I got on board because of a fluke question at a lecture Sabrina gave aboutFuchsiato Northwestern’s grad school, just a month before I graduated.
“I had a lifelong love affair with Sylvia Plath, that brave and beautiful and doomed poet. She was a guest editor atMademoisellebefore I was born,” Sabrina said. “I wanted to follow in her footsteps... well, most of them... although I’m not much of a writer.” She went on, “People question my sanity, but I see this yearning, as if people are homesick for a place they never lived. Women are going traditional, changing their last names when they get married. Families are using up vacation time to take the children to stay at a working farm.” She would hybridize this picture, classy nostalgia with edgy modern views—a demulcent print magazine with advertisements for colognes that cost a thousand dollars an ounce set about with the strongestfront-line reporting on women in prison, women in the arts, women in homeless shelters, women in the Senate.
“So why Chicago?” I asked.
“Hometown pride,” she replied. “My family has been in Chicago for twelve generations. Came here working on ships, ended up owning the ships. This city has taken so many blows to its reputation. But look what it has! The most beautiful lakefront in the world. The most vibrant art scene. A world-class university. Legendary writing community. And my amazing daughter, Ivy, to head it up.”
After her talk, Sabrina pulled me aside and said, “Come work for me when you finish school.” I had an offer for a lucrative but brain-rusting job editing the alumni magazine for the University of Illinois Chicago, but this was much more my style. So I showed up at theFuchsiabuilding (indeed, it was a pale shade of fuchsia, thus called “the Purple Palace”) the Monday after graduation. I met Ivy (the aforementioned wonderful daughter). She had been a correspondent for CBS morning shows and, later, style editor forRed.She didn’t confide much about her personal life, but once, out of nowhere, told me that she’d been applying to medical schools when her mother asked her to helm the magazine, for at least the first two years—which might easily be all the years there were.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in,” Ivy told me, dramatically pulling her fists, Michael Corleone–style, toward her chest.
That Saturday, Ivy was studying mock-ups of possible pages that would feature hats. I’d written the scant amount of copy that went with the photos. Veils were back. Black was back. Not just for Edwardian widows anymore. Mystery, majesty, melodrama, a magical brew (and a lot of alliteration).
Gosh.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like hats—or at least I didn’t dislike them any more than I disliked other really ostentatious clothing—but I didn’t really understand them. Although I’d done it often enough, I still didn’t entirely get the soul of dressing for ornamental reasons only.
Although she didn’t say a word to me, my editor pointed to a space on the counter, far from the photo proof sheets, and nodded her thanks for the coffee. She got out her loupe and peered closer. I gazed over her shoulder, not daring to say a word. Ivy Torres was famous, if not notorious, for her myopic focus on whatever task was at hand. Whether she was interviewing a white-hot celebrity or studying a sandwich menu, she gave it the kind of attention usually reserved for spinal surgery. It was what made her so lethally effective at her job. Interrupt her and she would say something low and slow in her Bryn Mawr accent that you didn’t realize had cut you until you woke up the next morning on a bloodstained mattress.
The photographer was no Irving Penn. In one of the shots, a model wearing only a hat had blown her breath on the window glass and written anFin the mist. In another, a second model, in nothing except black stockings, had positioned the hat between her spread legs, the brim just covering her concave belly and afterthought breasts.
Ivy straightened up, kneaded her lower back, and reached for the coffee. “Mmm,” she said. “You know what, Reenie? We should do a feature about extreme larks.”
“Like white-water rafting?” I asked. What kind of accessories would you need to shoot the Colorado River rapids?
Ivy regarded me with an expression I’d only ever seen on the face of a bear at the zoo: curious, dangerous, impassive. People believed that Ivy was all style and no substance when, in fact, she was all substance, including her style. Her own look was so minimalist it made those old black-and-white photographs of Audrey Hepburn look flashy. She didn’t wear any makeup at allexcept a flick of mascara and this sort of tinted balm that made her face look lit from within. I had never seen her eat.
“What I mean by larks is morning people. They call them extreme larks. They get up early, early, like five in the morning. People who live their best lives when it’s still dark. Meditate. Write. Pray. Garden. Go running.” I pictured a woman jogging through Grant Park in the predawn. Accessories she’d need: An aluminum truncheon, lightweight yet lethal. A can of Mace.
Ivy turned back to the photos.
“What do you think of it?” she said. “It’s your story.”
“You mean my story about Felicity! I think it’s a powerhouse story and I won’t write it in a gee-whiz way. I’ll ask feminist scholars for their opinions...”
Ivy curled her lip. To her, feminist scholars were big butch dames in bad boots. She had no use for them.
“Okay, I won’t ask feminist scholars their opinions,” I continued, although I intended to do it anyway. “I’ll talk to professors who study the role of women in culture, and there’s a medical doctor at Harvard who’s writing a book about women and revenge.”
“I didn’t mean that story. I mean this story,” Ivy told me.
“It’s pretty,” I admitted. “But it’s weird. Can you imagine yourself really wearing a velvet top hat with a veil? Where would you wear it? And what would you wear it with?”
“Not the point, Reenie.”
“Well, it’s very pretty.”
“Some sort of satin-and-lace slip dress and a long cape. One with a train that drags on the ground.”
I said nothing. I hated gowns and coats that dragged on the ground. I could think of nothing except that they epitomized the culture of profligacy. Mulberry silk, a hundred dollars a yard, diaphanous as a butterfly’s wing, dragged over pavement, stepped on, spilled on, torn. When I went to the Met Gala last year, and I was indeed required to go to the Met Gala, where Ifelt like a trout in a tank of black lace angelfish, I wore a black-and-gold Chanel minidress that the magazine had rented for me at a cost that was more than the rent on my apartment. I was so sick with anxiety over the dress that I couldn’t eat or drink anything except ice water and moved like a toddler with a full diaper. In my interviews, I confused Jennifer Hudson and Jennifer Lawrence, even though one was a Black singer and one a white actor. (“At least they were both women,” Ivy said with a sigh. “It would have been worse if it was Martin Lawrence.”) I was ill-suited to my job.
I was ill-suited in all kinds of ways. It would never have occurred to me, in real life, to try to “palette” (a verb) my handbag to my shoes (not “match” it, being too “matchy-matchy” was almost as dangerous as being color-blind). Ever the tutored self, I now had a private skeptic within; I hated having to find something to admire in a Louis Vuitton or Gucci. They were desperately ugly: The clunky chains and clips were to accessories what a garbage truck was to a Porsche Carrera. Why did anyone pay for such garish stuff? Did people really admire them or was it an emperor’s-new-clothes thing and nobody wanted to be the first to come out and say it?
Ivy was still studying the images. “It might be pretty, but it should be breathtaking. These pictures suck. I’m going to have the whole thing shot again. Horses, maybe. What do you think?”
I tried a joke. “We’d have to get really big hats for them.”
Ivy left the duskily lit photo studio and I followed. She made the kind of noise with her tongue that people make to call a dog, and Marcus Rhinehart materialized as if he’d been crouching under a desk, but a desk with a three-way mirror, wearing a pale blue Loro Piana twill blazer over black jeans from The Row. “This is not working,” she told him. “Padraig is so full of himself. Maybe we should call someone else. No, no, he’ll do it again and get it right. Find some horses. Same women,not just models. Healthy women who look outdoorsy. I want this done today.”
