An Innocent Fashion Read Online Free

turnstile, half-expecting that it would press back, then, easily— click! —the metal bar rotated and I was on the other side, one step closer. Black marbleunderfoot, I stood with a row of elevators on either side of me. Digital panels flashed scarlet numbers as beautiful people were transported to and from the twelfth floor, the floor that housed Régine —the only floor of the Hoffman-Lynch building that mattered. I held my breath, trembling hands at my side, trying hopelessly to be discreet as I swiveled around. Peering back toward the lobby, I saw a few women engaged in boring chatter—ordinary-looking, like a bunch of office supplies on a desk. One of them badly needed to re-dye her roots, which looked like the revolving fringe inside a car wash. They had nothing to do with Régine .
    An elevator pinged. The chrome gates parted. Raised to an immortal height on Corinthian stilettos, two long all-black pillars towered before me adorned with cell phones and structured handbags, and topped off by white faces like Narcissus flowers .
    Now, these —these women had come from Régine .
    â€œâ€”spattered red paint all over her!” exclaimed one, her lips the color of Gorgon’s blood. “Afterward she moaned to the cameras, ‘It’s not even fur—it’s only pony-hair!’” They both laughed as they circled around me, trotting fast. Together, sliding their sunglasses over their eyes, they hit the turnstiles— bam!— and reconvened into a canter, clip-clopping toward the glass revolving door. In a daze, I stepped into the elevator and pushed the button, hardly believing that in a moment I would be rocketed skyward to the heavens from which these beauties had descended.
    The only other noteworthy floor of the Hoffman-Lynch building housed Régine ’s teenage sister, who sagely reassured high schoolers that they would fit in by pairing their Converse sneakers with five-hundred-dollar dresses. Every other floor existed merely to make the building taller. There were several men’s fashion magazines—widely known ones, I guess—but theirintended readership skewed toward hopelessly unfashionable “guy’s guys,” the adult approximation of the neighborhood boys I had grown up with, who had graduated from bouncing around their own basketballs to watching other people do it on TV, and needed to be taught every month how to tie a Windsor knot.
    Having long ago mastered the fundamentals of men’s fashion, I was dressed that day in a wine-red suit—one of my favorites—and was trying to decide whether to undo the last jacket button when a woman joined me in the elevator. She was older, with gray hairs drawn into her businesslike bun and a mouth crowded by severe wrinkles . The twelfth floor button already radiated, but she pressed it once more for several seconds, as if she believed she could force it to move faster. I never understood why anybody did that, as if without the influential push of their own finger the world would get lazy and forget to rotate.
    My excitement rose with the elevator as I gazed at the woman’s impeccable outfit. She wore a black dress shirt and matching pencil skirt, with no frills or fun of any kind, yet unlike my clothes—which, despite being tailored to fit, still gave away their outmoded Salvation Army origins—hers gave that special impression of being very expensive, somehow sewn more precisely with a finer thread on a sharper needle, then selected right off the back of a runway model months in anticipation of the general trend. Her three-inch heels were black patent leather, shiny enough to have been unwrapped from their box that same morning.
    â€œYour shoes,” I gestured, unable to help myself. “Divine.”
    She didn’t reply. From the mashing of her thumbs on the keyboard of her cell phone, she could have been playing a game with a timer, but more likely she was