They sat across from each other in Rachel’s kitchen, the creased copy of Oops! between them. Although the séjour had begun to look a little the worse for wear, Rachel had made an effort to keep the kitchen clean, so the oilcloth on which their mugs rested was freshly wiped, and behind Magda’s curly head the olive oil and spice jars gleamed when the light hit them. It would have been a cozy scene if they hadn’t been discussing a murder.
But it became clear that as far as Magda was concerned, it was only a possible murder. She was normally the more excitable of the two, with cautious Rachel trailing behind her warily, but when it came to murder, Rachel had noticed before, they seemed to change places. This had happened with their first case, when she’d refused to believe that Edgar Bowen’s death was murder, and here it was happening again now.
As if to prove this point, Magda said, “I did the background research you asked for. But I have to say, I don’t see anything.”
Rachel wrinkled her nose. “I hate it when people say they have to say. What they really mean is they want to say.”
“Okay, I want to say I don’t see anything.” Magda pursed her lips. “Because I want to say that, as you will see, this has accidental overdose written all over it. The man was an addict. Less than six months out of rehab. On his birthday. It would be more surprising if he hadn’t shot up. But he did, and he misjudged the effect that four months of being clean would have on his tolerance, so he overdosed.” She mimed dusting her hands. “Case closed.”
Not for me, Rachel thought. Aloud she said, “Except that he injected into his bicep.”
“Again, he was an addict. Their veins collapse all the time, and they need to find new places to inject. Between the toes, into the thigh …”
But while waiting for Magda to arrive Rachel had re-read her copy of Knight’s Forensic Pathology. “The obituary said he’d used heroin for two years. That’s nowhere near long enough to use up your veins. And anyway, veins turn unusable because they’re clogged with whatever the heroin’s cut with, but given the kind of price he could pay, his heroin would be pretty pure. And even if his other veins were clogged, the vein in your groin never collapses. He could have used that before his bicep.”
“Yeah, but would he have wanted to risk being photographed shoving a needle into his groin? That’s exactly the kind of thing someone would sell to the tabloids. He’d want a more discreet way of getting a rush.”
Rachel sighed with exasperation. Magda’s stubbornness could be useful, but now that it was holding her back, it was just irritating. “Yes, but he wouldn’t get a rush. Intramuscular injections enter the bloodstream more slowly. He’d get more like a slow-building reaction.”
“He was at his birthday party. Maybe he wanted a nice relaxing buzz.”
She sighed again. “Let’s leave aside the fact that, according to what I read, heroin doesn’t give you a nice relaxing buzz. You take it because it makes you feel fantastic, and you shoot up because you want that feeling as soon as possible. And all right, I’ll imagine that an addict who’s so driven that he decides to shoot up at his birthday party also cares about being caught doing it in an ungainly position. That still leaves the fact that injecting your own upper arm is very awkward. Try it.”
Magda mimed holding a syringe in her right hand, reaching it over to her left bicep.
“Look at your hand.”
Her fingers were curled into a fist. She relaxed them, but even so, the best she could do was hold her imaginary hypodermic flat against her upturned palm and depress her imaginary plunger with a cramped thumb. She grunted. “Okay, it’s hard. But it’s not impossible. And if it’s hard to inject yourself in the bicep, it’s also hard for anyone else to do it. You can’t stab someone with a syringe in public without other people noticing.”
“It doesn’t need to have happened in public. He died outside, but he could have been injected inside. Especially since it would take a while for the dose to kick in.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Magda exhaled and reached into her bag. She pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Just read these, okay? Then see how you feel.” She handed them across the table.
The first sheets were printouts of photos, all showing a man Rachel recognized as Roland Guipure. In most of them, he was with a woman, and from the way she shared his dark hair and wide, full mouth it was easy to guess she was his twin, Antoinette.
Guipure was one of those people who would always have—had always had, she corrected silently—a boyish face, and the progression of the photos could be charted not only by the date Magda had written at the top of each but also by the gradual wear and tear that turned him from an actual near-boy into a disconcertingly fresh-faced, middle-aged man. There was Roland Guipure, recently named Best New Designer by Nouveau magazine, with his sister Antoinette Guipure, with dark hair flopping in his face in 2001; there were Roland and Antoinette Guipure, the twins taking fashion by storm, at the Met Ball, Roland rake-thin in an electric blue tuxedo, in 2002; there were Designer Roland Guipure and his sister Antoinette, with Alexander McQueen at the launch party for McQueen’s collaboration with MAC cosmetics in 2007, Guipure’s face leaner and his features more defined; there was Roland Guipure at his company’s induction into the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, France’s exclusive club for the best haute couture houses in the country in 2010, gray just beginning to show at his temples. Last in the pile were two photos of Guipure with a young man. Both were dated 2015, and in both the younger man’s face was beautifully made up, first (Roland Guipure and a male companion at Nüba on Thursday) with smoky eyes and black mascara, and then (Roland Guipure and a friend at Paris’s exclusive Le Montana club) with aquamarine eyeshadow and carefully applied cosmetic glitter, set off by pale peach lips. In both Guipure looked tired, his face pasty and the beginning of bags under his eyes.
