Hillary Edith Whitney, a longtime and beloved member of the Cooper House family and fashion director at RAGE, passed away tragically on May 15 of this year from a heart attack brought on by a long-term eating disorder. Ms. Whitney’s trademark work revealed women and their homes together in spectral visions that stayed with you long after the page had been turned. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including the ASME section award for her monthly feature on totems and curios (NikNak) for three years running, and she received multiple commemorations from the Junior League for her work with the Dress for Success program. On behalf of Cooper House, we send our love and condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues in the industry, and we offer the following pages in a memorial to her wit, kindness, grace, and impeccable style—a life well lived, and well loved, despite the devastating illness that killed her. She is the first entry in our new monthly section, MATRIARCH: women who rule the world, and we hope her memory will inspire the millions of RAGE women reading these pages.
Sincerely,
Margot Villiers and the staff of RAGE Fashion Book
Cat opened another folder comprising dozens of numbered photos of Hillary from Fashion Week events, celebratory weekends, photo shoots, her Photogram account, and, eventually, though she felt a little morbid about it, Cat’s own personal files. She couldn’t figure out what to choose. Caption as much as you can, she told herself, though hesitation tugged at the corners of her mind. You’re being too emotional, she finally decided, shoving her feelings into a cupboard under her stomach before starting at the top.
1996: Hillary pulling her first racing scull from the boathouse at the Sawyer School for Girls in Farmington, Connecticut. Go Fighting Sunflowers!
1998: Hillary Whitney, Catherine Ono, Bess Bonner, Sigrid Gunderson, Nora Bunting-Davis, and Olivia Dolman Fox shucking oysters on the beach at Menemsha, Massachusetts.
1999: Y2K! Hillary rings in the millennium from a balcony on Central Park West in a black Halston kimono.
2001: Hillary graduates from Parsons. Shown here with her longtime friend Oliver Delong.
2002: Hillary modeling a pair of bumsters, the original Alexander McQueen low-rises, at an Oscars party in Los Angeles.
Cat worked her way through another two dozen before she got to the past year. Hillary looked nearly the same as she had fifteen years earlier: still elegant, bone-thin and white-blonde, although her style had been updated from obviously gothic to pointedly ladylike, a look that Hillary herself referred to as “sophisticated villain.” The photos showed a pale woman with dramatic freckles, no makeup, and huge green eyes. Really huge green eyes.
Cat found a close-up, a high-res shot taken front row at Fashion Week in 2014, and dragged it to compare with a Photogram from May. Hillary wasn’t wearing eyeliner in either photo—eye makeup always looked a little bit crude on her white lashes and brows—which made the comparison simple. By placing the images side by side and zooming in, Cat could see that Hillary’s eyes had nearly doubled in size in the later photograph, the pupils and irises enlarged to cartoonish proportions. The irises might be contacts, but the pupils were all Hillary’s. It looked like she was on mushrooms. What the hell?
Cat googled “enlarge eye” and found only spambot articles from aggregators covering makeup tricks and tutorials on inexpensive colored contacts. She didn’t bother to click on any of the links, but typed bedford organics into the browser and found the shop they’d exchanged Photogram messages with the night before. Cat punched their number into her Cooper landline.
“Bedford Organics.”
“Hi, this is Catherine Ono. I’m a senior editor at RAGE. Is the owner available?”
“Ohmigod. We loooove RAGE. Unfortunately Vittoria’s not here right now, but can I give you her cell?”
“I’d prefer to stop by the store. Could she be there in an hour, do you think?”
“I’ll make sure she’s here. Do you know how to find us?”
“At 400 South Bedford?”
“Yes! Ring the third floor any time after four and we’ll buzz you up.”
Cat thanked her and hung up. A Williamsburg-based beauty company without a street-level storefront? Real estate was obviously expensive everywhere in the city, but a semiprivate upper floor was more suited to Madison Avenue. Aping the luxury business models of Manhattan might seem like a fine idea, but Cat was surprised that a start-up beauty business could survive without traditional retail traffic. They must wholesale, she thought. Maybe that explains why I’ve never heard of them.
She grabbed a pen and made a to-do list on a plain white index card for the following morning:
WEDNESDAY
finish HW memorial
Delvaux promo lunch at Per Se
beet dyes in home upholstery—750 words (work with Lou)
follow up with Delvaux rep and ask to see factory
As soon as Cat set down her pen, a leathery, manicured claw reached through the crack in her office door and yanked it open. Lou stood in the doorway, wearing a gauzy tank dress made from multiple thin slips of cream silk. The tanks billowed in the slight breeze of the office air-conditioning, whipping softly around her Pilates-carved calves. Her veiny arms were coated in henna tattoos; fine gold bracelets cut into her biceps. An enormous crystal dangled on a brass chain from the spindle of her neck, and a streak of earthy red pigment had been painted across her left cheekbone.
“Kit-Ohhhhhhh!” Lou cried. “I have a new inspiration, and I think you’re going to like it.”
“Desert priestess,” Cat threw out in reply, feeling kindly toward this motivated new Lou.
“Close. Pre-Columbian jungle priestess, but with a twist: she’s the victim of a rift in space-time, wandering Fashion Week, discovering technology, using it for her own anachronistic witchcraft.”
“Vaporwave Gaia,” Cat tried.
“Yes? Maybe? Actually, no, I don’t think I know what that is. What’s vaporwave?”
“It’s this thing that kids do where they put the Windows 95 logo over some computer-generated clouds and dance to remixes of Céline Dion.”
“No. Not that.”
“Hmm. Uh…cyberpunk Gaia?”
“Better. Are we both talking about the same kind of cyberpunk?”
“Cayce Pollard,” Cat and Lou said in unison.
“I just think,” Lou opined, waving her hands around wildly, “that we could take all these earthy resort clothes, and style a kind of priestess figure out of it, a sort of first-century jungle witch—”
“Because all the resort clothes for next season are just so natural, and logoless, and earthy, and how many fucking shoots can we do in Sedona? Totally. Let’s get Bess and Molly to pull everything together. I’m busy tomorrow, but how about Thursday or Friday?”