Carrie Duffy - Diva

‘I was up the whole night working on something new: a beautiful full-length dress made of crêpe de chine, with shoulder draping and an asymmetrical hemline.’ Her hazel eyes sparkled as she described it. ‘I have made the toile and I need you to try it, Dionne, I just know it will look amazing on you. But where were you last night? You did not come home, no?’

‘No,’ Dionne giggled. She was wearing an obscenely short, cherry-red bandage dress that clung to her incredible curves. CeCe realized she’d come straight to work from wherever she’d spent the night.

‘Are you still drunk?’

‘Maybe just a little,’ Dionne admitted, as she broke down in another fit of giggles. ‘Shit, that reminds me, help me get these back before Khalid notices them,’ she hissed, pulling a pair of neon-yellow peep-toe stilettos out of her bag.

‘You wore those?’ CeCe asked disapprovingly. ‘They’re vile.’

‘I thought they were kind of fun,’ Dionne disagreed, as she turned them over to inspect them. The soles were badly scuffed, and a cigarette butt clung to the bottom of the right one. Dionne quickly shoved them back on the shelf with a shrug. ‘If anyone complains, just say they’re shop-soiled and give them ten per cent off.’

The way Dionne saw it, there was no point working in a clothes shop if you couldn’t borrow the occasional item. It was one of the few perks to this job, and meant she was rarely seen in the same outfit twice.

‘So where did you go?’

‘David took me for dinner, then we went on to Bijou,’ Dionne gushed, naming the hot new nightclub that had just opened in the Marais. ‘I had so much fun – you should have come. The champagne was flowing, I was dancing on the tables all night long, shaking my booty … And the best part …’ Dionne paused for effect, ensuring she had CeCe’s full attention. ‘… The owner. Philippe Rochefort. Man, that guy is hot! Loaded too – like, serious money. David introduced me to him and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Very good-looking. Very French, you know what I’m saying?’

‘Poor David.’ CeCe smiled sympathetically. ‘He adores you.’

‘David’s a sweetie,’ Dionne conceded. ‘He’s a great guy but—’

‘But what?’

‘I don’t know.’ Dionne sighed despairingly. ‘There’s just not that spark. I want totally intense chemistry where you can’t keep your hands off each other, where there’s an orchestra playing every time you’re together and you think you might die when you’re apart.’

‘Life is not like in the movies, Dionne.’

‘My life’s going to be,’ Dionne replied indignantly. ‘There’s gonna be drama and passion and—’

‘Ah, ladies, much as I hate to interrupt you, I had hoped you might get round to doing a little work today.’

It was Khalid Hossein, owner of Rivoli Couture, a short, pot-bellied man in an ill-fitting beige suit. Egyptian by birth, he was a now a French national, for reasons neither Dionne nor CeCe could understand. Khalid never had a good word to say about the French, complaining about the Parisian weather, the taxation levels, and especially the liberal employment laws which, in his view, gave workers every excuse to slack off whilst making it virtually impossible to sack them.

‘I was just …’ CeCe began, then trailed off.

‘Putting these away for me,’ Dionne interjected, dumping a pile of lavishly decorated Christian Audigier jeans in her arms. ‘And I was about to—’

‘Do the coffee run,’ cut in CeCe, in a flash of inspiration.

‘Absolutely,’ Dionne purred, batting her eyelids at Khalid. ‘Can I get you anything?’

‘Well … an espresso,’ he agreed grudgingly. Dionne might have been lazy and unreliable, but she could charm the pants off anyone, employing the same skills she’d honed at Macy’s back home in Detroit to sweet-talk the Parisian tourists into leaving Rivoli Couture with bags full of overpriced, end-of-line designer gear. For Khalid Hossein, the bottom line was money. He would overlook a lot as long as the cash tills kept ringing.

Dionne slipped out to the café next door – the young guy there had a hopeless crush on her and gave her such a generous discount the order was practically free – as CeCe began straightening hangers. Khalid was OCD about having them all face the same way round.

There were times when CeCe hated this job with a passion. She put zero enthusiasm into it, saving her energy for her designing and her partying – the two great loves of her life. She and Dionne moved in moneyed, hip circles, and she loved the lifestyle, but she had to find some way of supporting herself. Her socializing was always paid for – her friends were rich and generous – but rent, food, the basics, all needed to be covered, and since falling out with her parents, CeCe had been on a steep learning curve, quickly discovering the harsh realities of working for a living.

CeCe had grown up in Clochiers, a small town in Auvergne in central France. It was stunningly beautiful, but boring as hell, and from a young age CeCe had been desperate to move to the city.

Her family were wealthy – CeCe had fallen in love with Paris when she’d accompanied her mother, Inès, on her regular shopping trips to the capital – but CeCe had little interest in money. Like Marilyn Monroe, she just wanted to be wonderful.

As a child she’d been given dolls to play with and she used them as her first models, cutting up old dresses then stitching them together in provocative, sensual designs that outraged her conservative mother. Whilst Inès’s wardrobe comprised chic, classic pieces by traditional French fashion houses, like Yves St Laurent and Givenchy, CeCe’s passions lay elsewhere. She loved the overt sexuality of Jean-Paul Gaultier, the high drama of Alexander McQueen and the punk-inspired eccentricity of Vivienne Westwood. Soon she was experimenting with her own style, mixing her father’s battered old walking boots with her mother’s vintage Dior, or using an Hermès scarf as a sash for her school uniform. She dressed to get attention – everyone in the small village knew her name, and that was just the way CeCe liked it.

When she hit her teenage years, CeCe cranked the rebellion up to max. She experimented with drink, drugs and sex, sleeping with both boys and girls – anything to push the boundaries. But there were dark times too. After the highs she would crash with depression, hiding beneath her sheets and refusing to get out of bed until her mother despaired and her father became white-lipped with fury. She remembered with horror the demons that had chased her down, pulling her deeper into a web of darkness that seemed impossible to escape from. It had taken a long time to fight her way out. There had been visits to a clinic – private and discreet, naturally – a startling array of pills and a course of counselling.

And then suddenly CeCe was back, as out of control and outrageous as ever, her behaviour even wilder than before. The summer after she turned eighteen, the issues came to a head and CeCe knew she needed to make a decision about her future. Her parents threatened to cut her off unless she curbed her ways and went to university to study for a proper degree. They wanted her to go into one of the professions, to become a doctor or a lawyer. Better still, to marry a doctor or a lawyer, and stay at home being a good housewife. CeCe couldn’t think of anything worse.

After a particularly heated argument, CeCe packed up her little Citroën and drove non-stop to Paris. She went first to her mother’s regular hairdresser in rue Cambon . Sitting in the stylist’s chair, CeCe stared hard at her reflection and took a deep breath. ‘I want you to shave off all my hair,’ she declared.