“Male companion?”
Magda shrugged. “Presumably a boyfriend. I couldn’t find a name.”
Rachel put the photos to one side and began to work her way through the pages beneath. They were a collection of articles from various sources, the first from fifteen years before.
Elle, July 2001
Fashionistas of all ages are hearing about newcomer House of Sauveterre. Designer Roland Guipure’s first prêt-à-porter show two months ago was bought out after an hour, and now his A/W haute couture is creating the kind of buzz we haven’t seen since Galliano. One to Watch.
“Why is he showing winter clothing in July?” Rachel asked.
“Ah!” Magda held up an index finger. “You ask that because you don’t know fashion.” She shook her head. “You and I might think we know fashion because we know the names of designers and famous models and read the reviews of collections in the papers, but we do not know fashion. It’s a world all its own, and that world has its own calendar. If it’s snowing, it’s spring; if it’s hot out, it’s winter. Haute couture runway shows happen the season before the season for which the clothes were designed—so spring/summer shows in January, and autumn/winter shows in July. Prêt-à-porter shows happen two seasons before the season they’re designed for, which means that spring prêt-à-porter clothes are shown in the winter of the previous year and autumn ones are shown in January.” Seeing the look on Rachel’s face, she reached into her bag once more and produced a piece of slightly wrinkled, lined notebook paper. “I know. This will help. I had to make it to keep the dates straight.”
“SCHEDULE,” the page said at the top. Then neatly spaced out underneath:
January
Spring/summer haute couture shows
March
Autumn/winter prêt-à-porter shows
July
Autumn/winter haute couture shows
October
Spring/summer prêt-à-porter shows
Armed with this, Rachel turned her attention back to the printouts.
The BoF: Business of Fashion, 7 January 2002
First Time’s the Charm
Paris, France—Roland Guipure may be a new name on the catwalk, but his label, Sauveterre, is already having the kind of impact more established designers would kill for. Sauveterre’s wittily deconstructed dresses and impressive Lognon pleating appeal to both the youthful customer looking to move toward more sophisticated pieces and the older woman who knows her style but wants to enliven it with unexpected fabrics and quirky details. As a result, Sauveterre had a net income of €500,000 at the end of the last fiscal year, its first as an established house.
Style Magazine, The Sunday Times, 26 October 2006
Fashion’s Wonder Twins
Antoinette Guipure wasn’t known for taking gambles. A graduate of the London School of Economics and a vice president of Major Finance at BancFLAN, she had a reputation as a cool financial head when her twin brother, Roland, came to her six years ago and asked for her support.
Roland wanted to start a fashion house, and he wanted to use principal from the family trust to do it. Anyone else would have said no, but on this occasion Guipure let family feeling prevail.
Or did she? Seated in her office at the highly successful House of Sauveterre fashion label, Guipure insists it wasn’t an emotional choice, but a careful decision based on the detailed plan her brother drew up. “We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Sauveterre to be right from the start,” she says. “A family business. We wanted our customers to feel that we would welcome them at any and every stage of their lives, and we wanted our employees to know we would be as loyal to them as they were to us.”
Such loyalty makes sense coming from two members of a family known for its conscience. Antoinette and Roland’s grandfather, the art dealer Maximilien Sauveterre, is a quiet hero in France because of his fair dealings with Jewish customers during World War II. After his death his daughter, the twins’ mother, Danielle, sold the art gallery and used the profits to found a nonprofit that supports numerous philanthropic organizations.
You could say, then, that House of Sauveterre—named in honor of their grandfather—is just following family tradition when it lavishes care on its customers and workers. At the same time, this strategy has been the recipe for a flourishing brand. The business that began with a seed investment of €1m five years ago is rumored to have earned around €2m in profits this year. It seems keeping it in the family has paid off handsomely for the Guipures.
