that her archrival, Carla, was two rows back from where she was sitting.

  ‘Well, wearing a qu
ilted puffer jacket belted over a swimsuit would be challenging for a normal woman, wouldn’t you think?’ I continued, but Marie wasn’t listening.

  It would take a model to be a virtual walking skeleton to draw even a small gasp of shock from the crowd. And, normally, by the time I’d been to New York and then London, I too became inured to the girls’ extreme thinness. I managed to disassociate from it so effectively that I could divide the world into two: the fashion world and the real world. I worked in the fashion world—I lived in the real world. I wasn’t going to get into those Gucci stovepipe pants anyway, so why not eat the pastry basket in bed while I checked my emails? Marie enjoyed breakfast as well, but she had devised a weight-management plan for us, so we weren’t forced into plus sizes—we were to skip every second dinner, so we woke up with flatter stomachs.

  The girls continued to file out, their spindly, coltish legs unsteady on sadistically high shoes. Every walk up and down the catwalk was a precarious balancing act and my palms were sweating I was so anxious for them. Suddenly, one took a tumble, falling forwards, hard, on her knees. She tried once, twice, three times to stand up but got tangled in the flokati carpeting, until she gave up and crawled painfully down the catwalk, sobbing. The audience sat stony faced. I’d seen people reach forward and snatch a fallen earring off a runway, but it was the rare individual who would step forward to help a girl up. This one was probably screamed at for ruining the show once she made it backstage, and when we visited the label’s showroom the next day to re-see the collection up close, her degrading exit did not appear in the video that was playing over and over in the reception area. It was as if it had never happened. I had seen so many girls fall over the years, but it was becoming more common than ever because of the absurd height of the shoes they had to wear.

  * * *

  In our final week on the circuit, in Paris, stuck in traffic on our way to a showroom appointment, we, as usual, discussed the finer details of what we had seen so far. These were the moments I truly loved my job, fully appreciating and talking endlessly about the sumptuous collections staged by houses such as Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior and Valentino. But now, there was a crisis. Marie only had a standing-room ticket to Céline, which might mean she wouldn’t get in at all. Could she endure the humiliation of waiting outside? Would her nemesis, Carla—who was less talented than Marie but boasted a huge social-media profile, and a large and expensive wardrobe—get a seat?

  It didn’t matter that she could watch the show online almost straight afterwards. No self-respecting fashion director could say, ‘I loved the Céline show,’ if they hadn’t been physically present. The lie would be discovered—they would be pounced on by rivals who had actually been there, like lions targeting an ailing wildebeest. You could never, under any circumstances, admit to a competing editor: ‘I didn’t get a ticket to the show. I was so disappointed; what was it like?’

  That would be a public admission of failure. The safest thing to say was that you missed a show because your hopeless new limo driver took the wrong route, or you were delayed because you were interviewing Tom Ford. It would take most people time to realise that practically no one gets an interview with Tom Ford.

  I could sense Marie was about to be enveloped in the fugue of self-loathing and hopelessness that generally arrives around the Thursday of Paris Fashion Week. This is when you are deathly tired, things are going wrong back at the office, you think you’re going to get into trouble over your mounting expenses, and there are three missed messages from your husband, telling you that the school has called. I wanted to suggest that Marie take my invitation to the Céline show, but it was vitally important, for commercial reasons, that the editor-in-chief be present at the bigger shows, especially if the labels were advertisers, or had the potential to be advertisers.

  ‘Let’s skip the next show and have a Casti burger,’ I suggested, throwing her a dietary lifeline. Our favourite restaurant on the rue Saint-Honoré served the Casti burger, a delicious Parisian creation. It was a hamburger that was smothered in the most delicious creamy sauce imaginable and came with fries. Ordering one during Fashion Week was quite possibly the most radical public statement an editor could make, apart from carrying a handbag that was a knockoff. (Although carrying a handbag at all was now viewed as a bit low rent, unless, of course, you were a blogger with a coloured clutch. It was far better not to carry a bag at all, and be permanently glued to your iPhone, letting everyone know the rest of your belongings were in the car with your driver/assistant/bodyguard, and you were otherwise occupied—nonchalantly booking Daria for a shoot with Mario in Argentina.)

  We made our way to a red velvet banquette and ordered our kilojoule-laden lunch. And Diet Cokes. Marie still looked despondent and I thought it wasn’t the time to tell her that I had seen on Twitter that it looked like North Korea was about to declare war. Ready-to-wear season is definitely not the time to raise any harsh realities like terrorism, poverty, superannuation or the obesity epidemic; Prada having run out of their must-have black and gold wedge in size 39 is enough to contend with.

