Chapter 1 #2
The kind of women who wore Eugenia’s dresses and didn’t shrink at her prices had fled to their country homes when the first alarms sounded, and most of them were still there.
New York had been a ghost town for more than a year.
It was finally reviving slowly, but a third or more of the shops were boarded up.
Stores that had existed for decades had gone out of business.
In good weather, people were eating in jeans at casual restaurants with outdoor terraces.
In bad weather, they stayed home. Most of Eugenia’s clients were hidden away in Connecticut, Long Island, or the more elite areas of New Jersey with stables of horses on their estates.
In Paris they were in their chateaux that dotted the countryside in Normandy and other regions.
In England, they were in their country manors and on grand estates, and even those who gave hidden, forbidden parties in the privacy of their homes weren’t doing it in black tie and ball gowns.
There were no debutante balls and cotillions, nor fairy-tale weddings.
Fashion Week had been canceled season after season for two years, fashion shows were virtual, and plans for the coming seasons were still tenuous.
Large gatherings were strictly forbidden.
Eugenia had kept her shops open in New York and Paris, with one or two employees, but she had no customers, and her overhead was crushing.
She was hanging on by her fingernails, and didn’t want to lose everything she had built.
Supporting and educating five children, plus her own expensive husband and the divorce, had all been costly.
She spent a fortune on rent, payroll, and exquisite fabrics, and the fashion shows she put on four times a year had all weighed heavily against her greatly reduced profits.
It all worked as long as the money kept rolling in.
And now it had stopped. The pandemic was strangling her business and she was hemorrhaging money.
Her business was gasping for air and she was determined to hang on.
Fashion Week in New York was going to happen in a month, in September right after Labor Day, and in a daring move, fighting for survival, Eugenia was going to try something different.
She had gone through all the fabrics she had in stock, trying to use what she already had, and was making a small selection of exquisite satin and lace and silk tops that her customers could wear with leggings or jeans.
She was designing cozy wraps and double-faced cashmere jackets with the exquisite trimmings she had been saving for years to put on evening gowns with matching coats.
She was trying desperately to raise her clients’ spirits, and give them glamorous, fun things to wear that would make life seem less dreary and keep her in business.
She couldn’t charge her usual high prices for what she was going to show this time, but everything helped.
She had ordered commercial down jackets, which was all anyone wore now, and added fabulous patterned silks as the linings and exquisite French “frogs” as the closures.
As an experiment, she had been personally hand-sewing jeans she bought commercially, decorating them with rhinestones, synthetic pearls, and colored beads in exotic patterns and using braid, gold tassels, and trim to dress up the jeans and make each pair a unique creation.
She was selling them for five thousand dollars apiece, ten in some cases, and her clients were eating them up.
She had bought bolts of denim from merchants who still had it in stock, and sewed it herself into suits and pants with tops.
She had let all her sewers go, and they were at home on unemployment.
In the meantime, she was selling what she had.
And now she was creating a most unusual line for Fashion Week this season, with white jeans encrusted with pearls and rhinestones for the spring/summer.
It was a valiant effort to keep her business alive, after it had been on life support for months.
She was using as much as she had in her stock and storerooms, to minimize her purchases.
She was trying to be as careful and creative as she could.
Eugenia herself was wearing nothing any different from her clients.
She was living in jeans and sweatshirts.
She had noticed that during the worst of it, she felt better when she wore color, and she was making sweatshirts in vibrant tones that made her happy just looking at them.
Hopefully they would make her clients happy too.
It was a long way from her training in traditional design and haute couture, and what she usually created, but these were special times that required desperate measures.
In the scheme of real life, fashion had shrunk to invisible proportions for everyone, and yet wearing clothes that made one feel ugly on top of it was even more depressing.
There was a happy medium somewhere that would meet the current need and she was determined to find it.
She wasn’t going to gouge people when she priced the new daywear line, except for the handmade one-of-a-kind items, which were of the highest quality and virtually priceless, made by the designer herself.
There was a lot of hand-stitching involved in what she was doing now, and that was worth something.
But she wanted her designs and creations to be mood elevating, to make people feel hopeful and happy when they wore them. Each piece was unique.
They looked expensive. Some were, but most weren’t.
She wanted them to be fun to wear. It was an odd time for everyone.
She had no idea how the collection would be received.
The critics might blast her off the runway.
But she had to do something. She was born to create.
She even covered one sweatshirt with tiny feathers.
It was a work of art as much as a piece of clothing, which was how she felt about fashion.
To Eugenia, fashion was an art form, like music or dance or painting.
And people’s bodies were the canvases she worked on.
She was almost ready for the runway show after Labor Day, and she was taking some time off in August to spend with her children.
Her five adult children were her greatest source of joy and the center of her private universe.
She was one of those women who had thought she could have it all, a husband, a family, children, and a rewarding career, which in her case had supported them all for three decades.
Three of her children were self-supporting now, her oldest child and only son, Stefano, her middle child, Daphne, and her youngest, Sofia, an independent spirit who danced to her own tune and thought fashion was defined by army surplus.
Her other two daughters, Eloise and Gloria, couldn’t live on what they made and needed assistance, so she helped them with additional support.
They were underpaid in their jobs. She was the safety net under all of them in one way or another.
They ranged in age from twenty-six to thirty-one.
They were her masterpieces, and she couldn’t let them down by going bankrupt.
They counted on her, and she tried to provide them with a role model, proving that hard work was its own greatest reward.
She felt she had failed them during the pandemic, by nearly running aground.
The tidal waves of the coronavirus had all but swept away the success she had built and enjoyed, and the life she had created for her family and herself through her business.
She was hanging on, but when she studied her accounts, as she did regularly with overwhelming anxiety, she was desperate to find a way to shore up her failing business until normal life returned.
She was running out of money. And she was determined not to lose her business.
Lately, she’d been considering looking for investors again, as she had in the beginning to get started, to tide her over this time and keep her from drowning.
She had had four solid, faithful investors when she established her brand, and she hadn’t let them down.
What she had sold then made sense at the time, but how could she convince anyone now of the importance and validity of expensive evening gowns, when there was no opportunity to wear them, and might not be for many years, if the scientists didn’t get a grip on the pandemic situation.
Things had improved considerably, but there was still danger lurking that no one could deny, and the pandemic was not yet over.
She had to hang on until it was. She felt certain it would end, as the Spanish flu had eventually slunk off into the mists.
But after what they’d all been through, would women still want evening gowns? Would anyone care?
Of her four original investors, two had died, one had moved back to China and retired, and the fourth had suffered severe reversals of their own. None of them were still an option.
There had been blessings in the pandemic too.