I’d always thought I was a good planner, an organized person. Among my friends I was arguably the biggest planner, though Mia and I had exchanged productivity app high fives more than once over the years. But all that was before I met Claris. Before I started working with her. Or in the case of Gentlemen’s Fashion Week, working for her.
Not that she’d put it that way. Not at all. She was...not exactly egalitarian, but not dictatorial either. Her plan seemed to be Surround yourself with highly competent people and then let them get on with it, and to her credit, it was working. The GFW Slack was hopping and bopping all day long as folks reported in on contacts they’d made and “positions” they’d “cemented,” making me feel like there was a bit of the mob about the whole thing.
Claris had laid out very specific task lists and timelines for venues, catering, decorating, lights, tech, load-in, load-out, promotions, volunteers (by section), and a bunch of other things I’d lost sight of because the overwhelm of information was so complete. Six months seemed like a lot of time to me, but when I saw all the things that needed to happen between now and September, I was slightly intimidated by the complicated moving parts.
By contrast my assignment was pretty nebulous, leading even more to the feeling it was a sort of sop to my role in Diego’s (their?) life. “Oh, and everyone, this is Mason. He’ll be posting to a few of the social accounts. Always remember to sign your posts!” I wasn’t the only one who had the login and passwords, but most of the rest of them were posting as themselves to their personal accounts in order to spread the #gentsfashweek (less clarity, more brevity) hashtag around and boost followers for the official account.
My first opportunity to do my *cough cough* job came about a month later when Claris tagged me to a channel about a “general check-in” at “the studio.” Followed by an explanatory email with directions to the place (way out in “is this even still the Bay Area because I’m really not convinced” territory). Apparently they had rented a vacant retail space to be used by the designers. Which seemed like a really cool thing, since I doubted a lot of young, small-scale clothing designers had studios.
When I finally got to the place, I was impressed. It wasn’t huge or anything, but it was big enough. In some previous lifetime it might have been a boutique pet store, one of those joints with a lot of stuff that looked pretty but not functional, at least judging by the chipping and fading mural across the front windows of frolicking (but clearly trendy and perfectly groomed) puppies and kittens. Some raggedy-looking folding shades were being used to roughly divide the room in quarters.
“Mason! Glad you could make it!” Claris kissed my cheek. “Let me introduce you to our stars. You’ve met them digitally, of course, but there’s really no substitute for face-to-face, is there?”
As usual, she didn’t wait for an answer before continuing, though I was actually grateful for the opportunity to look around. While my first impression had been more “abandoned retail store” than “hotbed of fashion,” once we started walking around I could see that each of the designers had a clearly delineated style of their own and their spot in the studio reflected that.
We passed a cluttered table at the front and entered the first designer space, which was awash in different shades of black and gray fabrics, some stiff, some draping, some almost transparent.
“This is Moe! He’s the babycakes of the bunch, and he specializes in waistcoats, neckcloths, and original suspenders. Moe, please meet Mason. He’ll be doing a lot of our Instagram and TikTok posts.”
Which reminded me. I shook hands and exchanged hellos with Moe before pulling out my phone and tweaking the settings to get the highest resolution, still half-listening to their conversation.
“I’m no babycakes, mama.” Moe patted his belly. “Testosterone has given me many gifts, including a place to rest my beer.”
“It suits you, darling. How’s progress coming on the skirt?”
“I’m not made for the skirt life, but Bren said she’d help me out, so hopefully I can get it to make sense. I just think guys look hot in skirts.”
“You’re preaching to the choir here. Mase, love, what do you think of a man in a skirt?”
“Anyone wearing something they feel good in catches my eye,” I said. “Do you mind if I take a few pictures, Moe? I might shoot some video too. I haven’t actually figured out what to do with TikTok, but it’ll help to have some footage to mess around with.”
