Later that night, on the phone to her parents in Los Angeles, Molly would casually refer to the magazine as simply “Book,” thinking she sounded sophisticated. After she hung up, Molly’s father would say, “I think she gets dumber every year.”
When Lou returned from the Coca-Cola machine with a cold press and a single glass filled with ice, Molly followed her into her nearly bare office, formerly occupied by Hillary. Molly sat down in the sky-blue Le Corbusier swivel chair in front of Lou’s desk, Moleskine and purple jelly pen in hand, ready to take notes, while Lou sat behind the desk on a shiny exercise ball she’d swapped in for the existing Aeron chair. She expertly popped the cap off the bottle of cold press using a monogrammed gold Dunhill lighter and poured the coffee into a glass and slid it across to the intern.
“Mummy’s little helper,” she woofed at Molly, who smiled nervously.
Molly didn’t think you were supposed to drink cold press straight, but she didn’t want to be rude, so she took a sip. Jesus, that’s bitter. She looked up to see Lou gaily swigging from the bottle as though it were water.
Lou stared at the laptop left open on the desk in front of her, displaying a completely blank spreadsheet in CoopDoc, Cooper’s in-house, cloud-based version of Excel.
“So,” said Lou.
“Yes,” said Molly.
“How many.”
“How many…what?” asked Molly.
“How many bloody blue bits do we need for NEEDS September?”
“I think twelve. But it can be fewer than that if we shoot some really big.”
“All right. Twelve. We can do that. Twelve blue things you just absolutely fucking need. Well. Okay. Yves Klein, let’s start there. Can you call Zoe at YSL? Let’s see what they’re doing with everything from the Marrakech house this year—I know they do a home line based off Majorelle for spring every year. Tell her I want six things in bleu. We can use two of those, probably. Then I want you to call this place I went to last year in Nah-miii-biii-ah. It’s this eco retreat and elephant sanctuary and this sort of wonderful yogic cleansing place that you heli into and they have these blue harnesses for their elephants, for their little baby elephants, and they make the dye out of some kind of Namibian flower, so let’s get a few of those. You could repurpose it for a large dog or child, or maybe you could wear it like a vest. And, hmm, more blue, maybe we should go to some showrooms. Oh—AND I’ve been thinking about tiling the upstairs bath blue so we’ll need some blue porcelain tiles anyway, maybe a blue toilet to match. Let’s find an Italian one. Is it too kitsch to have a cerulean potty? What do you think?”
Molly was still scribbling furiously, trying to write down the correct keywords for further googling. What time is it in Namibia, anyway?
In her own office next door, Cat stared at the wall of windows behind her desk, which she’d painted over last year with an enormous white rectangle that blocked the view of New Jersey. The rectangle—known as Plus-Minus Sign, or PMS—was how Cat documented the Roman winds of her aesthetic favor upon the world’s objects. The left column had a large black plus sign painted at the top; the right column, a minus sign. Cat added or subtracted a new item from each column every week using a black erasable marker. Today the PMS read:
+ —
sailing instead of driving “luxury”
human ivory woodworking
dread the 1920s
eating raw meat self-help
butt-tight overalls new safari anything
painted cinderblock walls strappy shoes
charm bracelets shorts
Although Lou’s outfit invoked at least two of Cat’s current minuses, she reconsidered Lou’s shorts. They were basically a large pair of underwear, which Cat approved of wholeheartedly. You had to be really courageous, really narcissistic, or the usual industry combination of both to wear underwear as pants to work. Perhaps, Cat considered, I can genuinely work with Lou after all.
Cat didn’t like any outfit, accessory, aesthetic, or genre that reduced women to what she considered to be traditional female prisons: the happy homemaker, the sexy librarian, the bitch in a power suit, the carefree athlete, the sophisticated socialite, the bad girl, and so on. These tropes were not only done to death, but they weren’t, she felt, modern; they didn’t account for the global diaspora of cultures and pressures that affected how women chose to present themselves each day. All those old hats did was show a woman how to occupy a place she’d already been hundreds of times before.
A woman draws attention everywhere she goes with everything she does—whether she wants to or not, Cat knew. The management of that attention was the full-time focus of the fashion industry, and she was heavily invested in the conversation. Every look she created and every reference she styled was seen, appreciated, and digested by millions of women around the world. Magazines were where women watched themselves being watched; where they learned how to be. Cat was passionate about delivering a complex version of female identity politics to everyone—or to anyone, she acknowledged, who had the fourteen bucks to buy a copy of RAGE.
When Cat had dropped out of her doctoral program in art history at the University of Chicago, her parents had been deeply disappointed. Hell, I was disappointed, too, she remembered, but the best position she could have gotten as an academic was as a mere adjunct: the job market was simply too crowded. By the time she’d started writing the second chapter of her thesis, two whole cohorts ahead of her were still unemployed, milling around campus with tragic, unwanted-puppy looks on their faces. They would never get full-time jobs—not when they were already marked with the scent of failure. Cat was no better and deep down she knew it, so when she ran out of funding after five years, her thesis far from complete, she decided to throw in the towel. The stars hadn’t aligned, and she gave up, surrendered without protest, for the very first time in her life, feeling like a complete and total failure, an outlook that she didn’t reverse until years later. Academia was the first career she’d ever tried and the first thing she’d ever quit. Three months after her funding appeal had been rejected, with her credit card maxed out and her checking account in overdraft, she’d prayed for a miracle and texted Sigrid, a close friend from boarding school, to lament her condition.