Beads, Boys and Bangles (15 page)

T
he next Miss Teen meeting is very different from the last one.

For a start, it’s in our kitchen, rather than the boardroom, and instead of staring silently at her cappuccino, Amanda starts by chatting in a friendly way about who we’re all going to see at London Fashion Week this time around and how much she’s looking forward to it.

Then she mentions how pieces from the Jewels collection are already becoming collectors’ items on eBay. Versions of the dress Svetlana wore are being sold for hundreds of pounds – several times the amount they charged for them at Miss Teen. We talk about the magazines that have featured Crow’s party dresses on actresses and It-girls, and how a couple of boutiques are thinking of selling the couture stuff.

Mum’s right. Amanda’s definitely flirting, in her own, strange way. But why?

Still with her polite face on, Amanda asks how the new
high-street designs are coming along. Crow brings out her sketchbooks and we look through them. They still haven’t changed much. Each one is a riot of textures, colours and Paris-type trimmings and looks just as undoable as ever.

Maybe she was just lucky with her Jewels collection – that it worked so well for a high-street store. Maybe she can’t really do ‘commercial’ and she should just stick to her normal dresses for party girls who can afford the amazing prices. Maybe I should just stick to helping her with those.

I asked Crow about changing her style to suit what they said at Miss Teen, and her shrug was almost painful to watch.

‘This is what was in my head,’ she said at last. ‘I
can’t
change it. I’d ask Yvette what to do, but . . .’

Yvette is now resting in peace in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and we miss her SO much. We both started getting a bit tearful at this point and changed the subject.

‘When do you need everything to be ready by?’ I ask Amanda.

‘I’m afraid the original deadline’s gone. We’re too late for a winter launch. We could potentially do a summer one next year. But that means
completely
new designs. And we can’t really finalise anything until we’ve sorted things out with Edie. Since that blogging award, a few people have actually returned the pieces they bought in December, saying they can’t wear them because they’re
not ethical enough. We just can’t risk that happening again.’

Great! I think, despite myself. Good on them.

‘Oh dear,’ I say out loud. ‘What are you going to do?’

Amanda grins. ‘Nothing! It’s what
you’re
going to do.’

She leans back and waits for us to ask her what she means, which we do.

‘You’re going to see the truth for yourselves. You said it, Nonie. Edie won’t believe it until she sees it with her own eyes. We’re going to send you to India.’

WHAT?

Is there a shop on Oxford Street called India? Or does she mean the country?

Crow and I both look very confused.

‘Mumbai!’ Amanda says. ‘Dad’s arranging for you all to go. You can stay for a few days, look round the factory, see for yourselves and do some sightseeing too. Crow’s very first collection was inspired by the colours of India, wasn’t it? It’ll be good to see them close up.’

‘What about school?’ I ask. I hate to do this. It’s awful reminding people you’re only a teenager. But it will be worse to have to say we haven’t got permission to go. And then it
really
hits me. I go cold and my tummy shrivels. ‘We’ve got GCSEs next term.’

‘We’ve thought of that. You’ll go in the Easter holidays,’ she explains. ‘We’ll talk to your parents about exams. Maybe we can get you some extra tuition. And in the meantime, good news! We have a very special client
who wants a dress. A special dress for a major occasion and she wants Crow to make it. Dad’s thrilled. This girl is pure publicity.
Good
publicity.’

AHA!
This
is the reason she’s sucking up to us so much. I
knew
there had to be one. Then everything clicks together. I don’t even bother to ask who it is. I know before she says it.

‘It’s Sigrid Santorini again. She’s
such
a star. Lucky you!’

I
t’s February. This time last year, I was putting the finishing touches to Crow’s Fashion Week catwalk show. I was surrounded by notes about models, hair, makeup, music, and requests to be in the front row.

This year, the invitations to other people’s shows are jammed into the frame of my dressing table mirror – so many I can hardly see myself (which is good, given the total wonkiness of my hair right now). But the only notes I have lying about are revision notes for GCSE mock exams. I have a feeling it’s not going to be as much fun this time.

We’re planning to go to lots of shows, but going to one and organising one are two different things. I thought I would miss it a bit, but I don’t. I miss it MASSIVELY. I miss it so much it physically hurts. I miss the near panic, the frantic phone calls, the certainty that nothing will be ready, the genius ideas for eyeshadow and shoes, the constant arrival of packages with props, the joy of seeing
Crow’s incredible designs coming together into a story that will make people gasp with pleasure. The total, happy exhaustion when it’s over. The feeling of being a working part of the fashion world, instead of on the sidelines, just looking at it.

Hopefully we’ll get another go, but if we don’t sort things out with Andy in the next few weeks, we can say goodbye to the kind of budget you need to put on a show. I feel shaky at the niggling thought in the back of my mind that it may never happen again. It’s amazing how quickly you can get addicted to something if you’re not careful.

It would be nice if somebody asked me how I was coping with being a spectator this year, but nobody does. Everybody seems to have something else on their mind right now.

Edie is busy making lists of shops we’re not supposed to visit because of their doubtful ethical practices, and checking all the health advice about visiting India. She has ALREADY DONE most of the revision for GCSEs, even though they’re months away, so she’s not particularly worried about the exam part, just excited to travel. Weird. I think I know Edie so well and she surprises me every other day.

Jenny is busy calling or texting me every five minutes to say her play is changing out of recognition and she can’t bear to talk about it. Sigrid is SO the Queen of Evil.

