After the tension of the London shows it was a relief to get over to Milan and surrender myself to the familiar routine of claustrophobic limo rides, freezing rain, back-breaking waits on hard benches and the various moods of my colleagues. I may have whinged about the shows along with the rest of the fashion pack, but really, I loved them.
Slipping back into that crazy routine was always strangely comforting, and as I looked around the venue of the first show, at all the people in ridiculously high-heeled shoes, carrying handbags that cost as much as the deposit on a small flat, I felt I was back among my own tribe.
As well as all the famous bigshots I was always pleased to see again – Hello Anna, Hello Suzy – there were all the other fashion-shows faces I recognized from season after season, but I had no idea who they were, or where they worked. It was an odd kind of long-term anonymous relationship and it was funny to think that as a regular attendee myself, I was probably one of those known-but-unknown strangers to other people.
I always enjoyed seeing what they turned up in. Oh, I’d think, she’s got a new coat. Or, that’s the same bag she had last season, time for a change. Or, she’s put on weight. You’d see a baby bump one season, notice she wasn’t around the next one and then she’d be back showing off the photos. It was like a weird extended family of total strangers, and I loved it.
Bee seemed to be pretty cheerful on the whole too, which was a good thing, because Alice was whey-faced and monosyllabic to the point where I was almost worried about her. I mean, she was never what you would call easy company, but she had dark shadows under her eyes and gloomed around the place looking like some kind of fashion zombie.
Bee didn’t seem to notice, mainly because Alice snapped into wide-eyed alert mode whenever being addressed by her mighty editor-in-chief, but also because it would have been a terrible inconvenience for her to acknowledge that her star stylist was ill-disposed during Milan, when she needed her in maximum schmooze mode. She was a tough old boot, our Bee.
In the end, though, Frannie and I agreed we couldn’t watch Alice suffer any longer – or, at least, we couldn’t stand being around it twelve-plus hours a day – and we decided that we had to do something about it. We’d snuck off to have coffee with Nelly, who was in town, with Iggy in tow, doing selected shows in her fashion-director-at-large role, and Frannie came back from the counter with a couple of paper straws.
‘Go on,’ she said, handing them to Nelly. ‘Emily and I will draw straws for who’s going to ask her what’s wrong and you can oversee it as the neutral party.’
‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ said Nelly, tearing one straw in half and concealing them both in one hand so they looked the same length. ‘She’s just a moody cow and a crap stylist, who should leave the magazine as quickly as possible, so Emily can have her job.’ She chuckled loudly. ‘OK, which of you two bleeding hearts is going first?’
We tossed a coin for that honour – while Nelly rolled her eyes – and I took the first turn, pulling out the torn straw.
‘Oh no,’ I said, groaning. ‘Not me. Oh, go on, Frannie, can’t you do it? Please? You’re so much nicer than me…’
‘Forget it,’ she said, taking a big bite out of her panino. ‘I’m not that bloody nice.’
From that point on the pair of them didn’t give me a moment’s peace until I had my ‘little talk’ with Alice. It had just turned into a big game for them – especially Nelly.
‘I tell you what,’ she said to me one afternoon, while we were waiting for Prada to start, and she had been teasing me mercilessly about my forthcoming Oprah Winfrey moment, within very close range of Alice’s ears. ‘I’ll stop giving you a hard time, in fact, I’ll help you do it.’
‘You will?’ I asked, amazed.
Nelly’s cleavage started shaking as the laughter welled up inside her.
‘Yeah, I’ll watch. Reckon I could scalp a few tickets for that. Actually, forget Oprah, we could make more of a Jerry Springer-type show out of it. I can just see it: “Alice – Talentless Moody Bitch”; “Emily – Wants to Help Crap Saddoes”. It would be great television.’
I put my hands over my ears until she stopped.
My big moment finally came the next day, when Alice and I ended up alone together in the limo on our way to the Antonio Berardi show. Bee was tied up in a meeting with the head of Chic International and Frannie was doing an interview with Iggy’s replacement designer at Rucca.
