By Caleb Morrow & Travis Duong

I.

Insatiably ravenous. Because our blood-slicked, grim-frocked feathers curl at the kill, we claw — rupturing songcords with keratin daggers, our coats kept clean. They imagine us as harbingers, a dyad of distant shadows: a dance stranded in history.

They are wrong.

We aren’t warnings — we are reckonings. At trembling sands and dying breaths, we descend. The dark is closer than they expect.

They utter SCAVENGER between their pearly whites as if it is an insult, but it is not. Swallowing histories of carcasses demands a toll. Thievery is art. Assimilation postulates competence. No one creates anymore — they consume. And their leftovers taste the same, fruitlessly purgatorial. When dust settles, rivers dry, and songs cease, it is us that waste the remnants. That is all they are to us — remnants. Shallow facsimiles of something shaped like brilliance.

What happened to brilliance? What happened to visionaries? What happened to…

Wait.

        Do you see that?

Between the crooked carcasses and the mycelium, the droughted roots and the tumbleweeds. Is that… scarlet? Not blood, nor viscera, nor the sacrilege of decay. That, right there, is scarlet. Ruby red ribbons. The blush of a lover. The carmine of a mystic. Is that our Darling? The heart that pumps this empty vessel — arteries carrying wanderlust. Never have we seen this much life, a crimson so brilliant.

        To Darling, our desideratum.

                    We await your inauguration.

                                    We will devour you, utterly.

                                                    Before the anthrax steals your breath.

II.

Tonight, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the dark. It’s a magnetic kind of mischief, a gravitational pull all too familiar with futile resistance. Seldom do I emerge after the sun’s run its course, but the after hours now seem an inopportune time for hibernation.

So now that I’ve descended upon this silent brook, where shall I turn my gaze? How does one orbit the unknowable? Though I’m renowned for my immediacy, slipping into crevices not designed for me, I can’t help but feel as though I’m intruding - every step sounds more like an interruption.

The leaves crackle and moan beneath me, as if they’ve not intended for visitation. My gracefulness betrays itself; footsteps that were once nimble turn uncertain against relentless ivy.

But then, the emergence of a butterfly. Its color relieves me from the earliest etchings of a nightmare. Remembrance of who I am.

Daaaaaaaarling.

That’s right. I’m the darling.

Autonomous and evergreen, I’ve persisted where they’ve told me I shouldn’t. I am the immortal echo, a voice capable of resurrecting even detritus. Unfiltered imagination and soul. The touch of my hand rivals Midas, but even our collision wouldn’t be a fair fight. For I am far more than a one-trick pony; to try and constrain me is to defy the cosmos.

Oh, daaaaaaarlinggggg.

Speaking of forces..

                                      Who dares raise their voice louder than mine?

These playing grounds may not be mine, but it’s only a matter of time before these woods grow accustomed to my song. Its convergence is obligatory. Only fools have asked me to retreat, and I’d hate for this lovely little place to suffer the same fate.

        To the double-sided gremlin perched above,

                        I know you’d much rather see me quiver,

                                          But I’ve never been one for hesitation

                                                                Emerge from that crooked branch if you dare.

III.

An irrevocable collision. 20th century westerns warned us about what happens when two battalions share the same space; nothing is destined to come out alive, not even the environment itself.

Allow me to paint the picture for you.

The whimsical stranger ventured cautiously into our wood before her footsteps quickened. I suppose she’d killed the seeds of doubt bubbling inside and made herself comfortable at will. She must have heard that our home engulfs you at the first sign of fear.

She must have heard the cries of our makeshift guillotine above her head.

So she’d readied herself for conflict, though she couldn’t have understood what she was going up against. Even in all her glamour, she is still mere flesh and bone. Ingredients to be dissembled and made whole again only inside the belly of the beast.

The vultures call it retaliation even when they deliver the first blow. Our defense is necessary, they insist. It’s what keeps the wood alive.

