Chapter 23
Lauren at home:
Grey jogging bottoms
White sports socks
Huge black and white T-shirt
Neon pink hoop earrings
‘I need to call Lauren,’ she told Paula, who immediately scowled.
‘Will you at least help me finish packing up here before you get involved in your next family drama,’ Paula insisted.
Reluctantly, Annie put her phone down. Of course she should help Paula and they should pack up for the night before she got back to Lauren and listened to whatever mini-drama she had no doubt blown up into monumental proportions in her mind.
Paula was holding up her own phone and taking some pictures.
‘For the ’Gram,’ she said, ‘got to get the feed about the show buzzing.’
Annie smiled and posed beside the box of clothes they were packing up.
‘Hang on,’ she suggested, ‘let’s just drape a sleeve or two over the edge artfully, as a little teaser.
’ Paula took the photo, checked Annie was happy with it, then with some rapid-fire tapping, she’d edited and enhanced it, captioned and uploaded it to the Instagram page.
For a moment or two, Paula seemed to be staring at her screen with a strange expression on her face.
‘What’s wrong?’ Annie asked. ‘Has Svetlana posted something strange?’
‘No… errrrrm… the last post on this account has had 10,560 likes and over 2,000 shares and it was only posted twenty-five minutes ago.’
‘That sounds like a lot… I thought we only had a few hundred followers on this account.’
‘Correct,’ Paula said.
‘What’s the post of?’
Paula turned her phone around and there was a photo of the beautiful lobster dress lying spread out on the clean white duvet of Annie’s very own bed.
‘But—!’ Annie protested. ‘We don’t know if we can sell it yet!
We don’t know enough about it! What if it turns out to be a fake…
or stolen… or who knows what? Oh God! I have a horrible feeling Lauren did this and now she is having a panic.
Good grief! I’m having a panic! We’re not supposed to be saying anything about those items yet.
We have to wait and see what Florence can discover first. But now she’s gone and announced it to the whole bloody world.
Oh my God, the likes have gone up past 13,000 just while I’ve been looking. This is crazy!’
‘I need to phone her, she has to take it down,’ Annie added, scrambling for her own phone.
‘Comments are flying in,’ Paula added.
* * *
‘Lauren, it’s me. What’s going on?’ Annie asked her daughter, as she tried to keep calm. ‘You have to take down the dress post. I had no idea you were doing that. That is not cleared for sale yet. So nice and quickly now, please, take it down!’
‘What?!’ Not surprisingly, Lauren sounded very taken aback at this instruction. ‘Not cleared for sale?! But why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Well… I had no idea you were going to do this, did I?’ Annie spluttered. ‘Why would you do this? Why would you go through stuff without asking me, then post it online? What even made you think of doing this? I asked you for some ideas!’
‘Well, I looked in those bags for nice things to photograph for the show’s feed.
I wanted to create some buzz. You didn’t say that I couldn’t,’ Lauren protested.
‘I can’t take it down now,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s going to be at 20,000 likes in a minute or two.
There are nearly 1,000 comments. It’s been shared, reposted…
This is insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. ’
‘Lauren! Oh my God! What have you done?’ The full realisation that the Schiaparelli dress was out there on the internet before there had been any information from Florence was only beginning to dawn on Annie.
‘There were so many refusals coming through,’ Lauren protested. ‘So, I thought I better try and do something to get people excited again. So, I went to the bag and chose the nicest things. I didn’t know!’ she repeated.
‘It’s all gone mad,’ Annie said. ‘It’s been shared over 6,000 times now. Does that mean it’s definitely too late to take it down?’
‘So what’s the problem exactly?’ Lauren asked.
‘The problem is… well, the dress has been donated, but we don’t have enough information about it to be selling it… we don’t know if it’s genuine for a start. And Florence, who donated it, doesn’t know either. What wording did you use in your post?’
Paula was the one who read aloud: ‘Vintage treasures/Fashion Gala Charity Sale, London, Oct 1st.’