Alice was looking particularly miserable, I noticed, as I snuck a sideways look at her in the car. Even her usual gypsy tangle of vintage and ethnic jewellery, and a fanciful antique lace petticoat and army boot combo did little to dispel the miasma of doom around her. She looked as grey as the Milan sky.
I took a breath.
‘Alice,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you something?’
She turned and looked at me with dead eyes.
‘What?’ she said, with no enthusiasm.
‘I just wondered, um, if you are OK? It’s just that you seem a bit low. You don’t seem quite yourself and I felt I had to ask…’
I petered out in the force of her gaze. There was still no animation in her eyes, but there was a cold malice in there.
‘That’s what you’d like, isn’t it?’ she said eventually.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You’d like there to be something wrong with me.’
‘Of course, I wouldn’t,’ I said, quite taken aback. ‘It’s just that you don’t seem your usual self and I was concerned.’
‘Concerned how quickly you can get my job, Emily?’
I just stared back at her horrified.
‘I know what your game is,’ she said. ‘Ever since you arrived at Chic you’ve been trying to get me sacked so you can swan around with your long legs and your handsome husband and your Sunday salons in Peter Potter’s columns and your great friend Nelly Stelios and her famous boyfriend – and my job. You want it all, don’t you? But you can’t have my job, because I’m not going to let you. And it doesn’t matter how many times you try and humiliate me about Croatia and spreadsheets and with all your clever ideas, you will never ever get my job.’
I started to speak. I had been going to say I didn’t want her job, but that was such a lie. Of course I wanted it – but not enough to try and get Alice the sack. I was just looking forward to the day she decided to leave, like most other people on the magazine.
‘Alice,’ I said. ‘You’ve got me all wrong. I don’t want you to get the sack. I’m not plotting against you. I really can’t believe you think that. And it’s not just me who thinks you’re looking pale, Frannie has been worried about you too.’
She laughed, bitterly.
‘Oh yes, you and your little gang of cronies,’ she said. ‘I might have known you had them in on this too. Well, I know what you’re up to, all sitting in your little office, laughing at me behind my back and trying to make me look bad in front of Bee. You think you’re so clever, but it all gets back to me, you know, Emily. Well, you can all go and rot.’
Then she put on her big black sunglasses and turned her head away from me. I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t think of anything to say.
It was quite extraordinary, but Alice managed not to speak to me for the rest of the time we were in Milan – and without Bee noticing. She was never what you would call the chatty type, but it was amazing how she totally avoided making eye contact with me, despite our ridiculously close proximity twelve hours a day in the limo and at shows.
Even at intimate PR dinners for eight people she managed never to address me, refer to me, or look at me, without anyone noticing except me. It was very discomforting. Not even Frannie noticed, but then she wasn’t looking out for it, because I hadn’t told her or Nelly the truth about how Alice had reacted to my well-meaning enquiries. I just said she’d told me she was really tired after too much travel and left it at that, partly because I was still in a state of shock about it.
I’d really had no idea Alice felt that way about me. Of course I knew there had been some unfortunate incidents, like the spreadsheet scenario right at the start of my time on Chic, but I thought I’d done my best to defuse all that. I didn’t think she liked me particularly, but I thought she felt that way about everybody.
I didn’t want to tell Nelly what had happened because I knew it would have been foghorned all over town in a moment as a hilarious anecdote, but with Frannie it was more complex.
For one thing it would just have added credence to Alice’s paranoid delusions to have had the two of us exchanging looks about her in the back of the car and nudging each other, which is exactly what would have happened. Because in some ways, Alice was right.
Frannie, Gemma, Janey and I did sit in our office and laugh at her pictures when the magazine came out. We did have running jokes at her expense about stupid things she’d said in ideas meetings. Gemma had even paraded around the office on several occasions dressed in pastiches of Alice’s signature whimsical outfits – gumboots with a gypsy skirt, a ballet tutu with a chunky fisherman’s jumper and a top hat, that kind of thing. Oh, how we’d laughed.