Alexander is busy trying to find out whether my ankle
is better so we can go out on another date. I’ve told him it’s healing slowly.

Mum is busy stressing about my exams, but Dad has managed to persuade her that I really can’t miss the India trip. He’s suggested it’ll help with my geography, which is quite funny. My geography is beyond help, but it was nice of him to try. Mum’s also stressed about Harry, who’s supposed to be planning for his degree show in June, but is ‘moping about the house like a wet dishcloth’ or playing soulful Russian folk songs very loudly in his room.

You’d have thought Crow, at least, would be missing Fashion Week as much as me, but if she is, she doesn’t show it. Instead she’s suddenly busy designing the most complicated, expensive dress she’s ever produced.

Sigrid has been invited to a party in honour of the film industry at the Elysée Palace in Paris next month. The French President himself will be hosting it. And his wife, the ex-model, will be there. And enough paparazzi to fill the Eurostar.
That
’s the major occasion she needs the dress for.

It’s in a different league from the Italian awards thing. Pictures of the guests arriving at the Elysée Palace will be on the TV news and in every paper and newsy fashion magazine, and half the fashion blogs on the internet. Fashion designers will be falling over themselves to dress the stars. John Galliano is probably doing a dress for someone. And Alberta Ferretti. And Alber Elbaz for
Lanvin, and the Valentino people (Valentino himself has retired to his yacht, as you do), and all my heroes. And Sigrid will be one of the prettiest, and one of the most photographed, people there.

For once, Crow can let her imagination run away with her. There is no such thing as ‘undoable’, or even ‘unaffordable’. If Crow wants twenty metres of hand-dyed ultramarine silk so she can do some clever pleating, that’s fine. If she needs amethysts and turquoises to sparkle on the bodice, that’s great. If she has to hire a top professional French embroideress to complete the details on the waist and the train, fantastic.

The Sigrid dress can finally use her ideas from Paris and bring them to life. With Andy Elat’s official approval it will have jewels. It will have sequins. It will have silver thread. The embroidery will be so complicated that it can only be done by one woman, who lives outside Toulouse and uses techniques handed down from the sixteenth century. It will cost so much to produce that Crow’s whole village in Uganda could live on the money for a year. But hopefully the publicity will be worth a fortune and Andy Elat will be a happy man again.

One way of taking my mind off the shows is to go downstairs to the workroom and help. If I wear a padded bra and stand on a step, I’m about the same height and shape as Sigrid, and Crow can use me as a model to imagine her new creation.

My version is less exotic. I’m wearing the
toile
, which is made out of thin cream cotton and will make the pattern. Zero jewels. Zip embroidery. At the moment, I actually look as if I’m off to a toga party. But I get the idea of how it will be when it’s finished and it will look as though Sigrid has risen from the sea like some sort of sparkling underwater goddess, picking up loads of precious stones on the way.

It will be incredible and will make the Swan dress she wore last year seem like a kindergarten smock.

I love to think of myself as a ‘house model’. Normally that means ‘design house’, not ‘your own house’, of course. It sounds so romantic. I pretend the step and padded bra aren’t required and Coco Chanel is fitting stuff onto me. Or at least I did until I discovered that Coco Chanel could be pretty mean on a bad day. Now we pretend it’s Dior himself. Crow isn’t the most perfect reincarnation of a middle-aged French bloke, but when she says, ‘And now, mam’selle, please ’old still for ze mastair,’ it makes me giggle so hard I end up with pin-pricks all over.

After the fitting, I do a mental calculation of the cost of the silk, plus the jewels, plus the embroideress, plus Crow’s time to do it. It’s an extremely large number. Needless to say, Sigrid isn’t paying for this. We are. Or rather, Andy Elat is. Sigrid will borrow it and then, if we’re lucky, we may one day sell it to a rich client. A VERY rich client. Or a museum.

*  *  *

‘You’re not worried, are you?’ I ask. ‘About working with such expensive stuff?’

Crow looks at me as if I’m completely bonkers. I don’t know why I bothered to mention it.

‘Nothing else will give the effect,’ she says, wide-eyed.

Nothing except the most expensive silk in the world and a bucketful of gemstones.

‘What if you spill something on it?’ I don’t mean to be negative, but I can’t help thinking of my polar bear jacket, which is pretty much ruined.

Crow gives me another look. ‘I don’t spill stuff.’

This is true. I am the stuff-spiller in this household.

‘Probably best if I don’t pop by too often while you’re working on the proper dress, then,’ I say, assuming she’ll laugh and tell me not to be silly.

She doesn’t.

S
oon, Jenny gets pictured in two magazines slurping a smoothie on her way to rehearsals, alongside unfavourable comments about her jeans and unwashed hair and parka jacket.

‘Where is the glamour-puss we knew last year?’ they wonder sadly. As if she’s supposed to go to a studio in south London dressed in Louboutins and a Burberry mac.

Somehow Sigrid manages to dress down for the same rehearsals and get universal sighs of appreciation. Her hair is always shiny. She’s in jeans, but they’re skinny, frayed and totally on-trend. She’s in a biker jacket, but it’s soft leather (not mink this time) and every fashionista wants one. She’s in a tee-shirt, but it’s a vintage one as worn by two of her friends in Hollywood and everyone loves it. She’s not wearing makeup, but the fashion press find this ‘authentic’ and ‘a sign of her dedication to taking acting back to basics’.