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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
It was just before noon on a chilly January day in Paris when Suzy Menkes, the International Herald Tribune's influential fashion editor, bustled into the newspaper's headquarters, in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. The evening before, Menkes had filed the last of three stories on the weeklong spring/summer couture shows--stories composed in virtuoso displays of deadline brinkmanship, begun on her laptop in a front-row seat beside the catwalk, finished in the back of a cab, as she and a photographer crept through the Paris traffic, and then transmitted from the cab to the Tribune using a wireless modem, in time to appear on the streets of Tokyo and Hong Kong four hours later.
Menkes, who is fifty-nine years old, and who recently became a grandmother, was dressed in a navy-blue Issey Miyake Pleats Please pants suit, with a gray-blue pin-striped Mandarin-style silk jacket lined in pink, and black jodhpur boots. She looked a bit like an Asian empress on a shooting holiday in the English countryside. Her personal style, which features pillowy vintage jackets and scarves and a preference for soft, luxurious fabrics like velvet and silk, is nearly the opposite of the sleek, clothes-as-combat approach to dressing favored by the other fashionistas you see at the shows. Her most distinctive feature is her hair, which she wears with an odd-looking flip in front: a long demi-pompadour that is coiled back on the top of her head, creating a dinner-roll-size opening that you can see through from the side--a style that, combined with fearless reporting, has inspired people to call her Samurai Suzy.
The elevator rose to two, where the Tribune's editorial offices, in an undistinguished modern building, take up the entire floor--news on one side, features on the other. The features wing had beat-up-looking furniture and a stale smell of cigar smoke. I had imagined something more glamorous, having seen Jean Seberg, wearing a T-shirt with the Trib's yellow-and-black logo on it, selling copies of the paper in Jean-Luc Godard's film "Breathless."Menkes's desk was strewn with the gilded invitations that fashion houses send out for the shows. These were to the upcoming men's collections in Paris, which followed the couture shows, and would be followed by the Women's Ready to Wear Collections, beginning in New York, then moving on to London, Milan, and finally Paris. (New York used to come last, but some American-based designers wanted the order changed.) On the wall behind her desk were rows of file boxes with designers' names on them, in alphabetical order, and there were stacks of magazines everywhere, as well as a case of champagne, unopened, and shopping bags with gifts from fashion houses, waiting to be returned. Menkes doesn't accept freebies, and, unlike most members of the fashion press, does not routinely wear the clothes of the designers she writes about. (She can't afford them.) When fashion houses send free items, she gives them to the American Hospital of Paris or returns them with a note saying, "I was brought up to believe a girl should never accept anything but flowers and chocolates.”
As Menkes sat down at her desk, she made a weary oufff sound and began to regale her assistant, Jessica Michault, with the saga of last night's "nightmare"involving her wireless modem, which had failed to work in the cab and had occasioned a "frantic dash"back to Menkes's apartment, on the Rue Jean-Goujon, to use the landline. Menkes has a musical voice with a Wagnerian range of pitch. She speaks in perfectly formed sentences, as though dictating copy over the telephone, and her precise diction and British accent give a note of propriety to her utterances. Although frequently overwrought by the struggle to make the dilatory and capricious world of fashion comply with her relentless and unyielding deadlines, she rarely uses strong language, preferring expressions like "Oh, bother!"and "What a muddle!"and "Today went pear-shaped!"
"I literally thought I might lose my mind,"Menkes was saying now, of her technical problems following the show. She seemed pleased by the prospect. She shot a reproachful look at her laptop, a cheap machine that she had bought, she said, "in one of my misbegotten and idiotic attempts to save the Trib some money."She added, "The truth is I just don't think the thing is up to the word count I produce."
Last year, Menkes produced about two hundred and ninety thousand words for the paper. She is only the Tribune's third...
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