And then, of course, there was the simple fact that I did want her job. Perhaps at some unconscious level I was trying to undermine her, I thought. I didn’t think I was that ruthlessly ambitious, but after years living with Ollie, maybe it had rubbed off on me. He was certainly convinced that I should leave Chic if I wasn’t promoted to fashion director in the next six months and was always reminding me of it.
With Frannie busy with her big profile on the new Rucca designer, Nelly wrapped up in Iggy, Bee obsessively chasing advertisers – she’d lost a couple of key accounts to pure and she was on a mission – and Alice iceberg-ing me, it was adding up to being a pretty miserable Milan season for me. The only nice thing about it was Miles.
He’d been to see me in my hotel room late at night a couple of times and we’d had a few heart-stopping moments of eye contact on our way in and out of shows, then on the very last day, I ran into him completely unexpectedly at the Fiera.
Frannie was away watching the Rucca fittings and I’d sneaked off to our secret café on my own to have a break from Bee’s advertiser mania and Alice’s gamma death rays. I was just deciding what to have when I realized Miles was standing right next to me at the counter. We looked at each other in amazement and I couldn’t stop myself grinning at him like a fool.
‘Hey, Emily,’ he said, pecking me on the cheek, like it was the most normal thing in the world for us to run into each other. ‘How are you doing? Want a coffee?’
We took our macchiatos off to one of the tables and sat there chatting like the casual fashion acquaintances we supposedly were. Really, what was so surprising about a catwalk photographer and a fashion stylist with loads of friends in common having a quick coffee together? Well, nothing, if I hadn’t been hyperventilating and practically swooning off my chair.
Just looking at the way his strong hand circled the cup made me dizzy and when he leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs and running his other hand through his hair, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I wanted to bite chunks out of him.
Miles seemed much more in possession of his faculties than I did, but then he always was the classic relaxed Australian.
‘Gee, that Franco Belducci show was a crock,’ he said. ‘Do you think anyone would really wear that shit? They looked like drag queens. Ugly ones.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No one will wear that rubbish, but they’ll buy the black trouser suits and he advertises with Chic, so we all have to go smiling to the show and I have to use something from that hideous collection in one of my stories in the next six months.’
Miles frowned.
‘You have to use things you don’t even like in your pictures?’
I nodded and shrugged. ‘It’s just part of the business. I do get to shoot the things I love as well, so the crap like Belducci is just a pay-off.’
‘Is that why you have to go out for all those dinners with PRs as well?’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘When you could be having me for dinner?’
I felt my face heat up like my straightening iron.
‘You’ve got it,’ I said.
‘God, it’s bullshitty, what you do,’ he said. ‘And you do it all the time. I only do it for a few weeks a year and that’s bad enough. I think I’d go nuts.’
‘It’s worth it,’ I said. ‘For all the great stuff I get to do as well.’ I giggled. ‘And for the Prada discount.’
‘You’re a hopeless case,’ said Miles, punching me lightly on the arm and smiling indulgently.
We sat there chatting a bit more and I gradually calmed down. I even managed to keep it together when various people came over to say hello to each of us. When we were alone again, Miles got us two more coffees and as he was walking back to the table with them, I noticed he was looking at me with a more serious expression on his face.
‘Are you OK, Emily?’ he said when he sat down.
‘What do you mean?’ I said. I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me to eat more.
‘Well, we’ve seen quite a bit of each other this week and I do also sneak the odd look at you through my long lens, and I’ve noticed you looking a bit low. You usually strut around the shows like such a haughty little princess, and this week you seem a bit, I dunno, flat.’
‘I am,’ I said, and then I told him what had happened with Alice, the whole story, which I hadn’t told anyone else.
Miles listened carefully, made a few perceptive and supportive comments and generally made me feel much better about it all. It didn’t really matter what he said – although his suggestion that people were always going to be jealous of someone as beautiful as me, was delicious, of course – it was just such a relief to have told someone. Someone who wasn’t in any way involved in it, or affected by it. Apart from Ursula, I didn’t have anyone else like that in my life, I reflected.
Eventually it was time for us to leave, Miles had to get away to mark out his space at the Versace venue and I had to do three more advertiser shows before that. We strolled out of the café doors together and I was just about to turn left towards the escalators and the exit, when Miles grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the staircase.