  Just then, Miranda Kerr walked in. While the women in the restaurant feigned lack of interest, every man’s head spun round. I figured she wouldn’t be ordering the burger. She cantered daintily towards us and turned sideways, her Balenciaga-clad bottom expertly navigating the tiny gap between our table and hers, and deftly slid into her prize position on the banquette. Whenever I tried that manoeuvre, I would get wedged in, knock over an American tourist’s glass of Pouilly-Fumé and have to be rescued by a waiter, who would noisily pull the table and chairs aside. Now, waiters suddenly engulfed Miranda, with a fawning politeness I’d never experienced in Paris. As it turned out, as we exited, I knocked over her Badoit, but so much help rushed her table, I figured she’d be fine.

  * * *

  It was time to go to the Viktor & Rolf show. Given that the season before they had shown truly hideous oversized quasi-medieval armour, with the models’ faces painted bright red and accompanied by a screeching soundtrack, I wasn’t in a huge hurry. We dismissed our driver, as the show was just around the corner, and trotted towards the Tuileries, looking nervously towards the sky as the first drops of heavy rain began to fall. We had no umbrella. Marie was wearing her Proenza Schouler shoes. They were tweed. This day was going from bad to worse.

  I tried to console myself with the knowledge that the Lanvin show was coming up. It was a show I always enjoyed, despite the fact that it was routinely staged in a cavernous shed in one of the ugliest and more far-flung suburbs in Paris. Even though the governing fashion bodies had erected expensive buildings—such as the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, and the Fiera in Milan—specially designed conveniently to house the RTW, hardly anyone wanted to stage their shows in them. The right ambience was crucial to how well a collection would be perceived. Thus, you would often run back to your driver after a show, thrust him your invitation to the next one, which was due to start in twenty minutes’ time, and he would look at the address and say: ‘Mon dieu. That’s on the other side of the city. And it’s peak hour.’

  Over the years, I had attended shows in abandoned warehouses, castles, private villas, hotels, basketball stadiums, swimming pools, prisons, boats, museums, universities, town halls, art colleges, galleries, car showrooms, marquees, racecourses, car parks, amusement parks, stables and palaces. All in one week.

  ‘We have dinner with Patricia and her agent tonight,’ I said. Marie and I had promised to catch up with one of the models from our home town. She had walked in almost all of the important shows this season and was just about to crack the big time. Six months before, she had been no one, but she had since dropped at least eight kilos and opened for a Marc Jacobs show, so we were now desperate to sign her for Chic.

  Marie looked alarmed.

  ‘Are we eating again today?’ she exclaimed, as we navigated our way around a cluster of street photographers feverishly snapping a bone-thin Swedish model who was wearing Do
c Martens, a pair of ski goggles and an embroidered satin evening coat.

  ‘Well, it will be seven hours, four shows and three showroom re-sees later,’ I ventured.

  ‘Let’s go Japanese,’ said Marie, studying her slightly sodden shoes as we settled into our seats. ‘We can just have miso and some sashimi.’ In Paris, Japanese was our safeguard when the lure of steak frites threatened to become too much to handle.

  ‘No, not tonight,’ I replied. ‘I’ve made a booking at L’Avenue.’

  L’Avenue was one of the most popular restaurants in Paris, consistently attracting a crowd of actors, models and rock stars, and also was a comfortable walking distance from our hotel. These were its crucial attributes, as the food was really terrible and stupidly expensive. But then, it wasn’t like the model was going to eat. The last time we were there, Dita Von Teese was at the next table, and I had spring rolls and got such a terrible attack of food poisoning, I could barely make it back to my room. I was sick for three days, had to sleep on the bathroom floor because it was more convenient than going back and forth from the bed, and missed the Miu Miu show and had to change my flight. But I did end up losing almost two kilos.

  Marie was busy scanning the front row opposite to see who was wearing what shoes, so I turned and scanned the person on my other side—a beautiful young Japanese man with shoulder-length hair, wearing a gorgeous black suit and holding a jewelled Prada bag. I was mildly surprised—his attire was maybe a little too evening for that time of day. That said, the press, and especially the Asian press, had become more and more flamboyant over time, and it was fun to watch. It wasn’t in the least unusual to be sitting next to a charming editor with diamante earrings, a brocade pencil skirt and a five o’clock shadow.