Olivia Goldsmith - Fashionably Late

OLIVIA GOLDSMITH

FASHIONABLY LATE

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1994

Copyright © Olivia Goldsmith 1994

Olivia Goldsmith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006479727

Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780008154073

Version: 2015-06-16

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part One: Designer Genes

Chapter One: Reaping What You Sew

Chapter Two: Barren Karen

Chapter Three: Cut from a Different Cloth

Chapter Four: The Cutting Edge

Chapter Five: Hard Labor

Chapter Six: Fashion Cents

Chapter Seven: Cut and Dried

Chapter Eight: Everyone Has One

Chapter Nine: Dressed for Success

Chapter Ten: Out of the Closet

Chapter Eleven: Marriage à la Mode

Part Two: Hemming and Whoring

Chapter Twelve: Fashionable Collection

Chapter Thirteen: Hemming It Up

Chapter Fourteen: Dressing Her Wounds

Chapter Fifteen: A Friend in Tweed

Chapter Sixteen: What’s My Line?

Chapter Seventeen: Dollars and Scents

Chapter Eighteen: Dialing for Daughters

Chapter Nineteen: The Waist Land

Chapter Twenty: Whirling Dervitz

Chapter Twenty-One: Tongue in Chic

Part Three: Slaves to Fashion

Chapter Twenty-Two: An Affair to Remember

Chapter Twenty-Three: By a Thread

Chapter Twenty-Four: Rags to Bitches

Chapter Twenty-Five: Paris When It Sizzles

Chapter Twenty-Six: Womb for Rent

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Fashion Plays

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Pulling the Wool

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Slaves to Fashion

Part Four: A Real Mother

Chapter Thirty: Thread Bare

Chapter Thirty-One: Cut on the Bias

Chapter Thirty-Two: In Stitches

Chapter Thirty-Three: Case Clothed

Chapter Thirty-Four: Fashion of the Times

Chapter Thirty-Five: A Stitch in Time

Chapter Thirty-Six: Nothing as it Seams

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Clothing Allowances

Chapter Thirty-Eight: For Whom the Belle Tolls

Chapter Thirty-Nine: What’s in a Name

Chapter Forty: A Horse With No Name

Chapter Forty-One: A Friend Indeed

Chapter Forty-Two: Fashionably Late

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

Praise

About the Publisher

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Though it contains incidental references to actual people and places, these references are used merely to lend the fiction a realistic setting. All other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

PART ONE

Designer Genes

He who only sees fashion in fashion is nothing but a fool

Honoré de Balzac

CHAPTER ONE

Reaping What You Sew

Fashionably late, Karen Kahn and her husband, Jeffrey, walked past the flash of photographers’ lights and into the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue. Karen felt, for that moment, that she had it all. Tonight was the annual award party and benefit held by the Oakley Foundation, and Karen was about to be honored with their Thirty-Eighth Annual American Fashion Achievement Award. If she couldn’t arrive fashionably late here, where could she?

Stepping through the lobby and into the Deco brass elevator, alone together for the last moment before the crush began, Karen looked at Jeffrey and couldn’t repress a grin. Soon, she’d be among the crème-de-la-crème of fashion designers, fashion press, and the wealthy society women who actually wore the fashions. Despite all of her hard work, despite dreaming that this could happen, Karen could hardly believe that she was the woman of the moment.

‘It’s taken me almost twenty years to become an overnight success,’ she wisecracked to Jeffrey, and he smiled down at her. Unlike Karen, who knew she was no more than ordinary-looking, Jeffrey was handsome. Karen was aware that tuxedos make even plain men good-looking, but she was still taken aback by how much they did for a looker like Jeffrey, who was both sexy and distinguished in his formal clothes. A lethal combo. The gleam of the black satin of his peaked lapels set off his thick pepper-and-salt hair. He was wearing the cabochon sapphire shirt studs and cuff links she had given him the night before. They perfectly matched the washed-denim blue of his eyes, as she knew they would.

‘Not a moment too soon,’ he said. ‘It’s important to schedule your Lifetime Achievement Award before your first face-lift.’

She laughed. ‘I didn’t know that. Lucky it turned out that way. Although if I had the lift first, I might still be considered a girl genius.’

‘You’re still my girl genius,’ Jeffrey told her, and gave her arm a squeeze. ‘Just remember, I knew you when.’ The elevator reached their floor. ‘And now, see how it feels to really hit the big time,’ Jeffrey told her.

Before the stainless and brass Art Deco doors opened, he bent down and kissed her cheek, careful not to spoil her maquillage. How lucky she was to have the kind of man who understood when a kiss was welcome but smeared makeup was not! Yes, she was very lucky, and very happy, she thought. Everything in her life was as perfect as it could be, except for her condition. But maybe Dr Goldman would have news that would … she stopped herself. No sense thinking about what Jeffrey called ‘her obsession’ now. She’d promised herself and her husband that tonight was one night she’d enjoy to the utmost.

As the elevator doors rolled aside, Karen looked up to see Nan Kempner and Mrs Gordon Getty, fashion machers and society fund-raisers, standing side by side, both of them in Yves Saint Laurent. ‘You’d think they could have put on one of my little numbers,’ Karen hissed to Jeffrey, while she kept the smile firmly planted on her face.

‘Honey, you’ve never done glitz like Saint Laurent does,’ Jeffrey reminded her, and, comforted, she sailed out and air-kissed the two women. One was in an oyster white satin floor-length sheath with gold braid and a tasseled belt – a lot like curtain trimming, Karen thought. Perhaps Scarlett O’Hara had been at the portieres again. The other was in black lace shot with what looked like silver, though, since it was on Mrs Getty, it must be platinum , Karen joked to herself. Both women took their fashion seriously: Nan Kempner had once admitted in an interview that as a girl she had ‘cried and cried’ at Saint Laurent’s when she saw a white mink-trimmed suit too expensive for her allowance. The legend was that Yves himself had come down to meet the girl who cried so hard.