“Sure! I don’t think anything is in, like, hashtag-spoilers state yet, but make sure you only get fragments instead of whole pictures, if that’s okay.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that fashion shows would have spoilers, but in retrospect it was obvious, and I’d need to edit the shots I’d already taken. Though maybe that could be the whole theme: teasing people with little hints clearly cropped from bigger pictures. “Got it,” I told him, and began wandering around his area while Claris caught up with his progress (or lack of progress) since the last time they’d checked in. Could I also tease the designers themselves? I knew there were three who were less well known than Diego, and if we made the designers mysterious they’d be more intriguing to viewers. Especially younger viewers. Hmm.
Claris had a gift for reining people in and I began to think, listening to her, that she was genuinely perfect for Diego. Or perfect for any creative-type person prone to going off on some tangent about mail-order lace and shipping delays and problems with vegetable dyes being used on high-percentage synthetic fabrics. She smoothly guided Moe back onto whatever track she wanted him to be on (yes, she was sympathetic about the shipping delays, of course, and exactly how was this going to impact his progress and previously set target deadlines?), never seeming to lose her patience as I might have.
It was admirable. She was admirable.
I caught a picture of her looking contemplatively at some sample Moe was holding out for her, a few loose strands of hair dark against her pale skin, and opened a text to Diego. NGL, your wife is kinda hot.
Then I stared at it. Did I dare send something like that? Was it overstepping? Would he think I was proposing a threesome?
Had he ever given me the impression he had a one-track mind before? Not really. And I knew they both had a sense of humor. So like. I mean.
I hit send. And quickly went back to pictures of whatever I saw that seemed visually interesting: a gray metal rivet on a black velvet background, beaded trim on a sleeve, a necktie of woven ribbon.
Claris brought me to meet Brenda, a delightfully dyke-forward lesbian, which I didn’t feel guilty for thinking because she was wearing a baseball cap that read DYKE. “Like your cap,” I said, grinning as we shook hands.
“I have one in every color,” she replied. “Gotta coordinate with my combat boots, y’know.” She was probably in her early forties and I’d made the apparently erroneous assumption that everyone involved in the show would be young. Obviously not. It wouldn’t really make sense given you could get into fashion design at any age, and it wasn’t as if you aged out of it, like your best sewing years were behind you once you hit thirty.
Her style was entirely different than Moe’s. A lot of straight lines and boxy shapes, squared shoulders and curve-minimizing silhouettes. Her sketches, also unlike Moe’s, were all of gentlemanly fashions on women, so that was super cool. I clicked away as Claris conducted a very different catch-up, still seeming to come around to the same bullet points, keeping the timeline in focus no matter what she was asking about.
The last member of the design team was a man named Harold whose age could have been anywhere from twenty-seven to forty-five. His hair was silver at the sides but his face seemed youthful and his bearing was that deliciously soft-spoken type that exemplified the phrase “still waters run deep,” making you wonder what exactly was going on behind that unruffled yet slightly vulnerable exterior. I mean, I already had my hands full, but Harold would have been my type if I hadn’t.
“Everything is progressing according to plan,” he said to Claris in his low, steady voice. He switched apps on the iPad on the table in front of him and showed her something.
“I adore you, Harold. You’ve even color-coded your calendar.”
“Of course I have. How else would I be able to visually assess where I am in the project?”
“It makes perfect sense, dear.” She gestured toward me. “Mason is one of us as well. The man likes a kanban board.”
He smiled at me, displaying perfect teeth. “Oh, me too. Always so satisfying to move items over to Done.”
“It really is,” I agreed.
We might have talked more but Claris was, of course, forever on task. “I’m glad to hear things are going as expected. No unfortunate shipping disasters?”
“Not as yet, but knock on wood.”
She rapped the tabletop. “Every day until the show if need be.”
They moved on to topics I couldn’t follow except that they were both speaking a variant of High Productivity and Organization with a GTD emphasis and it amused me listening to their voices grow more excited as Claris pulled up her phone to show Harold her promo flow chart.
