“Bloody Clammy,” said Meredith, but not uncheerfully. “You’re after Hounds, aren’t you?”
“Not so much the product as its maker,” Hollis said, watching Meredith’s expression.
“You wouldn’t be the first.” Meredith smiled. “But there isn’t much I can tell you.”
“Would you like a coffee?” Offering Meredith her own cup. “I haven’t touched it.”
“No, thank you.”
“Hollis has been extremely helpful,” George said, “about Inchmale.”
“Horrid man,” said Meredith, to Hollis.
“He is that,” Hollis agreed. “Prides himself.”
“I’m less anxious, now,” said George, though Hollis found it difficult to imagine him anxious at all. “Hollis understands Reg’s process from experience. She puts things into perspective.”
Meredith took Hollis’s cup now, and sipped gingerly from the slot in the plastic lid. Wrinkled her nose. “Black,” she said.
“Sugar if you want it.”
“You’re really leaning on me now, aren’t you,” Meredith said to George.
“I am,” said George. “And I’ve waited until you’re in a very good mood.
“If that little shit hadn’t met my price,” Meredith said, “I wouldn’t be.”
“True,” said George, “but he did.”
“I think he wears them himself,” said Meredith. “Not that I think he’s gay. That would make it okay, actually. He insisted on all the documentation, everything we’d collected on their original owner. Something about that’s left me wanting a shower.” She took another sip of hot black coffee and handed the cup back to Hollis. “You want to know who designs the Gabriel Hounds.”
“I do,” said Hollis.
“Nice jacket.”
“A gift,” Hollis said, which was at least technically true.
“You’d have a hard time finding one now. They haven’t done them for a few seasons. Not that they have seasons in the ordinary sense.”
“No?” Studiously avoiding the matter of who “they” were.
“When they remake the jackets, if they ever do, they’ll be exactly the same, cut from exactly the same pattern. The fabric might be different, but only an otaku could tell.” She began to collect the slender security cables that had secured the Chanel suits to their dress forms, until she held them in one hand like a strange bouquet, or a steel flail.
“I don’t think I understand,” Hollis said.
“It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.”
Reminding Hollis of something Milgrim might have said, but she’d forgotten exactly what. She looked around, wondering if he was still in sight. He wasn’t.
“Lose something?”
“I’m here with someone. But never mind. Please.”
“I’m not sure I should help you with this. Probably I shouldn’t. And actually, I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“Because I’m no longer in the loop. Because they’ve gotten that much harder to find, since I took Clammy to buy his jeans in Melbourne.”
“But you could tell me what you do know.” Hollis saw that George had busied himself collapsing the chrome stands of the dress forms, closing up shop.
“Were you ever a model?”
“No,” said Hollis.
“I was,” said Meredith, “for two years. I had a booker who loved using me. That’s the key, really, your booker. New York, L.A., all over western Europe, home to Australia for more work, back to New York, back here. Intensely nomadic. George says more so than being in a band. You can cope, when you’re seventeen, even when you’ve no money. Almost literally no money. I lived here, one winter, in a monthly-rent hotel room with three other girls. Hot plate, tiny fridge. Eighty euros a week ‘pocket money.’ That was what they called it. That was to live on. I couldn’t afford an Orange Card for the Metro. I walked everywhere. I was in Vogue, but I couldn’t afford to buy a copy. Fees were almost entirely eaten up before the checks found me, and the checks were always late. That’s the way it works, if you’re just another foot soldier, which is what I was. I slept on couches in New York, the floor of an apartment with no electricity in Milan. It became apparent to me that the industry was grossly, baroquely dysfunctional.”
“Modeling?”
“Fashion. The people I met who I most got on with, aside from some of the other girls, were stylists, people who finessed little bits of trim for the shoots, adjusted things, sourced antiques, props. Some of them had been to very good art schools, and it had put them off, profoundly. They didn’t want to be what they’d been groomed to be, and really it’s the nature of that system that not that many people can, ever. But they came out with brilliant skill sets for being stylists. And art school had made them masters of a kind of systems analysis. Extremely good at figuring out how an industry really runs, what the real products are. Which they did constantly, without really being that aware of doing it. And I listened to them. And all of them were pickers.”
Hollis nodded, remembering Pamela explaining the term.
“Constantly finding things. Value in rubbish. That ability to distinguish one thing from another. The eye for detail. And knowing where to sell it on, of course. I began to acquire that, watching, listening. Loved that, really. Meanwhile, I wore out runners, walking.”
“Here?”
“All over. Lot of Milan. Listening to stylists absently lecture on the fundamental dysfunction of the fashion industry. What my friends and I were going through as models was just a reflection of something bigger, broader. Everyone was waiting for their check. The whole industry wobbles along, really, like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over. Season to season, show to show, you keep it moving.”
Which reminded Hollis of a Curfew tour, though she didn’t say so. She took a sip of the unsweetened Americain, which was cooling, and listened.
“My grandmother died, I’m the only grandchild, she left a bit of money. My booker was leaving the agency, getting out of the business. I applied to Cordwainers College, London College of Fashion, accessories and footwear. Done with modeling. It was the runners.”
“Sneakers?”
“The ones I wore out walking. The ugliest ones were best for walking, the best-looking fell apart. The stylists would talk about them, because I’d show up in them, at shoots. Talk about how the business worked. The factories in China, Vietnam. The big companies. And I’d started to imagine ones that weren’t ugly at all, that didn’t fall apart. But somehow,” and she smiled ruefully, “untainted by fashion. I’d started doing drawings. Very bad ones. But I’d already decided that I really wanted to understand shoes, their history, how they work, before I tried to do anything. Not that conscious a decision, but a decision. So I applied to Cordwainers, was accepted, moved to London. Or rather, simply stopped moving. In London. I may just have been enamored of the idea of waking up in the same town every day, but I had my mission, the mystery runners that I couldn’t quite imagine.”
“And you made them, in the end?”
“Two seasons. We couldn’t get away from that structure. But that was only after I’d graduated. I could still make you quite a smashing pair of shoes, with my own hands, though the finishing would never get past my tutor there. But they did teach us everything. Exhaustively.”
“Sneakers?”
“Not the sole-molding or the vulcanization, but I could still cut and sew your uppers. We used a lot of elk for our line. Very thick, supple. Lovely.” She looked down at the security cables in her hand. “My second year, there, I met someone, a boy, Danny. American. From Chicago. Not at Cordwainers but he knew all my friends there. Skater. Well, not that he skated much. An entrepreneur, that way, but nothing too repulsive. Made films for some of the American companies. We lived together. Hackney. He had Hounds,” Meredith said, looking up from the cables, “before there were Hounds.”