An Innocent Fashion Read Online Free Page A

preoccupied by something a hundred times more thrilling; an e-mail about ostrich-leatherhandbags or candidates for the cover of the September issue. I figured then she must not have heard me, so I repeated myself, more clearly, “I like your shoes!,” the words as bright and crisp as a soap bubble.
    The elevator pinged at our destination. She turned her face toward the parting doors and said simply, not to me, but to the air before her, “Christian Dior.”
    My little bubble spun around, stunned, and quietly burst as she disappeared through a set of glass double doors. On one side of me now loomed a floor-to-ceiling television—showing runway models walking on a loop—and on the other side, a huge red logo: RÉGINE .
    I WAS TEN YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME MY MOTHER DRAGGED me along to her nail appointment at a local salon called Angelina’s—the one regular indulgence of her otherwise unglamorous existence. There, beneath an unfading waft of acetone, against the dramatic soundtrack of the afternoon soap opera, I stumbled upon Régine . Around our house, the only magazines were the tabloids my mother piled up by the bathroom toilet, with features titled, “Your favorite stars look just like you without makeup!” Headlines always involved the latest cheating scandals and speculation over surgical procedures, while inside one was sure to find several pages dedicated to which rich and famous women had worn which unflattering dress to some party or award show: on the whole, every kind of stomach-turning, and printed on bad paper.
    But Régine reminded me of the illustrated fairy tales I used to check out from the school library. Like all fairy tales, with theirstock characters and predictable endings, the magazine had its fair share of faults, not least of which were the celebrity profiles it proudly touted on the front cover. What did it matter to me if the star of some forgettable summer blockbuster had birthed yet another child with her second husband, or that it took her just four months to work off the pregnancy fat? It didn’t matter to me, either, that anybody had attended this or that party, or that they had worn Gucci for the first half, then—surprise!—changed into Dior. And my one enduring question was never answered: What was an anti-wrinkle serum, and why were so many pages dedicated to them?
    Once I got past these minor irritations, however, I flipped through one breathtaking picture after another, fingers trembling, my heart throbbing with longing. Régine ’s power wasn’t merely in the beauty of its models, with their long endless legs and little noses that hit the light just right; it was in the whole world they lived in. They could be fanning themselves beneath an arch in a Moorish palace, or frolicking on the beach of some private Caribbean island, yet they were always part of a picture that was perfect and complete—color-coordinated by somebody, with nothing ugly or wrong to mess it up.
    Later, as an art history major at Yale, this was what I would love about all my favorite paintings, whether by Renoir or Van Gogh or Pollock. In the space of a canvas, they could create a whole world that was beautiful, and made sense . The best fashion spreads were just like that, only better because they were photographs, taken from actual life; and even though I knew they were staged and airbrushed, they still seemed real , as if I could set out looking for the perfect world they showed and find it. I had inexplicably imagined the Régine office as one of these worlds—women majestically lounging about in magnificent long gowns, lacing up each other’s embroidered corsets, their swanlike necks dripping with the world’s finest jewels.
    When at last someone entered the foyer through the glass double doors, she wasn’t wearing a ball gown, but rather an ash-gray sheath and matching sling-back stilettos, and holding a copy of the current