Antoinette Guipure wears a sleeveless knit top, Sauveterre, £320, black silk trousers, Sauveterre £820, mock crocodile slingback brogues, Salvatore Ferragamo £1,450.
Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis, France, April 2008
Sales of Note
Sauveterre Couture, SARL, has purchased 21 Rue la Boétie for €3,990,000. The parcel (Parcelle 13—Feuille 000 BL 01—Commune: PARIS 08 [75]) was formerly owned by Malraux Financiel and rented as individual offices. Before that it was the art gallery and home of Maximilien Sauveterre (the well-known Second World War philanthropist). It will now be redeveloped as the House of Sauveterre headquarters.
quelles.nouvelles, September 4, 2014
www.quelles.com/latest/gui/2015104
Which fashion designer has been lacing his system with something stronger than silk thread? Out and about looking drowsy, with his sleeves rolled down in the middle of a Paris canicule, we hear that he’s using more poudre than a model with a pimple.
The New York Times, March 7, 2015
Walking, Wounded
Paris—Last night Sauveterre’s Roland Guipure sent down the runway his A/W 16 ready-to-wear fashions. It grieves me to report that not only was it not fashionable, but it was also anything but ready to wear.
Guipure is known for his almost-but-not-quite outré ruffles, his delicate folds, and his keen eye for the kinds of charming details that keep clothes fresh. But this show offered none of those. Instead, what Sauveterre showed was a series of dull looks in drab fabrics. Guipure’s palette for this year seems to run the gamut from muddy green to mud-brown, while the dresses made repeated—one might say too much—use of wrist-length sleeves and exaggerated Peter Pan collars. The models appeared to take their cue from the clothes, their expressions so sullen that they looked like dissatisfied escapees from some school that required its pupils to wear camouflage.
A design house is entitled to try something entirely new. After all, only by such attempts do designers emerge from old forms and into new ones. Unfortunately, here Mr. Guipure seems to have dressed his models in the leftover cocoons.
The Fit, August 10, 2015
This morning the House of Sauveterre announced that its chief designer and Creative Director Roland Guipure has entered a rehabilitation facility. “I’m pleased that my brother has decided to confront his demons,” Chief Financial Officer Antoinette Guipure said in a written statement. “Everyone in the House of Sauveterre family wishes him well and looks forward to the day he returns.”
VOGUE.com, October 2015
RUNWAY
Spring/Summer 2016 Ready-to Wear—Sauveterre
When Sauveterre announced two months ago that Head Designer Roland Guipure would be entering rehabilitation for an addiction to heroin, no one knew quite what to expect for the future. As it turns out, the answer is “miracles.”
When Guipure left for a facility in Greece after showing an Autumn/Winter collection that British Vogue labeled “the kind of clothes a depressed Goth would find too lifeless,” it seemed his label had only two possible paths.
The house could enter hiatus until his return, or it could draft in a new designer. The first risked incurring heavy financial losses; the second risked losing continuity for a label so closely associated with its head designer.
In the end, Sauveterre made the only decision that seemed more perilous. They decided to use designs Guipure completed in his désintox for this season’s collection.
I can’t be the only critic who was concerned after the house announced this plan. But when I entered the Petit Palais, transformed into a stark black cube for the Sauveterre défilé, my worry was replaced by delight, courtesy of the series of exuberant designs that filed down the runway. After last season’s muddy colors and heavy tissus, here was a return to the vivid jersey and bright silks of Sauveterre’s earliest outings.
Guipure has always excelled at treading the thin line between bold and outré, and here he walked that tightrope successfully once again. These clothes cling to the body with a sinuosity that plays against the square white, almost puritan, collars. The shades are hot pinks, bright yellows, with occasional soft blues and greens to give the eye a rest. The wedding dress at show’s end, long soft rectangles of painted habotai wafting down raw-edged from a loose duchesse bodice, was a masterpiece in the true Sauveterre mold: youthful but elegant, subtle but eye-catching. If this is what Guipure produces when he is half recovered, fashion eagerly looks forward to his full reemergence.
BuzzGoss, December 1, 2015
He’s baaack! The word on the catwalk is that Roland Guipure left rehab last week and is currently holed up in his atelier. A little bee tells us he’s already started sketching for next year’s collections. It’s looking like a Merry Christmas for Maison Sauveterre!
