assistants would immediately begin calling all of their public relations contacts at the various design houses and, if appropriate, at upscale Manhattan stores and tell them that Miranda Priestly – yes, Miranda Priestly, and yes, it was indeed for her personal use – was looking for a particular item. Within minutes, every PR account exec and assistant working at Michael Kors, Gucci, Prada, Versace, Fendi, Armani, Chanel, Barney’s, Chloé, Calvin Klein, Bergdorf, Roberto Cavalli, and Saks would be messengering over (or, in some cases, hand-delivering) every skirt they had in stock that Miranda Priestly could conceivably find attractive. I watched the process unfold like a highly choreographed ballet, each player knowing exactly where and when and how their next step would occur. While this near-daily activity unfolded, Emily sent me to pick up a few other things that we’d need to send with the skirt that night.
‘Your car will be waiting for you on Fifty-eighth Street,’ she said while working two phone lines and scribbling instructions for me on a piece of Runway stationery. She paused briefly to toss me a cell phone and said, ‘Here, take this in case I need to reach you or you have any questions. Never turn it off. Always answer it.’ I took the phone and the paper and headed down to the 58th Street side of the building, wondering how I was ever going to find ‘my car.’ Or even, really, what that meant. I had barely stepped on the sidewalk and looked meekly around before a squat, gray-haired man gumming a pipe approached.
‘You Priestly’s new girl?’ he croaked through tobacco-stained lips, never removing the mahogany-colored pipe. I nodded. ‘I’m Rich. The dispatcher. You wanna car, you talka to me. Got it, blondie?’ I nodded again and ducked into the backseat of a black Cadillac sedan. He slammed the door shut and waved.
‘Where you going, miss?’ the driver asked, pulling me back to the present. I realized I had no idea and pulled the piece of paper from my pocket.
First stop: Ralph Lauren’s studio at 355 West 57th St., 6th Floor. Ask for Leanne. She’ll give you everything we need.
I gave the driver the address and stared out the window. It was one o’clock on a frigid winter afternoon, I was twenty-three years old, and I was riding in the backseat of a chauffeured sedan, on my way to Ralph Lauren’s studio. And I was positively starving. It took nearly forty-five minutes to go the fifteen blocks during the midtown lunch hour, my first glimpse of real city gridlock. The driver told me he’d circle the block until I came out again, and off I went to Ralph’s studio. When I asked for Leanne at the receptionist’s desk on the sixth floor, an adorable girl not a day older than eighteen came bounding down the stairs.
‘Hi!’ she called, stretching out the ‘I’ sound for a few seconds. ‘You must be Andrea, Miranda’s new assistant. We sure do love her around here, so welcome to the team!’ She grinned. I grinned. She pulled a massive plastic bag out from underneath a table and immediately spilled its contents on the floor. ‘Here we have Caroline’s favorite jeans in three colors, and we threw in some baby T’s, too. And Cassidy just adores Ralph’s khaki skirts – we gave them to her in olive and stone.’ Jean skirts, denim jackets, even a few pair of socks came flying out of the bag, and all I could do was stare: there were enough clothes to constitute four or more total preteen wardrobes. Who the hell are Cassidy and Caroline? I wondered, staring at the loot. What self-respecting person wears Ralph Lauren jeans – in three different colors, no less?
I must’ve looked thoroughly confused, because Leanne quite purposely turned her back while repacking the clothes and said, ‘I just know Miranda’s daughters will love this stuff. We’ve been dressing them for years, and Ralph insists on picking the clothes out for them himself.’ I shot her a grateful look and threw the bag over my shoulder.
‘Good luck!’ she called as the elevator doors closed, a genuine smile taking up most of her face. ‘You’re lucky to have such an awesome job!’ Before she could say it, I found myself mentally finishing the sentence – a million girls would die for it. And for that moment, having just seen a famous designer’s studio and in possession of thousands of dollars worth of clothes, I thought she was right.
Once I got the hang of things, the rest of the day flew. I debated for a few minutes whether anyone would be mad if I took a minute to pick up a sandwich, but I had no choice. I hadn’t eaten anything since my croissant at seven this morning, and it was nearly two. I asked the driver to pull over at a deli and decided at the last minute to get him one, too. His jaw dropped when I handed him the turkey and honey mustard, and I wondered if I had made him uncomfortable.
‘I just figured you were hungry, too,’ I said. ‘You know, driving around all day, you probably don’t have much time for lunch.’
‘Thank you, miss, I appreciate it. It’s just that I’ve been driving around Elias-Clark girls for twelve years, and they are not so nice. You are very nice,’ he said in a thick but indeterminate accent, looking at me in the rearview mirror. I smiled at him and felt a momentary flash of foreboding. But then the moment passed and we each munched our turkey wraps while sitting in gridlock and listening to his favorite CD, which sounded to me like little more than a woman shrieking the same thing over and over in an unknown language, the whole thing set to sitar music.
Emily’s next written instruction was to pick up a pair of white shorts that Miranda desperately needed for Pilates. I figured we’d be headed to Polo, but she had written Chanel. Chanel made work-out wear? The driver took me to the private salon, where an older saleswoman whose facelift had left her eyes looking like slits handed me a pair of white cotton-Lycra hot pants, size zero, pinned to a silk hanger and draped in a velvet garment bag. I looked at the shorts, which appeared as though they wouldn’t fit a six-year-old, and looked back to the woman.
‘Um, do you really think Miranda will wear these?’ I asked tentatively, convinced the woman could open that pit-bull mouth of hers and consume me whole. She glared at me.
‘Well, I should hope so, miss, considering they’re custom measured and cut, according to her exact specifications,’ she snarled as she handed the minishorts over. ‘Tell her Mr Kopelman sends his best.’ Sure, lady. Whoever that is.
My next stop was what Emily wrote as ‘way downtown,’ J&R Computer World near City Hall. Seemed it was the only store in the entire city that sold Warriors of the West, a computer game that Miranda wanted to purchase for Frederic and Marie-Élise Marteau’s son, Maxime. By the time I made it downtown an hour later, I’d realized that the cell phone could make long-distance calls, and I was happily dialing my parents and telling them how great the job was.
‘Um, Dad? Hi, it’s Andy. Guess where I am now? Yes, of course I’m at work, but that happens to be in the backseat of a chauffeured car cruising around Manhattan. I’ve already been to Ralph Lauren and Chanel, and after I buy this computer game, I’m on my way to Frederic Marteau’s apartment on Park Avenue to drop all the stuff off. The incredibly famous designer! No, it’s not for him! Miranda’s in St Barth’s and Marie-Élise is flying there to meet them all tonight. On a private plane, yes! Dad!’
He sounded wary but pleased that I was so happy, and I came to decide that I was hired as college-educated messenger. Which was absolutely fine with me. After leaving the bag of Ralph Lauren clothes, the hot pants, and the computer game with a very distinguished-looking doorman in a very plush Park Avenue lobby (so this is what people mean when they talk about Park Avenue!), I headed back to the Elias-Clark building. When I walked into my office area, Emily was sitting Indian-style on the floor, wrapping presents in plain white paper with white ribbons. She was surrounded by mountains of red-and-white boxes, all identical in shape, hundreds, perhaps thousands, scattered between our desks and overflowing into Miranda’s office. Emily was unaware that I was watching her, and I saw that it took her only two minutes to wrap each individual box perfectly and an additional fifteen seconds to tie on a white satin ribbon. She moved efficiently, not wasting a single