Not that I needed it, but now I kind of wanted to see the promo flow chart too. I was technically in promotions, right? Aside from the fact that my role was a sinecure. Sort of. I mean. I was actually doing things. Even if she’d basically given me the job to keep me around.
Speaking of my role—what if I did mini interviews with the designers? That would be a fun way to introduce them to the world. Or at least to TikTok. After our tour I went around and bothered them all for a few more minutes, asking how they got into designing clothes and what their earliest memories were of recognizing the power of fashion.
Good sound bites were had and intriguing stories were told, go GFW promotions.
Harold was just wrapping up a meandering story about an aunt who’d made all her own clothes and how captivated he’d been by her ability to express herself with what she wore better than anyone else he knew when the door opened and—Diego walked in.
Naturally I did not stop recording immediately and run up to him. For one: that’d be rude. For two: I didn’t know what the rules were and if we were free to greet each other like other-than-friends. For three: he had legit stuff to do and didn’t need me to come pouncing on him like a puppy wanting attention.
Though for the record he was in a pair of tight leather trousers and a loose T-shirt and I basically wanted to blow him right there in the dusty front window of what used to be a pet store. Would blow, ten out of ten.
Still, I maintained focus, smiled and nodded at Harold, made understanding noises, and finished the recording with thanks before putting away my phone and slowly moving back up to Moe’s section, where Diego was leaning against the edge of the table, head slightly to the side, listening intently to whatever Moe was telling him.
God, he was hot when he was concentrating really hard on something.
He caught my eye and his smile widened, but he didn’t lose the thread of his conversation. I veered right and wandered into the only area we hadn’t already toured, which after about a minute I realized must be Diego’s.
I’d known that fashion designers all had their own styles, their own languages, their own hallmarks. But it was one thing to be able to tell an Armani from a Michael Kors. It was something else to see the different paths each of the designers in the show were taking to get there, the way their own personalized approaches were informed by their sense of style, which thus informed the designs they were currently bringing to life.
Diego made his way to me after checking in with everyone. I was in deep consideration over the effect of a mesh window in the middle of a top hat—as if the hat had been cut in half horizontally and lengthened, leaving only a two-inch ring of mesh around the middle, seeming both like it was holding up the top half of the hat and also like it couldn’t possibly support the weight.
“What do you think?”
“I can’t decide. It’s cool. But how does it look from a distance?”
He leaned in to kiss me lightly. “An excellent question, my dear sir.”
So that addressed one of my concerns; this wasn’t a total secret.
“And the answer is I’m not sure.” He placed the hat on my head and backed away toward the door, eyes on the hat as he went. “Bren? Will you look at this?”
Brenda put down what she was doing with a sigh that didn’t feel at all pointed at Diego and said, “Gladly. If I ever manage to figure out how to keep this jacket from looking like a damn refrigerator box I’ve lopped head and arm holes in, I’ll be glad. What’s your issue?”
“The hat.” A hand-flick in my direction. Was this what it felt like to be a model? Now both of them were looking at me but neither was actually looking at me.
“Needs to be higher,” she said after a bare couple of seconds.
“You exist to make things more difficult,” he told her, smiling.
She blew him a kiss and went back to her area. “Go big or go home, buckaroo.”
This time he held his hand out to me and drew me to sit before plucking the hat off my head and smoothing the surely imaginary wrinkles across my shoulders. “Thank you for modeling the look. She’s right, of course. I had an inkling and didn’t want to accept it, but if you’re going to put something up on the catwalk, it’s gotta make an impact or there’s no point. This would have people squinting the way you were squinting, trying to figure out what they thought.”
“Better than hating it, though.”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. Not at all. In a straight-up choice between someone hating a look with the fire of a thousand suns or feeling ‘meh’ about it, I’ll pick the thousand suns any day.”