‘That sounds OK… no over-promising,’ Annie added.
Then Paula squeaked. ‘Look!! The latest comment is from the New York Museum of Costume… they want to talk to us about buying the dress, pre-sale.’
‘OMG, there’s a comment from PaigeP…’ Annie said, scrolling down the list. She could hardly believe it. A comment from PaigeP! Annie’s very own fashion guru.
‘What does she say?’ Lauren asked from the other end of the line. Annie read out: ‘“Can’t wait to come to this show and see what other astonishing treasures are for sale. This looks like the event of the season…” Oh my good bloody grief. This is unbelievable.’
After a deep breath, Annie told Lauren, ‘OK, sit still, don’t post anything else. Don’t reply to anything… I’m going to try and work out what to do next. Oh, now I’ve got Svetlana on the other line. See you soon, babes.’
Annie ended one call and accepted the next.
‘Annah! Have you seen the socials? We have arrived!’ Svetlana gushed.
There was so much enthusiasm in these words that Annie didn’t think now was the time to talk about permissions not being in place and those sort of…
ermmm… minor details. ‘I have all these messages and emails coming in,’ Svetlana was telling her, ‘asking for more information, asking for interview… did I even know about this famous dress, Annah? Did you tell me and I forget? There is so much going on, I can’t remember what you have told me about this or not. ’
Annie decided to slightly fudge it. ‘Same, my darling, same…’ she said vaguely.
‘Look, we’ve had a wonderful rehearsal here.
Let me get home and I will speak to you tomorrow about all the vintage treasures we have.
So, don’t do any interviews until we’ve spoken.
Well, of course, you can be interviewed, if you want.
But can you please keep it a bit vague until I get you all the details?
Is that OK?’ She wondered if that was going to be enough.
She knew the fashion pack, vintage Schiaparelli had been dangled before them and they probably wouldn’t stop until they got their hands on it.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ Svetlana said, ‘I think we should have some gold VIP tickets, selling for… ￡500.’
‘What! That’s a lot… people will expect a lot of attention for ￡500.’
‘Tscha… but we will give it to them, no?’
Five hundred pounds… gold tickets… Annie had the feeling, yet again, that things were getting out of her control. Just when she thought she was back at the reins, another problem or plan seemed to appear. It was exhausting.
‘Leave it to me,’ Svetlana said, ‘I will make the tickets, I will pick the guest list… some very interesting people are about to get an upgrade.’
I need to remain calm… Annie was telling herself.
I need to go home and get through the evening, then I need to go and see Florence first thing tomorrow.
She’ll be in the house… she’ll talk to me…
she’ll help me to sort all this out before the full fashion pack descends.
Even as she had these thoughts, likes and comments were still pouring in.
Schiaparelli original!!
This is incredible!!
What’s the provenance of this dress?
Can you prove it’s authentic?
Does the V&A know this dress is going up for sale?
Surely the Louvre should be informed?
She decided it might be best to close the phone for now and focus on getting home. ‘So, what exactly is going on?’ Paula had to ask as Annie put her phone in her bag and turned her attention to getting the last boxes packed up. ‘Is there a problem with selling those amazing clothes?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ was Annie’s honest answer. ‘Look, hopefully I can get this all completely sorted out tomorrow. That’s the best-case scenario. So, let’s not worry about it until we need to. Why don’t we try to get excited about all this amazing hype and attention we’re getting.’
‘If you get everything all cleared for sale, then you are a hero, Annie. If you don’t get it cleared and we have to completely backtrack… that could be a big, noisy fashion scandal, Annie. And it will be a long time before you hear the end of it.’
‘Got it, Paula… got it,’ Annie said, feeling her heart begin to race. The words ‘a big, noisy fashion scandal’ ringing in her ears. Fashion scandal… career suicide… let’s not worry about it until we need to? Had she just said that? Well that was going to be impossible.