Chapter XIII. Out of Many, One.
XIII.
OUT OF MANY, ONE.
WEDNESDAY.
When Jaya Clark and Katrine ?stergaard showed up at the Carlo di Varenna shoot, it changed the dynamic.
Perceptibly. Cecilia had seen it happen before, a celebrity model becoming the focus of attention, and the ensuing domino effect: the shifting of energy, power, the very chain of hierarchy.
But in this case, it was multiplied by two.
Jaya Clark was a regal beauty. A fine-boned, tawny-skinned, half Indian, half Brit from London.
The “exotic It girl” of the fashion world, she’d graced numerous covers of Vogue and Bazaar, and was equally in demand on the runway.
Chanel, Prada, Versace. Jaya was angular and aloof enough to have thrived during the waif movement, but her classic features ensured she would work for a long time.
Katrine, in comparison, was not really a runway girl (with the exception of Versace, because Gianni liked his curves) but more a reluctant bombshell from Denmark.
Big blond hair, wide blue eyes, pillowy lips.
Katrine had the face of a doll but a body made for sin, which made her a hot commodity at Sports Illustrated, Victoria’s Secret, and the like.
She was a Herb Ritts discovery, and that distinction elevated her from the fray.
And while neither girl was more beautiful, traditionally or otherwise, than the newcomer Anouk, Cecilia still found it amusing that the crew fawned and catered in the manner they did.
Sarah, the esteemed makeup artist, a patrician redhead from London, cooing over the suppleness of Jaya’s skin. “Like a baby’s. Still. And you’re how old now? Twenty-four? You would never know, pet. Don’t ever smoke.”
Beatriz, the head stylist—from Milan by way of Marbella, who spoke four languages fluently and was the only one of the bunch who had actually attended boarding school in Switzerland—swooning over how enchanting Katrine looked trying on the new line of body-conscious dresses. “Like a young blond Sophia Loren.”
“Anita Ekberg,” Santiago, the venerated hairstylist from Venezuela, corrected her. Santiago, when he wasn’t busy doing multimillion-dollar ad campaigns, styled hair for the likes of Sharon Stone, Uma Thurman, and Madonna. He knew his way around a celebrity blond.
They were all revered in their respective fields. And yet in the presence of the supermodels they could not help but ingratiate themselves. And it followed that everyone else was expected to kowtow.
“Can someone bring me a parasol? I can’t get too dark,” Jaya said.
It was their third setup of the day, on the terrace of a grand Mediterranean-style villa with sweeping views of the Sea of Cortez.
Maren, the producer with di Varenna’s ad agency, had scouted it weeks earlier, and claimed it was “quintessential dolce vita: international and aristocratic to a fault.” She had beamed with pride on the walk-through Monday, clinging to her Smythson notebook, while Didier nodded his approval.
“Wait until you see the boat we booked for Thursday,” she’d said. “It’s huge. And sexy. You’re going to love it.”
“I am sure I will,” he’d said, smiling at her.
By midmorning, when the sun was still low enough in the sky to not create harsh shadows, Didier was firing off shots of the three girls lounging poolside, while their male counterparts cannonballed into the water in the background.
Only Didier could inject such high energy into a languorous setting.
It was one of his signature traits. Compositions that felt alive, dynamic.
“A parasol! Please,” Jaya repeated from her position front and center on her chaise longue. They had just paused to switch over the camera lens when she began voicing her displeasure.
Cecilia watched as James, Sarah’s assistant—a lanky, thirtyish, soft-spoken Brit—hurried inside to their staging area to fetch some sort of covering for the supermodel.
“I burn easily, too, if I’m not careful,” Katrine said from her adjacent chaise. They were wearing matching black bikinis, sunglasses. Anouk’s bikini was white.
“Oh, I don’t burn. I just…” Jaya shrugged her pointy shoulders. “I just don’t like being dark.”
Cecilia looked up from where she was adjusting a reflector.
She knew what she’d heard, but when no one on set reacted or even looked in her direction, she buried it.
After close to five years in the business, her shell had somewhat hardened.
She’d been privy to an onslaught of inappropriate comments.
Some insensitive, some ignorant, some downright nasty.
