Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger
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and French Runway always send some of their assistants for Miranda, and most of the time the editors help her themselves. But it’s at spring RTW that she throws a huge party, the annual kick-off party that everyone says is the biggest and best at all the shows, all year long. I’ll only go for the week while she’s in Paris. So obviously she would only trust me to help her there.’ Obviously.
‘Mmm, sounds like it’ll be a great time. So that means I just hold down the fort here, huh?’
‘Yeah, pretty much. But don’t think that it’ll be a joke. That will probably be the hardest week of all because she needs a lot of assistance when she’s away. She’ll be calling you a lot.’
‘Oh, goody,’ I said. She rolled her eyes.
I slept with my eyes open, staring at a blank computer screen, until the office began to fill up and there were other people to watch. Ten A.M. brought the first of the Clackers, the quiet sipping of no-whip skim lattes to nurse the previous night’s champagne hangovers. James stopped by my desk, as he did whenever he saw Miranda wasn’t at hers, and proclaimed he’d met his future husband at Balthazar the night before.
‘He was just sitting at the bar, wearing the greatest red leather jacket I’d ever seen – and let me tell you, he could pull it off. You should have seen how he slipped those oysters on his tongue …’ He audibly groaned. ‘Oh, it was just magnificent.’
‘So’d you get his number?’ I asked.
‘Get his number? Try get his pants. He was butt-ass naked on my couch by eleven, and boy, let me tell you—’
‘Lovely, James. Lovely. Not one for playing hard to get, are you? Sounds a little slutty of you, to be honest. This is the age of AIDS, you know.’
‘Sweetie, even you, Miss High and Mighty I-Date-the-World’s-Last-Angel, would’ve been on your knees without a second thought if you saw this guy. He’s absolutely amazing. Amazing!’
By eleven everyone had checked everyone else out, making notations of who had scored a pair of the new Theory ‘Max’ pants or the latest, impossible-to-find Sevens. Time for a break at noon, when conversation centered around particular items of clothing and usually took place by the racks lined up against the walls. Each morning Jeffy would pull out all the racks of dresses and bathing suits and pants and shirts and coats and shoes and everything else that had been called in as a potential item to shoot for one of the fashion spreads. He lined up each rack against a wall, weaving them throughout the entire floor so the editors could find what they needed without having to fight their way through the Closet itself.
The Closet wasn’t really a closet at all. It was more like a small auditorium. Along the perimeter were walls of shoes in every size and color and style, a virtual Willy Wonka’s factory for fashionistas, with dozens of slingbacks, stilettos, ballet flats, high-heeled boots, open-toe sandals, beaded heels. Stacked drawers, some built-in and others just shoved in corners, held every imaginable configuration of stockings, socks, bras, panties, slips, camisoles, and corsets. Need a last-minute leopard-print push-up bra from La Perla? Check the Closet. How about a pair of flesh-colored fishnets or those Dior aviators? In the Closet. The accessories shelves and drawers took up the farthest two walls, and the sheer amount of merchandise – not to mention its value – was staggering. Fountain pens. Jewelry. Bed linens. Mufflers and gloves and ski caps. Pajamas. Capes. Shawls. Stationery. Silk flowers. Hats, so many hats. And bags. The bags! There were totes and bowling bags, backpacks and under-arms, over-shoulders and minis, oversize and clutches, envelopes and messengers, each bearing an exclusive label and a price tag of more than the average American’s monthly mortgage payment. And then there were the racks and racks of clothes – pushed so tightly together it was impossible to walk among them – that occupied every remaining inch of space.
So during the day Jeffy would attempt to make the Closet a semi-usable space where models (and assistants like myself) could try on clothes and actually reach some of the shoes and bags in the back by pushing all of the racks into the halls. I’d yet to see a single visitor to the floor – whether writer or boyfriend or messenger or stylist – not stop dead in his or her tracks and gape at the couture-lined hallways. Sometimes the racks were arranged by shoot (Sydney, Santa Barbara) and other times by item (bikinis, skirt suits), but mostly it just seemed like a haplessly casual mishmash of really expensive stuff. And although everyone stopped and stared and fingered the butter-soft cashmeres and the intricately beaded evening gowns, it was the Clackers who hovered possessively over ‘their’ clothes and provided constant, streaming commentary on each and every piece.
‘Maggie Rizer is the only woman in the world who can actually wear these capris,’ Hope, one of the fashion assistants – weighing a whopping 105 pounds and clocking in at six-one – loudly announced outside our office suite while holding the pants in front of her legs and sighing. ‘They would make my ass look even more gigantic than it already is.’
‘Andrea,’ called her friend, a girl I didn’t know very well who worked in accessories, ‘please tell Hope she’s not fat.’
‘You’re not fat,’ I said, my mouth on autopilot. It would’ve saved me many, many hours to have a shirt printed up that said as much, or perhaps to just have the phrase tattooed directly on my forehead. I was constantly called on to assure various Runway employees that they weren’t fat.
‘Ohmigod, have you seen my gut lately? I’m like the fucking Firestone store, spare tires everywhere. I’m huge!’ Fat was on everyone’s minds, if not actually their bodies. Emily swore that her thighs had a ‘wider circumference than a giant sequoia.’ Jessica believed that her ‘jiggly upper arms’ looked like Roseanne Barr’s. Even James complained that his ass had looked so big that morning when he got out of the shower that he’d ‘contemplated calling in fat to work.’
In the beginning I’d responded to the myriad am-I-fat questions with what I thought to be an exceedingly rational reply. ‘If you’re fat, Hope, what does that make me? I’m two inches shorter than you and I weigh more.’
‘Oh, Andy, be serious. I am fat. You’re thin and gorgeous!’
Naturally I thought she was lying, but I soon came to realize that Hope – along with every other anorexically skinny girl in the office, and most of the guys – was able to accurately evaluate other people’s weight. It was just when it came time to look in the mirror that everyone genuinely saw a wildebeest staring back.
Of course, as much as I tried to keep it at bay, to remind myself over and over that I was normal and they weren’t, the constant fat comments had made an impression. It’d only been four months I’d been working, but my mind was now skewed enough – not to mention paranoid – that I sometimes thought these comments were directed intentionally to me. As in: I, the tall, gorgeous, svelte fashion assistant, am pretending to think I’m fat just so you, the lumpy, stumpy personal assistant will realize that you are indeed the fat one. At five-ten and 115 pounds (the same weight as when my body was racked with parasites), I’d always considered myself on the thinner side of girls my age. I’d also spent my life until then feeling taller than ninety percent of the women I met, and at least half the guys. Not until starting work at this delusional place did I know what it was like to feel short and fat, all day, every day. I was easily the troll of the group, the squattest and the widest, and I wore a size six. And just in case I failed to consider this for a moment, the daily chitchat and gossip could surely remind me.
‘Dr Eisenberg said that the Zone only works if you swear off fruit, too, you know,’ Jessica added, joining the conversation by plucking a skirt from the Narcisco Rodriguez rack. Newly engaged to one of the youngest vice presidents at Goldman Sachs, Jessica was feeling the pressures of her upcoming society wedding. ‘And she’s right. I’ve lost at least another ten pounds since my last fitting.’ I forgave her for starving herself when she barely had enough body fat to function normally, but I just couldn’t forgive her for talking about it. I could not, no matter how impressive the doctors’ names were or how many success stories she prattled on about, bring myself to care.
At around one the