A fitting followed a week after the meeting, and with it all the excitement and beer drinking that came with celebrating my new, prestigious job. The fitting for the commercial took place at the Four Seasons again, and I figured the hotel served as a kind of L’Oréal office base away from the home office in New York. The executives took their meetings in the bar, conferred in a conference room, slept in their individual suites, and lavished their new star with a room full of beautiful clothes to try in the presidential suite. My manager came with me to the fitting and both of us were excited.
After the initial meetings and greetings of the stylist and her assistants and tailors, I wandered into the main room of the presidential suite wide-eyed and my mouth agape. All the furniture had been removed and the walls were lined with racks and racks of clothing. Hundreds of suits hung on the racks and on every rack, on the north, south, and west walls, was the same gray suit.
“Great. I was just looking for a gray suit! Now I know where they all are.”
The mood in the room was quiet and not jovial, so I put my smart-ass personality to rest and took out the pleasant, compliant, easygoing one I’ve been using at work since the day I started. I knew this kind of client, the kind where every little detail mattered; I’d modeled for them for years. I’d just never worked for this giant of a company at this level. My experience with clients who tested every little detail in a think tank of consumers who’d been randomly collected from shopping malls was limited to the smaller companies in Australia. And nothing says, “You’re in the big leagues” like two hundred near-identical suits in the presidential suite of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
I looked at a gray suit with a short jacket and a pencil skirt with a side slit. Then I looked at a gray suit with a pencil skirt and a short jacket with a slightly different lapel than the one I’d looked at five minutes prior that had a pointier, larger lapel and a skirt that was slit on the opposite side. Some of the fabrics were a different weight than others with a different ratio of cotton to wool. It was clear to me that my opinion or preference of suits didn’t matter at all, and so I went into the dressing room and tried on jackets and skirts as they were handed to me.
Undressing in front of my manager was embarrassing. I didn’t feel quite thin enough to be standing around barefoot in my G-string, but I didn’t want to tell her to leave the room. After all, the only reason for her to be here was to help me navigate through the sea of suits, and I knew she’d have much preferred to be somewhere else with another of her bigger, more famous clients. She was a busy woman whose time was important, so I couldn’t have her wait in the living room. Besides, there was no furniture anywhere else in the hotel suite. Comfort had been cleared away for productivity. And the skirts that were passed in and out of that dressing room from the stylist’s assistant to the stylist to the tailor and then back to the stylist’s assistant to be hung back up on the rack of suits that didn’t fit looked like a production line in a factory—an unproductive factory. So far, not one of the suits had fit. The skirts either didn’t zip up in the back, or if they had Lycra or another synthetic fabric helping them to stretch, the skirt did that telltale bunching that looks like ripples on a lakeshore between two gently rolling hills that were my thighs. They didn’t fit. None of them. I tried on suit after suit until it was obvious to the stylist and the tailor that the fitting should take place skirt by skirt. It was pointless to try the jacket if the skirt was so small it couldn’t be zipped up in the back.
They were all a size 4. My modeling card measurements—34, 24, 35—had put me at a size 4. And it seemed like the more expensive the suit, the tighter it was. A size 4 in Prada was a size 2 in the type of clothes I’d wear for Ally. I could’ve argued that the European sizing was different. I could’ve made a case for myself, but none of that was important when I couldn’t zip up the fifteenth skirt in a row. None of what I could’ve said would be important.
You can put on a brave face for only so long. I put one on for about three hours before it cracked. After three hours I fell silent. There was nothing to say. We all knew what was going on. I was unprofessional. I didn’t deserve the campaign. My manager had slid down into her chair with her hand on the side of her face, exhausted, no longer willing to go to battle for me. The stylist, who had lacked a personality in the beginning, found one toward the fourth hour of the fitting, and it wasn’t pleasant to be around. She’d stopped addressing me directly. Everything she said in front of me was to her assistant or tailor: “Go get the Dolce skirt. Let’s see if she can fit into that.” Or “What if you let the skirt out as much as you can. She might be able to get away with it.”
She stopped cold as the door of the suite was knocked upon and opened simultaneously. It was the L’Oréal executives come to see what was taking so long. They had been in the conference room taking meetings but had been expecting to see some pictures of Portia de Rossi in several gray suits. We were supposed to have given them Polaroids of all the options by now. We had given them none.
“Hi.”
I didn’t bother to smile or go to them in the hallway. My manager didn’t even get up.
“What’s going on in here?” The female executive had a smiley yet accusatory voice. The kind of pissed-off yet polite voice one would expect from Hillary Clinton if she had the sneaking suspicion that someone was trying to pull the wool over her eyes.
There was an awful silence. It was a silence full of thwarted hopes, a stale-air kind of silence.
The explanation they were seeking was summed up with a simple statement from the stylist that everyone seemed to understand.
“Nobody told me she was a size eight.”
Like a dead man to the galley, I walked with my manager to the Four Seasons parking garage. When I’d driven in that morning, I’d been given the option to self-park or to valet park and, quite honestly, I didn’t know which one was the cool thing to do. I thought maybe it said more about the type of person I was if I did away with all the ceremony of a valet. It said that I was self-sufficient, that I could see through artifice, that I wasn’t falling for it. I was happy about that now because the vast gray parking structure was empty of people, except for my manager and me, the emptiness echoing the clicking of our heels as we walked through it. It occurred to me as I was walking miles to my car (valet parkers got all the good spaces) that the parking garage held up the rest of the building and was its true nature, that all the floral lounge chairs and Hollywood dealings were like costumes and a character to an actor; another kind of empty shell that needed a good stylist and a purpose. I’d been given another fitting two days from now, a time and address scratched on a piece of paper. That would give the stylist time to find bigger sizes. The second fitting would take place in the rented space of the stylist in a not-so-good part of Hollywood. That’s what you get for drinking beer.
My manager walked me as far as the elevators, but that was as far as she’d go. We’d come down the stairs, tried to find my car around that area, and then started walking because I thought that maybe my car was at the other end. I have no sense of direction. If I haven’t been to a place before, I’ll get lost. In the car, if I haven’t traveled the exact route, I’ll get lost and almost force myself to go the wrong way to prove that I knew it was the wrong way. I deliberately go the wrong way so I can predict the outcome with confidence.