‘Go up,’ he hissed at me. ‘I’ll follow.’
He knelt down and pretended to sort out something in his camera bag and I did what I was told and went up the stairs. I stopped when I got to the next landing, not sure what to do. It was dusty and deserted up there, and it seemed a million miles away from the frantic main spaces of the Fiera.
A couple of minutes later Miles joined me, his filthiest grin splitting his face. He took my hand and led me up the next flight of stairs, to another landing, where there were a few old plastic stacking chairs lying about in piles and it looked even more abandoned. To one side there was a recess with a door in it and Miles led me to it, pushing me gently against the wall.
As his mouth joined mine I flipped straight into the zone where nothing existed but me and him and flesh against flesh. I was panting so hard, I felt like I might vomit. My stomach was churning with desire for him.
I had my hand down his pants and I was grinding myself against him while we kissed and then moving more out of instinct than conscious thought, I tried to move one leg up over his hip, but my tights and skirt made any further developments impossible. Miles pulled away from me and started laughing.
‘Bloody tights,’ he said. ‘Bloody winter clothes. Bloody Europe. If we were in Australia, I’d have had you by now. No wonder they’re into all those pervy stockings and suspenders over here.’
I smiled back at him, it was funny. Then he put his mouth against mine and kissed me again, very tenderly, without closing his eyes. When he pulled away again, he put his hands up around my face.
‘But that’s OK, isn’t it, Emily?’ he said, his eyes gazing searchingly into mine. ‘Because it’s not just about the fucking, is it?’
I stood there gazing back at him. That was a question I really didn’t want to answer. Not even to myself.
I couldn’t believe it, but Alice carried her cold face right on over into Paris, where it was even easier for her to ignore me, as we didn’t go round in such a tight little family Chic unit there anyway.
Even having Luigi arrive from Milan to drive us again, with the associated hilarity of following strange limos around Paris and Bee’s happiness about having her champion cigarette lighter on hand, didn’t do much to lift the mood between us. I felt self-conscious about everything I said and did in front of Bee and Alice, in case it added to her conviction that I was out to stitch her up.
In the end, I was acting so weirdly, it was my moodiness that Bee ended up being concerned about, not Alice’s. The two of us were walking through freezing fog over to the tent in the Tuileries to see Lanvin when she asked me about it.
‘Is something wrong with you?’ she asked, with her usual bluntness, her high heels crunching harshly on the frozen sandy path.
‘No,’ I snapped, much too quickly. ‘Why?’
Bee looked at me with narrowed eyes. Our breath hung in the air between us.
‘You seem unusually quiet, Emily. I’m used to you and Frannie chattering away in the back of the car like a couple of entertaining schoolgirls, but now you seem to have hit surly adolescence. That display you put on at Huw Efans was bad enough, but now you’ve got the sulks and I’ll tell you straight, it’s a fucking bore. I know it must be humiliating having your husband parading around like Lily Savage in a Savile Row suit, but has something actually happened?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I’m just a bit tired.’
She sighed impatiently.
‘We’re all tired at the shows, Emily. Dealing with it is part of the job and I’ve already got Alice’s moods to endure, without you pulling the prima donna act as well, so snap out of it.’
Then she slapped me quite hard on the upper arm with her bright green kid leather gloves and stalked off into the fog.
In every regard it was turning out to be one of my less fun Paris seasons. I didn’t see so much of Nelly there as I had in Milan because she was pretty much Paris fashion royalty now, in the front row at most shows and caught up with lggy’s working scene every evening.
He wasn’t showing that season – he was going to debut for Albert Alibert in the October – but she was so wrapped up in him and making their new life together in Paris, she just didn’t have the same time for her old London mates. Not in any snobby way, just the practical facts. We did have dinner once and a couple of drinks and coffees, but there wasn’t the same feeling of being in a gang.
I still had Frannie, of course, but she didn’t seem interested in going out at all. She wasn’t drinking or having late dinners, because she was on some kind of super-strict de-tox diet she was researching for her big annual ‘Bikini Beauty’ story for the June issue. It was boring even by my standards of food consumption, but there was nothing I could do to shift her from it.
