Dating Big Bird Read Online Free

designer for Henri Bendel. But though she’dbounced around from house to house, everyone knew where her true inspiration for designing women’s fashions had come from: Diane Von Furstenberg. Karen’s first job in the business had been as her assistant, and she had never gotten over the wrap dress.
    “That dress is genius—pure genius,” she’d said in countless interviews and in countless conversations since then. “It was the quintessential ‘basic.’ The fit, the fabric, the way it hung—I knew the second I put it on that my life was never going to be the same.”
    And indeed it wasn’t. Just before she’d left Bendel’s to start her own company, she’d come up with the concept and the design for her own basic: a women’s body-suit. Produced in a palette of neutral colors (black, white, brown, navy, gray, for starters), Karen’s “second skin” was intended to be the foundation to a woman’s wardrobe, over which a suit jacket, pants, sweater, or evening skirt could be worn with ease. Simple and sexy, Karen believed it was to become her signature piece—one that she would take with her when she struck out on her own.
    But there was a catch.
    The body-suit didn’t sell at Bendel’s.
    And the reason it didn’t sell was because another body-suit—exactly the same in design and material—had just hit the market and was flying off the racks in major department stores like Saks and Neiman’s and Bloomingdale’s, which, unlike Bendel’s, had branches all over the country. The success of that designer—Donna Karan—and the untimely coincidence of their both coming out with the same item had haunted Karen ever since. Even after Karen’s own star had risen and her success rivaled Donna’s, the press always asked her about it. And though they never accused her of copying Donna and though it was clear to them that Karen was immensely talented—more so, thesharpest ones knew, than Donna—that early wrinkle in her career was a scar that in Karen’s mind would never ever completely disappear.
    But that day seven years ago, during one of the many long strategy meetings Karen insisted on attending at our offices to discuss her new company, I came up, out of sheer desperation, with the idea that she should change her name.
    “Change my name?” she said, her skeletal frame turning in her swivel chair to face me. She bit her big lipsticked lips and stared at me over the plume of smoke coming out of her nose. “What do you mean,
change my name
?”
    I had no idea what I meant.
    What I
did
know was that she needed to have a corporate identity ready before the fall buying season began, and all we had so far was
LipskyLook
. With that, we’d be lucky if J.C. Penney took her line.
    “Maybe the name of your company should relate more to your design philosophy,” I heard myself pontificate. “Maybe the name will help connect the wearer to the clothes.”
    She was still biting her lips, but she hadn’t yelled at me yet. Which I took as an encouraging sign.
    “A name,” I said slowly, gathering all of my bullshitting skills in one glorious breath—I was a copy writer, after all, with layers and layers of creative talent that were, as yet, untapped!—“that describes the woman who will wear your clothes. A name that evokes style. Urbanity. Sophistication. Sex.” I came up for air and to buy myself another crucial few seconds of time, and when I did, I noticed her mouth—licked clean of her signature mud-matte pigment and ravenous for success.
    “Lipps,” I said suddenly.
    Then I wrote it on my pad and held it up so she could see the crucial addition of the second
p
.
    “Karen Lipps.”
    But back to that Labor Day weekend, when I started sleeping with the Pickle’s Big Bird.
    It was a crisp early September Sunday morning, the kind of autumn morning that makes living in downtown New York seem movie-worthy: wisps of white clouds against a bright, clear, relentlessly blue sky; sleek sunglassed people