my fault. She’s always been very thin, worked really well in editorial. She had that edgy, androgynous look going, but she didn’t get picked for a couple of jobs recently and she’s taken it badly. She collapsed yesterday because she hasn’t been eating. She’s in hospital all wired up and they’re checking her for heart problems, not enough potassium in her system, of course.
I just feel like it’s my fault, I should have been watching her better. She’s so young, for all that she does that cool ‘I can handle it’ trip. Sorry, didn’t mean to lay this on you, just needed someone to talk to I guess. I tried to say it to Natalie –
Natalie was the company’s boss
– but she just doesn’t see it the same way that I do. Shit, Izzie, it’s a tough business out there.
Hope you’re OK, give us a call.
Lola
Lola’s email was a sobering wake-up call for Izzie. Her grandmother might be in a hospital bed looking like a fragile little collection of bones beneath papery fair skin, but at least she was an old lady who had lived her life. Izzie knew exactly which model Shawnee was. She had an almost photographic recall of all the models on the agency’s books, which was what made her so good at her job, because she never forgot a face, and therefore was always able to work out which model would work for which booking.
She’d never have figured Shawnee for someone who would end up in hospital. Shawnee seemed so together, so happy: all lightly sun-kissed skin and those amazing pale green eyes that gave her the edgy look Lola had talked about. And now she was ill, weighing who knows what, all because she’d felt that she hadn’t got the last few jobs because she wasn’t thin enough.
And it was all about being thin. Beautiful was important too, but thin was almost as vital, no doubt about it.
When she’d first started in the modelling industry, Izzie had been irritated by people who had spoken about how crazy it was to have these incredible slim women striding up and down catwalks, showing off clothes.
‘Why are they so thin? Why don’t you use real women?’ was the complaint, and Izzie would roll her eyes and look for another industry person to back her up by explaining how it all worked.
‘They need to be thin to show the clothes to best advantage,’ she’d say patiently. ‘That way, you see the clothes and not their bodies. It would be different if they all looked va-va-voom, J-Lo-style. You’d be looking at them, not the garments. That’s partly how the supermodel thing went out of fashion – it became all about the models and not about the clothes they were wearing.’
Sometimes people got it.
‘I see what you mean,’ they’d say.
Sometimes they didn’t.
‘That’s bullshit,’ a woman said to her at a party once in Washington. Izzie had been with her Irish friend, Sorcha, who lived in DC, and they’d attended the launch of a book of political speeches. The crowd was very different from the sort of people Izzie usually mixed with and she’d been cornered by a woman with a bad haircut who wore a very masculine-cut suit and T-shirt and managed to make this fashion statement look drab.
‘The fashion industry is bullying women to make them powerless,’ the woman said. ‘Wear this, eat this, don’t eat this, be thinner. It’s all bullshit to sell clothes. Thin is a feminist issue. Actual women don’t have flat stomachs and no tits. The fashion industry is conspiring to turn real women into powerless little girls. You people should be working from the inside to change it all.’
Izzie cringed to think how she’d responded.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she’d snapped, fed up with this politics-obsessed city where nobody ever talked about anything except Capitol Hill.
‘Let’s go, Sorcha,’ she’d said to her friend. ‘I’ve just been yelled at by this nutcase in a suit. I work in fashion – I’m not the industry spokesperson. Sometimes a dress is just a damn dress.’
But that woman had been absolutely right, she thought sadly. At the time she’d dismissed her words, assuming that a woman without fashion sense couldn’t possibly grasp what the industry was really about, but in fact the woman had put her finger on the problem with great accuracy.
There wasn’t any real need for models to be that thin. People weren’t stupid, they could work out what the clothes looked like on real women. Apart from the ones who’d bought into the whole thin-is-fabulous mental state, most of the people buying the clothes were real women, anyway. It would be handy to see how the garments moved and flared on similar figures, instead of on six-foot beauties who wore size zero.
Even the beauties couldn’t stay that thin for ever, which was how girls like Shawnee ended up in hospital beds on heart monitors.
Izzie felt ashamed when she thought about the SilverWebb Agency she and Carla had been so excited about. She’d lost that excitement in the last few months because of being involved with Joe.
She bet he hadn’t stopped improving his business. But she’d done that dumb woman thing of taking her eye off every single ball while she was with him. She’d also neglected her friends: she hadn’t been to see Sorcha for months, even though Sorcha had been ringing her up, begging her to visit.
Naturally, Izzie hadn’t been able to explain why she couldn’t come.
‘Just busy at work,’ she’d said.
‘Come on,’ Sorcha had groaned, ‘you can’t be busy all of the time. At this rate, you ought to own the company by now – or do they own you?’
And Izzie had promised to make the trip to Washington sometime in the future, but not just yet, because she couldn’t very well tell her old friend that she didn’t want to leave New York in case she missed spending time with her not-really-married lover.
Then there were Laura and Jacob, friends from yogalates. The three of them had been friends for ages. Laura and Jacob had shared dating stories for years until one day they’d looked at each other in a different way and, kapow – cupid’s arrow skewered them. They’d got married the previous Christmas and Izzie was ashamed to realise that she had only seen them once since.
Joe Hansen had taken over her life and she had nothing to show for it. Tish was another Joe casualty. How long had it been since Izzie had dropped in to see her and her new baby?
She was going to change, she decided. When she got back home, she’d phone all the people she’d neglected. The Joe days were over.
Dear Lola, I’m so sorry to hear about Shawnee. That’s truly terrible. It’s the one thing I really hate about this industry and I’ve hated it for a long time. It makes you wonder what’s going on when someone like Shawnee looks in the mirror and hates what she sees. I know we all do our best to take care of the girls we work with, but it’s a big world out there and we can’t protect them from that, unless we try and change that world. I’d love to talk to you about it sometime when I get back to New York.
She dared not say any more; this email was being sent to the office, after all.
But it’s wrong that someone as beautiful as Shawnee thinks she’s not good
