R. Hernández - An Innocent Fashion

I found the first diary crushed like a bookmark between the pages of a Christian Dior coffee-table publication. Holding in the books above and below, I yanked it out and smiled as I ran my fingers over the yellow satin cover, feeling a thrill at the thought of reading it. I laid it on the bearskin rug at my feet and found a second on a bottom shelf: Tiffany blue, bound in silk with gold-tipped pages, sandwiched between two decades-old copies of Vogue Italia .

As I gathered them all up in every size and shape, in shades of coral and mustard and azure blue, I learned that Edmund also collected greeting cards. Tucked into books and diaries and crannies all around I found a dozen cards, always blank on the inside, and paired up with the unused envelopes. Happiness is a journey, not a destination . To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world. Life is not about finding yourself, it is about creating yourself. Some of them were in other languages ( La vie ne vaut d’être vécue sans amour ), and they made me wonder if he bought them on his travels, thinking, “That would make a nice card for John Galliano, ” then returned home and forgot about them? Or did he buy them for himself, because, well, he just liked feel-good quotes in calligraphic fonts?

I noticed another blue diary on the nightstand. In total, there were four more diaries in its various drawers; one covered by a pile of pills, with no container in sight, and another guarded by a flaccid wind chime, which like Edmund’s peaceless Buddha alluded to his vague interest in a New Age aesthetic. For good measure, since the diaries seemed to be everywhere, I decided to check the bathroom — and was unsurprised to find two there, resting in a pearly magazine rack. The bathroom was in fact pearl-themed: It contained a pearl-studded mirror and a bathtub shaped like a giant oyster, presumably so Edmund could pretend to be the pearl in the middle.

I took it as further confirmation of his genius, all these diaries hidden in the corners of his apartment like Easter eggs. When I thought I had almost all of them — surely a few still lurked — I knelt on the bearskin rug with all of them fanned out around me like a parasol, and took a breath.

The first diary. I opened it — winced.

Edmund’s handwriting somehow contained greater menace than Charles Manson’s scrawl, and it was while trying to discern his near illegible scratches that I came close to thinking he and Régine and everybody must all have been playing a huge joke on me.

Carla came to the city today she is so fat I can’t believe anybody could look so bad in Alaïa we went to dinner—

It stopped there. I turned the page to see if it continued — that couldn’t be all — but it never did, and in fact the next time he had written was twenty pages later, in a different colored ink:

Today we went to Indochine for dinner I had the salmon the Times said it was their best dish I sat with Coco Rocha Raquel Zimmerman Edie Campbell FeiFei Sun Daria Strokous Joseph Altuzarra and Georgina St. James Coco Rocha was wearing a Vera Wang chiffon dress and Miu Miu open-toe ankle boots Raquel Zimmerman was wearing a Louis Vuitton plaid cropped jacket and skirt and Marni platform heels Edie Campbell was wearing a Rodarte sweater and sequined skirt with lace overlay and Giuseppe Zanotti boots FeiFei Sun was wearing a Nina Ricci lame jacket Céline tapered pants and Jil Sander boots Daria Strokous was wearing a Marc Jacobs polka-dot jacket Dries Van Noten silk blouse Proenza Schouler macrame skirt and Chanel kitten heels Joseph Altuzarra was wearing an Yves Saint Laurent suit and Ferragamo shoes and Georgina St. James is going through a divorce so I don’t blame her for wearing head-to-toe Dillard’s or something.

That was it. There were no sketches or inspirations, no anecdotes or stories, no reference to his editorial work at all.

I fumbled for another diary from the pile— Karlie Kloss wore Christian Dior —then another— Chanel Balenciaga Versace —then another, which was empty except for one word in the middle— open-toe —just OPEN-TOE in the middle of the page, in the middle of the diary, constituting the entirety of the book’s revelations.

I began in anguish to flip through more and more pages, desperate to find something, anything, of value. But there was nothing, just a ramble of designers and famous people; a running tab of names, names, names without any punctuation, except for the end of some long passages where his ink had bled into a kind of mottled period, as though the exercise had exhausted him and he could barely lift his pen to prevent an aneurysmal inkblot.

My bottom lip trembled.

It had been one thing to slowly recognize the bland truth about everyone else at Régine —but Edmund too?

Like a slow-moving washing machine, my stomach churned as the truth about him became sickeningly apparent. Even with all the patterns and the colors screaming for attention, the apartment was like the bags under Edmund’s eyes: sagging, tired. In the middle of his huge flashy bedroom, his satin-covered, queen-size bed was collapsed in its center like a broken lung, and everywhere the stacks of magazines leaned against each other for relief.

Edmund Benneton wasn’t a genius. He was a sham. He was tired, washed out, relying on twenty-four-karat bells and whistles to sustain his reputation as a “creative” while all along living in sleepless fear of his inevitable undoing. My idol— Régine —my dream — it was all a sham.

How far I thought I’d come from poring over Régine at my mother’s nail salon, dreaming of an escape — only to realize that this was exactly the same.

My arm gravitated onto my lap as the pages flipped over my thumb and the diary finally slipped away from me. I turned and noticed the bear’s entire head was still attached to the bearskin rug I was sitting on. It had two glittering glass gemstones for eyes — and suddenly, I couldn’t be there anymore. I scrambled in a panic to my feet, excavated a hole on a bookshelf with a swoop of my hand, and shoving, shoving, began to cram the diaries there, patting them in, a worthless row of bleak, colorful spines — pressed the bottom of my hand to my nose — sniffled, with one last, unbelieving glance around me, at Buddha, and Medusa, and cried out.

EVERY DAY THEREAFTER I DESCENDED INTO THE SUBWAY like a buoy being dragged underwater.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.”

One day an old woman with a head scarf spat phlegm into a corner of the train car. She hacked loudly while a wall of people pressed against me, trying to place inches between themselves and her. Someone cleared his throat loudly to remind her that her behavior was inappropriate, but she took it as a sign there was more phlegm in her own and continued to expectorate.

One day two black kids hollered at everybody to “Stand back, stand back, ev’rybody, it’s showtime .” They blasted hip-hop from a handheld radio and started to do handstands before passing around a baseball cap for cash tips. When the train jolted to a stop, one of them accidentally kicked a baby stroller with his Nikes and they escaped onto the platform with dollar bills fluttering behind them.

One day two Asian women got into a fight when one of them bumped a cartful of lettuce heads against the other’s cart of onions. But after a minute I wasn’t sure if they were mad or if they just knew each other and were talking very loudly in Chinese while pointing in each other’s faces.

One day the overhead voice said, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please”—the doors rung ding-ding! to close, then bluff ing, rung ding-ding! to close again — then ding-ding! and ding-ding! and ding-ding! and “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” then ding-ding! “Stand clear of the—” ding-ding! “Stand clear—” ding-ding! and everyone was looking around for whoever was holding the door open ding-ding! ding-ding! ding-ding! and it was a lady with an enormous suitcase who clearly did not fit into the subway car ding-ding! and I wanted to scream STAND CLEAR OF THE FUCKING DOOR, PLEASE! If I wasn’t entitled to be happy or successful, wasn’t I at least entitled to get home without being stuck in this miserable underground hell with you and your suitcase? Ding-ding!