Elle, December 2016
House of Sauveterre has announced that it will not be showing spring/summer 2017 haute couture. Creative Director Roland Guipure returned from an extended stay at a rehabilitation center earlier this month, and a press release from the company explains, “We’re mindful that we don’t want to overtax Roland during a delicate time. We’re committed to continuing to produce the exciting and innovative prêt-à-porter we showed last October, so we’ve chosen to focus on that. Look for new Sauveterre haute couture in July 2017.”
WWD, March 9, 2016
Sauveterre RTW Fall 2016
You would be forgiven for thinking that a designer emerging from recent personal troubles would offer a sober collection to mark the occasion. At Sauveterre, however, Roland Guipure went in the opposite direction, offering a burst of innovation to announce a comeback that most had been eagerly, if tensely, awaiting.
The invitation to Sauveterre’s defilé announced the show as “A Garden of Possibility,” and it says something that Guipure made this abstract phrase take vivid concrete form. Perhaps channeling Dior’s postwar exuberance, his pieces offered flowers everywhere: in skirts artfully swirled, in high collars twisted into Guipure’s beloved architectural shapes, in sleeves that blossomed at the shoulders. But perhaps hinting at his recent brush with drugs, these flowers were no delicate blooms, but rather fashioned from rough plaids, twists of dark tweed, and in the case of one memorable skirt, intricate purple leather panels made to imitate an upside-down rose.
It wasn’t difficult to see the connection between this show and the looks the House of Sauveterre presented last season in a defilé made up of designs Guipure had completed while in rehab. There the sculpted collars framed the face; here they nearly swamped it. The princess lines that are an instinctive part of Guipure’s repertoire had allowed the clothes to sinuously frame the body last season; this season they seemed to make the pieces cling to the models like spiderwebs threatening to overwhelm. Everywhere sleek exuberance was transmuted into darker, yet still arresting, echoes of the forms of a few months ago.
When Guipure emerged at the show’s end, dressed all in white and hand in hand with his sister and business partner, it was hard not to think that a talent that had nearly shriveled was now well on its way to a rich reblooming.
The BoF: Business of Fashion, 24 March 2016
Deals
Tokyo, Japan,– CHIEKO Group S.p.A and the HOUSE OF SAUVETERRE today announced their intention to ink a new license agreement for the exclusive development, manufacture and distribution of a new perfume, Lace, by Sauveterre™. The objectives of the new license agreement are to build a successful scent product line linking Sauveterre’s brand recognition with Chieko Group’s manufacturing and production capabilities.
Sato Asuka, CEO at Chieko, stated that “We are extremely pleased that this agreement is about to reach completion. Chieko is proud to partner with the House of Sauveterre in a relationship that we are sure will bring great mutual satisfaction.”
A life charted in media, Rachel thought. Rise, fall, and rise again, all of it watched, noted, and judged. Under this constant observation she’d probably have turned to drugs too. It seemed like the only way to get some peace.
She leafed back through the printouts. She saw Magda’s point. Guipure’s life after rehab seemed charmed: professional acclaim, a chunk of money, all topped off with a celebration of his very existence at the trendiest club in town. She could see him being convinced enough of his own invincibility to take just one hit. She drummed her fingers on the table and bit her lip. Maybe she was wrong.
She took a deep breath and started to say so, but Magda preempted her. “Now you see. He had a licensing deal in Japan; he was going to make a fortune! And all the reviews of his last show are like that one from WWD. Every single one is a rave. For God’s sake, the critics even loved the clothes he designed while he was in rehab! Plus, no one in any of these articles has a bad word to say about him. I don’t see a hint here of jealous rivals or disgruntled employees …” She corrected herself: “In fact, the reverse, according to the article in the Times.” She took a breath. “On the other hand, he’s at a lavish party at a trendy club, surrounded by friends from the fashion world—not exactly known for just saying no—and probably suck-ups eager to offer him things to make him happy. It sounds like the backdrop for a cut-and-dried celebrity overdose. Even in the bicep.”
This was no more than Rachel herself had been going to say, but she didn’t respond. She was staring at the cover of Oops! “No, it isn’t,” she said.
“Oh my God! You just want to win. That’s all this is about. Who would want to m—”
“I don’t know,” Rachel cut in. “And I don’t know why. But let me ask you a question.” She picked up the magazine, flipped to the article about Guipure, and read aloud. “The left sleeve of his three-hundred-euro Armani shirt was dotted with blood where he’d stuck the needle in his bicep.” She flipped it closed and pointed to the glossy cover, where Guipure was pinning pleats on a bored-looking mannequin, his left hand working busily. “How does a left-handed man inject heroin into his own left bicep?”