The final disappointment was no Paul. For the first time in years he wasn’t doing Paris, because he’d been offered a car commercial at such a ridiculous fee his agent had threatened to sack him if he turned it down. It had all happened at the last moment and he’d rung me from the shoot in Rio to tell me.
‘Repeat after me,’ he had said down the phone, when I’d groaned with disappointment at the news. ‘Beach. House. Fire. Island. The. Pines. OK? Have you got that?’
There were just two things – or, rather, two people – that made Paris bearable that March. One was Miles, who came over to the Meurice late, several nights that week – I’d given him a key again – but the other was more of a surprise to me. It was the writer, Rosie Stanton.
I’d seen her a few times at Christmas parties and launches, since she’d come to the Sunday salon and when I bumped into her at Junya Watanabe on the first morning of the Paris shows, she suggested we ‘catch up’ for dinner, as she put it. I’d been a little vague at the time, not wanting to commit myself until I’d seen what other invitations were coming in. But by the Friday, when there were no exciting dinners of any kind on offer, I was more than happy to accept her invitation to go out after Alexander McQueen.
We went to Brasserie Lipp, where she seriously impressed me by getting us a table, not only downstairs – most foreigners were instantly ushered up the spiral staircase to Social Siberia – but in the front section where only the chosen few were ever seated, and strictly locals. We were actually next to Sonia Rykiel, who ate there practically every night.
It was Rosie’s perfect French and intellectual appearance – i.e. hopelessly ungroomed and badly dressed – that had swung it, I realized. My French was OK, a result of that six months in Paris as a child and the expensive education that Ursula had given me, and it was good enough to tell that hers was pretty much native.
‘I read French and economics at Cambridge,’ she told me, when I remarked on it, raising her glass of burgundy to chink my kir royale. ‘And I lived here for several years. That’s how I got into fashion writing actually. I was living over here as a correspondent for The Sunday Courier, mainly covering French politics, but one day they got me to interview a young designer who couldn’t speak any English, because their fashion editor at the time couldn’t speak any French, and when she left I got the gig.’
At least that explained her dress sense, I thought, taking in the details of that evening’s outfit, which was as apparently random as usual. This one featured some kind of terrifying long-line crocheted cardigan in ecru string, over a black polo neck and a flowery summer skirt, with heavy black knee boots.
When Alice mixed heavy boots with floaty dresses it was some kind of a poetic statement, but on Rosie it just looked like a horrible accident. She had flaking pale pink metallic varnish on bitten fingernails, and her hair was in its customary un-style, centre parted and limply hanging. It wasn’t helped by the black macramé beret – string was clearly a theme for her that season – that she’d just taken off.
Despite our lack of taste convergence and her rather intense conversational style, I enjoyed Rosie’s company. As I had found at the Sunday salon, she stretched me in the brain department. Talking to her about shows made me think about them quite analytically rather than just going on about how ‘divine’ something was, like I did with everyone else. Which really meant how great I thought it would look on me.
Not that I got to say much. ‘Talking’ to Rosie one-on-one was rather more about listening than speaking, I had discovered, but at least she was worth paying attention to. Over the course of the dinner she gave me quite a detailed lecture comparing and contrasting Jean Paul Gaultier and Alexander McQueen, both of whose shows we had seen that day.
‘Gaultier is essentially inspired by retro aesthetics,’ Rosie was saying, fixing my gaze intently over her gigot of lamb. ‘But he is interested in how he can make them relate to current mores. McQueen, on the other hand, takes contemporary concerns and imposes them on to historical styling. The interesting thing is that although he goes back much further for inspiration, in the current context – with its universal sense of apocalyptic inevitability – he is the more modern designer.’
It was quite amazing really, I thought, how she could eat, talk, think and drink simultaneously without choking herself.
‘In the Eighties,’ she continued, stuffing in a large piece of bread, ‘before the current vintage boom, when most designers were interested in designing for a putative twenty-first-century utopia, or an ironic mis-topian take on that, Gaultier seemed paradoxically more innovative than his contemporaries.’