The idea of being hated with the fire of a thousand suns didn’t seem ideal to me at all. “But wouldn’t it be...awful? If people hated you?”
“It’s not me, it’s a hat. Which I say now, but when it comes down to the line I’m as sensitive as any other artist. But no, it’s just, the enemy of engagement is apathy. If someone hates your work, really hates it, has a hot coal of pure loathing deep inside them because of something you’ve done—assuming you aren’t being racist or homophobic or anything that objectively earns you that response—then you’ve made them feel, and that’s engagement. If all they do is blink at it and turn away, well, you’ve done nothing at all.”
It seemed like a relatively harsh grading curve to me, but I was no artist. “I envy it a little,” I admitted. “The passion, the drive to create something, the ability to make people feel.”
“This is where I definitely do not say anything about your ability to make me feel.” He coughed. “But I know what you mean. It doesn’t have to be art, you know. Claris does it with spreadsheets.”
Brenda, a few feet away on the other side of a folding shade, guffawed. “She should have that on a license plate holder. ‘Project managers do it with spreadsheets.’”
“Do I hear my name being taken in vain?” Claris called.
“I think Bren’s suggesting that you use spreadsheets as part of sex acts!” Diego called back.
“Sorry, darling,” she said to Moe, “clearly I need to go defend my good name.” When he laughed she only pointed her finger and said, “Shush!”
“Not saying it’s a bad thing.” Brenda appeared around the shade just in time for Claris to wrap an arm around her. “Just saying it’s a thing.”
“I do not have sex with spreadsheets.”
“I didn’t say you did. But I bet you get off on them.”
Claris’s lips turned up in an unmistakable smirk. “Well. No comment there. Ahem. Though I’m not sure why my relationship to spreadsheets has anything to do with fashion.”
Diego patted my thigh like it was nothing, just a casually intimate touch in a small group setting. “Mason was just saying he envied art-related passion. I think Bren was making the point that passion can have many applications.”
“And so it can!” Claris ruffled Brenda’s cutely spiked fade, making her duck away to protect her hair. “Spreadsheets being only one of them. Mase, love, you have plenty of passion.”
I’d nearly forgotten where we’d started this conversation after the twists and turns it had taken. “Sure, you know. It’s just I once loved my job and now I don’t, so I think I’m jealous of anyone who has a thing in their life that inspires them the way everyone here is inspired.”
“If you’re looking to find that in a job, pup, you’ll probably be disappointed.” With an extravagant bow, Brenda added, “I’m a cashier in a discount clothes store, I know of what I speak. The idea is not to marry your job. Don’t look to it for all the emotional support you’d look for in a partner, you know? Go there, do it, leave, and don’t think about it again until the next time you’re there. In the rest of your life, do shit you love.” She shot a sour look over her shoulder. “Speaking of, I should be wrestling with this stupid idea I had in the middle of the night and thought was genius and now I hate it and it’s too late to back out. Oh, the joys of doing what you love.”
Claris tweaked her ear. “Good girl. Back to work!”
“Demon.”
“Sweetpea.”
They grinned at each other. Brenda retreated and Claris came to sit down beside me on what appeared to be a plastic storage bin full of feathers. “While I am not quite as jaded as some, I do think you might look outside your job for a sense of meaning at this point in your life. Maybe it will enable you to be happier where you are. Maybe it will open doors so you can move into a different position. But either way I suspect you need to feel like you’re doing something, and that will help immeasurably.”
“Now that you say it,” Diego mused, “the two of you are a lot alike. Before Claris went freelance she was so disheartened with the daily grind I thought she might quit her job and open a cupcake shop.”
“Oh, no, that was never a real thing. That was just something I said to mock the straight white ladies on reality shows.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “I’ll tell you what I was super tempted to actually do, though. There’s a whole strange underground market for well-worn and unwashed lingerie, and I think I could make a killing at that. Don’t you, darling?”
I laughed. “See, that’s not at all where I thought you were going with that.”
