Chapter 160: Arrival In The City Of Love
Sean noticed. He didn’t mention it.
The flight was seven hours. Vanessa worked for the first two, the venue specifications replaced by a detailed notes document she typed with the focused efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough to work productively at thirty-five thousand feet.
Sean read. A book he’d been carrying in his jacket for two weeks, the kind of dense economic history that required more sustained attention than his life had recently allowed.
After the second hour Vanessa closed her laptop and looked out the window at the specific nothing of high altitude cloud cover and said, without turning from the window, "How long have you been interested in fashion."
"Since someone started putting me in things that fit properly," said Sean.
Vanessa almost smiled. "Before that."
"Not particularly," said Sean honestly. "I understood it was significant without understanding why. The difference between clothes that work and clothes that are just clothes was visible to me. The language behind that difference wasn’t."
"And now," said Vanessa.
"Now I understand more of the language," said Sean. "Enough to know how much of it I still don’t speak."
She turned from the window and looked at him. "What do you understand."
"That it’s not decoration," said Sean. "That the best version of it is a statement about what the person wearing it actually is, not what they want to appear to be. Those are different projects and most people only attempt the second one."
Vanessa looked at him for a long moment.
"That’s correct," she said. "That’s a more accurate description of what I’m trying to do than most people in the industry manage after ten years."
"You showed me the suit," said Sean. "What it was supposed to say was visible."
"What did it say," said Vanessa.
Sean looked at her. "That the person wearing it already knows where they’re going and doesn’t need the room to confirm it."
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked back out the window.
"Yes," she said quietly. "That’s exactly what it says."
They sat in comfortable silence for a while after that. The flight attendant brought food which was better than Sean expected and which Vanessa ate with the distracted appreciation of someone whose mind was partially still on the venue lighting rig.
"Tell me something," said Sean.
"What," said Vanessa.
"How you started," said Sean. "Not the professional version. The actual beginning."
She looked at him briefly. Then at the tray in front of her. "My mother made clothes," she said. "Not fashion. Clothes. She was a seamstress in the practical sense, alterations, repairs, the unglamorous version of the industry that keeps the glamorous version running." She paused. "I used to sit in her workroom after school. She had a specific way of looking at a garment when she was assessing it. Not at the surface but at the construction underneath. The bones of it." She picked up her coffee. "I learned to see that way before I learned that seeing that way was something people did professionally."
"When did you know you wanted to design rather than repair," said Sean.
"I repaired a dress when I was twelve," said Vanessa. "A client’s evening gown, significant damage to the bodice. My mother was ill and the deadline was the next day and I did it because there was nobody else." She paused. "When I finished it I hadn’t just repaired what was damaged. I’d changed three things about the construction that I thought were wrong in the original." She looked at her coffee. "The client came to collect it and she looked at it for a long time and then she looked at my mother and said who altered this. My mother said her daughter." She was quiet for a moment. "The client wore it to the event. She sent a note afterward that said the dress had been the best thing she’d worn in years and she wanted to know if the daughter took commissions."
"How old were you," said Sean.
"Twelve," said Vanessa. "I didn’t know what a commission was. My mother explained it to me that night." She set down the coffee. "That was the beginning."
Sean looked at her profile against the window, the cloud cover outside, and thought about a twelve year old in a workroom at night fixing something that needed fixing and making it better than it was.
"You’ve been doing this your whole life," he said.
"Yes," said Vanessa. "It’s the only thing I know how to do completely."
"That’s not a small thing," said Sean.
She looked at him. Something in her expression had the quality it sometimes had in the store when something landed somewhere she hadn’t fully defended. "No," she said. "It isn’t."
They didn’t talk for a while after that. Not uncomfortably. Just the specific quiet of two people who had said something real and were letting it settle.
Vanessa fell asleep somewhere over the Atlantic, her head tipping slightly toward the window, the document in her lap, her coffee cup empty on the tray. Sean looked at her once, the composed professional entirely absent in sleep, just a person on a plane who had been making things since she was twelve, and then looked back at his book.
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Paris
The city appeared below the descent approach in the specific way Paris appeared from altitude, not dramatically but with the quiet certainty of somewhere that had been here long enough to have stopped needing to announce itself.
Vanessa was awake, looking out the window, and her expression had something in it that Sean hadn’t seen from her yet. Something younger and less managed, the specific look of someone seeing something they’ve never quite gotten used to no matter how many times they’ve seen it.
"You love this city," said Sean.
"I love what it represents," said Vanessa. "For what I do." She paused. "The first time I came here I was twenty-two. For a trade show. I had no money and I shared a room with three other people from the agency I was working for and I ate the cheapest thing on every menu for four days." She didn’t look away from the window. "I told myself I would come back someday with my own collection. Under my own name."