Sexist, racist, ageist, lookist. For all its inherent beauty, the fashion world could be an ugly, petty place.
But it was a coveted industry, and so Cecilia had learned that it was often best to bite one’s tongue and let the less pernicious remarks slide.
And it wasn’t that she couldn’t appreciate Jaya’s situation.
Cecilia did not particularly want to get darker either.
That morning, she had donned a large-brimmed utilitarian sun hat and smothered SPF 45 on her face and limbs before leaving her hotel room, before the sun had even risen.
This was partly because she’d read an alarming article on skin cancer a couple of years back and how those with more pigment were not necessarily immune.
And partly because she was still haunted by the wrath of her mother, who had laid into Cecilia when she returned from two weeks in the C?te d’Azur following her junior year in Paris, darker than she’d ever been.
“When you stepped off of that plane, you were so black I was embarrassed,” Olive Chen had chided.
It had stayed with her. That kind of thing always did.
James reappeared presently with a parasol to provide Jaya her protection. For thirty seconds the crew watched in silence while he awkwardly held the apparatus and Jaya lolled like Cleopatra.
Finally, Didier cleared his throat. “On y va, ma belle? T’es prête?”
“Oh, are you waiting on me? I’m sorry.” She flicked her wrist, to shoo James away, and then returned to posing, arching her back and angling her head toward the camera. “So sorry. Yes, I’m ready.”
Anouk snickered then and Jaya and Katrine both turned in her direction.
Their expressions unreadable. It was not an admonishment so much as a curiosity.
Who was this new girl? And why wasn’t she kowtowing like the rest of them?
Fearless (or was it clueless?), Anouk squared off with them, smiled her effervescent smile, and then just as quickly returned to her model pout.
Cecilia could not help but be a little impressed.
Later in the afternoon, after the catered lunch and touch-ups, they’d set up a shot in the salon.
Bas and Jaya playing chess on a marble table in the foreground, while Elliot watched them from a nearby sofa.
Katrine curled beside him, feigning sleep, her blond head nestled in his lap, his hand in her hair.
Anouk angled at the other side of the divan in a pair of minuscule shorts, her bare legs outstretched before her.
Her head tucked into a book. To Cecilia, the scene felt forced and improbable. But the Italians drank it up.
“I love it! Love!” the art director Rafaella cooed. “It’s sexy, but smart. The chess … mind games. And these three, so pretty. Serene.” She nodded toward the Elliot-Katrine-Anouk configuration, her big, curly hair bouncing. “You are genius, Didier. Beatriz! Genius!”
“Ti piace?” Beatriz looked up from where she was loosening one of the spaghetti straps on Jaya’s dress, allowing it to drape off her shoulder.
“Molto!”
Cecilia wasn’t certain genius was the accurate term.
Didier had shown her and Marc the series of photos he was using for inspiration.
A 1964 spread by Richard Avedon, shot in Ibiza for Harper’s Bazaar.
Avedon had employed a pair of identical Spanish twins and a fetching Brazilian diplomat to create a story that was both artistic and titillating.
A perverse ménage à trois of sorts. Cynical, sultry, narcissistic.
All qualities that seemed to work for the di Varenna campaign.
“You have to know your history. You have to know and respect what came before you,” Didier had said to them, two weeks prior, in the studio, just before the epic blizzard that shut down all of New York.
“Anyone can be good, but if you want to be great, you have to do the homework. You study them. All. Avedon. Penn. Stern. Bailey. You get to know them. Know what they did. Know why they were special.”
Cecilia appreciated when Didier would impart these little words of wisdom.
But at the same time, becoming aware of the technical eliminated some of the magic.
Didier wasn’t a genius so much as someone who borrowed from other photographers and then put a fresh spin on it to make it something new.
To make it his own. And perhaps at the core, this was what all artists did.
Perhaps there was no reinventing the wheel.
There was just changing the hubcaps. And something about that made Cecilia sad.
“Viens ici, Cecilia,” he called to her now.
After shooting off a few rolls, he’d had her and Marc reposition the lights, and she’d been securing the last of the stands with a sandbag. She stood then, sweaty, in overalls and work gloves, her hair in a solitary braid. Very little about her job was glamorous.