“Where did you think I was going with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know—save the whales, move to a jungle somewhere, buy a houseboat and live on the delta for the rest of your days. But selling dirty panties, nope, did not go there.”
She sighed. “I still think that would be a good idea. It’s something one already has, which one already uses, and all one has to do is pop it in the mail. Hardly a large commitment for a side hustle.”
Diego pulled her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “I’d buy them. If I didn’t, um, have access to them already. But I think you’re forgetting that you’d have to keep buying new ones to replace the old ones and you don’t even like the frilly sort, so.”
“True. I suppose I’d have to do research to find out which types were in high demand. Anything with lace lining the thigh elastic is right out.”
“You could cross-promote,” I suggested. “Diego could design, you could sell, put a tag and include a business card with every purchase.”
Both of them laughed. What is it about making people laugh that’s so damn satisfying? I couldn’t help smiling at them.
“Alas, I’m afraid the demographics aren’t exactly the same. Diego designs for men and while my hypothetical clientele would be men, I doubt they’d be shopping for the same things in both contexts.”
“So sorry,” Harold said, apologetically approaching us. “Diego, is there any way you could take another look at what I’m working on? I think it’s nearly there, but...”
“Of course! That’s why we do this. Excuse me, you two, and try not to come up with any new plots while I’m gone.”
“There goes our fun!” Claris teased as he walked away.
“Is Diego something of a...mentor?” I asked. “I’m trying to work out how this all goes.”
She bent her head forward. “Not to speak ill of the departed, but this show is the brainchild of a guy who was quite a bit more well-known than Diego or any of the others—which is why he’ll work himself to the bone to make sure it goes off without a hitch, but that’s neither here nor there. When Diego was merely one of the designers, largely chosen because they didn’t present a threat, he took on a support role for the others. Now that he’s nominally in charge, he’s actually built in peer critiques to the workplace environment.” She glanced fondly toward the back of the room. “He’s really something else, that man.”
I nodded, envying her slightly possessive pride. “No argument here.”
“The lovely Brenda’s right, you know. About you, I mean. Find something to do with yourself, darling. Something that has nothing to do with work. Maybe something that has nothing to do with your ordinary life.”
“Aren’t I doing that?” I motioned to the studio.
“Hardly. Unless you’re telling me Diego has nothing to do with your life.”
“He certainly makes it feel a lot less ordinary.”
“Touché, but my point stands. Volunteer somewhere for a while. Maybe a couple of somewheres. You have a fire in you to help people—I’ve known that since we met. Give vent to that, Mase. You deserve to have a sense of fulfillment, even if it’s not from your job.”
Volunteering hadn’t actually occurred to me—aside from Gentlemen’s Fashion Week. I had volunteered at an animal shelter in high school because I’d taken an elective in community service, but not since then. “You think?”
“Why not? Put yourself out there and you may be surprised what finds you. Not in a ‘law of attraction’ way, in a very straightforward ‘if you go about life with an open net you can’t predict what you catch’ way. And it can’t hurt to try.”
“That’s true.”
Claris nodded as if we’d decided something. “Good, that’s settled. Let me know if you need any help, I have contacts all over the place. Now will you show me what you’re thinking about for TikTok? I confess, I have really no idea what people like about that platform, but I do think we should embrace it...”
We spent the rest of a productive evening mapping out some ideas for promotional social media engagement and occasionally being called upon to offer our thoughts on this or that design element. It didn’t feel like work. It didn’t feel wholly social. It felt good, though. Like I was part of something. Like Gentlemen’s Fashion Week had value and even in a small way I was contributing to that.
Man, though, sometimes Claris was just spooky with the insights. She was right. I needed this. I walked back to my car whistling and spent the rest of the night culling the pictures I’d taken and cropping things to look more mysterious. Maybe it had been a fake job given to me as an excuse to have me around, but what the hell. Might as well do it right.