Today’s event, the Council for Fashion Awareness Awards sponsored by British Petroleum, had been jammed smack in the middle of New York Fashion Week, and Lincoln Center was overflowing with skeletal women swaddled in precious yardage, tiny human bouquets of cigarette smoke and hair extensions. Companion hordes of plain-Jane handlers screamed into cellphones and headsets, hustling their charges from logo to logo for the audiences watching and clicking around the world. As Bess posed, a childlike brunette publicist waved her arms at Jim to send Cat up.
He helped her out of the SUV onto the carpet, propping her up with his wiry biceps as she tugged her dress into place. The photographers were still focused on Bess, who helpfully changed poses and looked over her shoulder, giving Cat ten whole seconds before anyone noticed her. She took advantage of the stolen moment to breathe (a ragged little hiccup as the cage of her dress resisted any true expansion of the diaphragm) and scan the plaza for a friendly face.
Nothing. Everyone was familiar, but these days, no one was her friend.
A boy in a porkpie hat with a camera bigger than his head and brand-new seafoam Prada loafers turned around and screamed her name, galloping toward her on his slender little legs. The other photographers followed suit. Cat moved her lips into a grin automatically and began taking mincing, robotic steps toward the first step-and-repeat board, focusing her eyes on the fish-in-a-gown logo as the swarm descended around her. They all called her by name, asking asinine questions about what she was wearing, what she was doing later, where she had come from. She didn’t respond: just stared at the fish drawing and smiled vacantly, holding her cheeks up and swiveling into a position modeled by the childlike publicist.
The cameramen from TMI were the pushiest: asking who her boyfriend was, if she had an eating disorder like her friend Hillary. They all knew Hillary now. RAGE’s September issue had come out four weeks ago, on August 20, with a close-up of Hillary’s spectacular face on the cover. Her green eyes and white lashes were rendered in high-resolution gloss on every newsstand on the globe. BEAUTY KILLS read the cover in navy all-caps. In the year-old picture—a test shot from one of Reuben Avador’s winter shoots—Hillary’s skin glowed like a Swedish teenager’s, her visage placed in the center of a lightly feathered vignette. Set just beneath her poreless and freckled jawline: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HEIRESS HILLARY WHITNEY.
After forty-eight hours it was their best-selling issue of all time. Maddie’s feature, fact-checked within a single pixel, had slaughtered sixteen different beauty companies, five members of Congress, four retail chains, and the head of the Federal Drug Administration. Margot ran it all with an editor’s letter read around the world:
Dear Readers:
We must never step away from the critical lens, even when it is turned back upon our own faces. There is nothing to fear from transparency. Only lessons to be learned.
Magazines like RAGE are the collective conscious. Surely after this issue Cooper will lose some of the advertisers implicated in Maddie Plattstein’s astonishing work of journalism, which, plainly, means losing money. This means you may have to pay more on the newsstand—but isn’t a dollar or two more worth reading genuine editorial content from a truly independent apparatus, instead of the discounted opinions our competitors offer, constructed behind-the-scenes by the advertisers whose products are choked down your throats? Or, like some of our competitors, delivering no editorials at all? Well, I hope this issue will prove that it is, indeed, worth it.
Fashion and beauty are not meaningless. They are not frivolous. They are not silly. They are multitrillion-dollar industries that employ close to half a billion people around the globe directly and indirectly. RAGE is not just a consumer magazine—we are the most widely read trade publication in the world. We consider that a responsibility to the women in Bangladesh who cannot read this page, but instead earned just thirty cents today making your cheap T-shirt; who will be poisoned by making your face cream in unregulated, unsupervised laboratories and still be unable to feed their families; whose lives are literally dictated by your purchasing power.
So let us look inward and to the future without fear. Be careful how you spend your money, lest it be your own death.
Margot Villiers, editor in chief and founder of RAGE Fashion Book
The issue’s articles—all headlined under MATRIARCH, the new name for the entire features section—were paired with 47 pages of photography and 283 total issue pages of advertising, a Cooper record. Cat’s collection of Hillary history ran throughout Maddie’s piece, a career-making work of journalism that wove the threads of Hillary’s life and her friendships with Bess, Cat, and even Sigrid alongside a razor-sharp exposé of the wholly unregulated beauty industry. In addition to reporting on Bedford Organics, Maddie had also dug up whistle-blower testimony from inside three major international beauty companies, exposing their own attempts to experiment with minor fractions of illegal drugs and mood-enhancing supplements in products like body lotion and skin oil, all of it marketed as “natural” and “organic.” An internal memo from Esme Bowder, which owned no less than fifteen global beauty brands, asked the question “we don’t have to disclose this, right?” over email to a member of the United States Congress, who replied “not really. that’s what trademarks are for ;)” in reference to a weight-loss cream costing $250 per ounce.
RAGE’s subsequent tests of the trademark in question, expedited by the DEA, found that HypnoEnerSerum? was loaded with enough stimulants to potentially stop the heart of a child or an extremely thin woman. Hillary’s designer death, Maddie Plattstein argued, might have been custom-made in Brooklyn—but just like reclaimed wood walls and screenprints of water towers, it had been merely the precursor to what could be a national epidemic.