She paused to smile at me, rather smugly, while I chewed and nodded.
‘But now that we are beyond that rather metaphysical sense of millennial uncertainty,’ she continued, ‘replaced with an actual environment of chaotic change and apocalyptic insecurity, the more distant past becomes more relevant as a reference point, than recent decades. Fundamentally, McQueen’s is an aesthetic of anxiety, which I think is very interesting.’
I thought I pretty much got the gist of what she was saying and I was rather impressed. Impressed with her and impressed with myself for understanding and even enjoying such a conversation.
Then she started droning on about Rei Kawakubo, who was not my favourite designer, mainly because I never got an invitation to Comme des bloody Garcçons, and my mind was floating off into autopilot, wondering whether I should text Miles to see whether he was up for a postprandial parlez-vous, when Rosie said something that made me snap back to attention.
‘Are you happy at Chic?’ she asked, apparently out of nowhere, although I realized that she had just been talking about how she was enjoying working for magazines after ten years on newspapers.
I was really surprised.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the great fashion magazines of the world and Bee is a wonderful editor. I love working for her.’
‘And you’re senior fashion editor, is that right?’
I nodded.
‘How would you like to be a fashion director?’ said Rosie.
‘On Chic?’ I asked, suddenly getting concerned that Rosie might be on a secret mission from Alice.
‘No,’ she said, slowly stirring her coffee. ‘On Surface.’
‘What’s Surface?’ I asked, with intense relief.
‘It’s a new magazine of which I have just been made editor-in-chief,’ said Rosie. ‘I’ve been given carte blanche to choose my staff and I would like you to be fashion director.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, almost spluttering with surprise. ‘That’s very kind of you, Rosie. I’m really flattered. Crikey, you sprang that on me. What kind of magazine is it going to be?’
‘It’s going to be a glossy fashion magazine, like Chic, or Vogue, or Bazaar, but with less fluff and more analysis. A fashion magazine for women who think.’
She smiled at me. One of her front teeth was quite grey.
‘There won’t be any relationship rubbish in it,’ she continued. ‘Or horoscopes, or beauty coverage. Our reader isn’t interested in mascara. But there will be more fashion shoots than in most glossies, interspersed with essays on trends and in-depth profiles of the more interesting designers by important writers. I interviewed Junya this morning, for the first issue.’ She flashed her rather smug smile again. ‘Imagine The Economist, but as a fashion magazine.’
I was still trying to imagine a woman who wasn’t interested in mascara but who would be interested in looking at loads of fashion pictures. It sounded a bit potty to me, but it’s always nice to be offered a job, so I didn’t say no immediately. Then something struck me.
‘If you aren’t going to have beauty coverage,’ I said, ‘how are you going to get the advertising revenue to finance the magazine? Most fashion magazines are mainly bankrolled by the beauty industry, not fashion, as you know.’
‘We believe that if the fashion and writing are good enough to attract the right readership – and they will be – the beauty houses will feel they can’t afford not to be in Surface, but we won’t be at their beck and call for editorial coverage. In fact they’ll come begging to us.’
‘Well, that would be nice,’ I said with all sincerity. ‘They torture Bee and Frannie.’ I laughed ironically. ‘My husband is one of the worst.’
She smiled again, as if to say – I rest my case.
‘So are you interested?’ she said. ‘Does “fashion director” appeal as a title?’
‘Well, of course it does, but to leave Chic would be a huge step. I would really have to give it some very serious thought and I’d need to know a lot more about – er – Surface, first. Like, where did you get the name from, for example? And who’s publishing it?’
‘When we get back to London, I’ll show you the dummy,’ she said, glossing over my questions. ‘I’m sure you’ll love it. The first issue isn’t coming out until September, so you’ve got a bit of time to make up your mind.’
I promised to think about it, although I didn’t think I was remotely interested at that point. But then again, I thought, on my way back to the Meurice in a cab – ‘Emily Pointer, Fashion Director’.
It did have a certain ring to it.