So they spent the night admiring our quick-witted tourist until they’d decided to pounce. Their mercilessness always follows this rhythm; imagining how the prey would taste on their tongues until it’s no longer necessary to imagine. Pretty little vibrant things stumble into the wood all the time, each naively believing that their vivacity can turn our twisted manor into something more animated.

It plays out the same with no surprises. I can’t remember the last time I’d been astonished – something so fresh it shakes me to my core, sheer audacity to make me anew.

So they pounced. Closing in on the wood’s freshest face, the vultures carelessly assumed tonight would be like any other. They weren’t equipped for the fairest fight of their lives.

It was an onslaught of ferocity, the vultures clawing with all their might at the resistant darling. Though bruises etched themselves across her face, I recall a tiny smirk emerging. She seemed to be aware of something the rest of the wood was not; the vultures couldn’t combat such unfiltered exuberance. Their usual prey was in the midst of decaying, so succumbing came as a natural conclusion. But this specific visitor rendered the vultures’ attacks useless. With every advance made, their frustration heightened. The game only worked if the prey understood their role.

So, much to the surprise of all the wood’s frequenters, the vultures rose to great heights and fled far away. As their reign meets its conclusion, the wood starts anew. It’s taken on a vigor unrivaled by our entire past.

We are alive again. ■

By Lorena Tellez

The Beast That Shouted I at the Heart of the World

At 8 years old, I learned that the world moved without asking me.

The ceiling fan spun in slow, perfect circles above my bed, cutting the air into even pieces. The refrigerator down the hall hummed, low and constant. Headlights slid across my bedroom wall and disappeared, slid across and disappeared, like something breathing. Everything moved with quiet certainty, as if it had been told what to do and had agreed to do it.

Even then, I suspected there were rules. Not rules like don’t run in the house or finish your homework, but older rules, quieter rules, rules everyone else seemed to follow without being told.

At school, I collapsed into myself, trying to take up less space; my God preferred quiet offerings. I folded into my chair, tucked my elbows in, kept my knees together — but I never knew where to put my hands. At my sides, they looked like they belonged to someone else. In my pockets, they felt like I was playing a character in a movie. Folded together, they made it look like I was begging.

So I watched other people constantly, studying the choreography: how they leaned against desks, how long they held eye contact, how they laughed, how wide they smiled. Everyone else seemed to understand something they silently agreed upon. I was wordless, breathless, trying to translate scripture no one had ever taught me. I began to understand that being human was a kind of ritual, and I had arrived without knowing the prayers.

I did not think being human would feel like this. I did not think it would feel like standing in a temple, terrified of doing something wrong.

It wasn’t that being a person hurt. It was that I didn’t know how to be one.

I wanted to be absorbed into them, into their rhythm, their certainty. I wanted to move the way they moved, as if guided by something invisible and kind. But I was afraid, too — afraid that if I opened myself completely, if I showed everything inside me, I would still be turned away. That I could lay myself on the altar and still be told I was the wrong kind of offering. That I could split myself open and say, Look, this is everything, this is all of me, and it still would not be right.

So I observed. I mimicked. I worshipped.

I tried on expressions the way other girls tried on clothes. I would pull my eyebrows together and then relax them. I would smile with my mouth closed, then with my teeth showing, then with my head tilted slightly to the side. I practiced laughing silently, then with sound, then covering my mouth with my hand. I watched my reflection carefully, waiting for the moment when something would look natural, when the face in the mirror would stop looking like someone pretending. If I could assemble the right expressions, the right reactions, the right timing, maybe it would become real. Maybe I would become real.

Sometimes I would hold one expression too long, and it would begin to look wrong, stretched and trembling at the edges. I would drop it quickly, my face falling blank like a stage after the lights go out.

I did this every night, just as fervently as other people prayed.

***

At middle school cheer practice, we rolled out eight blue mats across the cafeteria floor, taping them together so they would not slide apart. Stomp, stomp, clap. The sound echoed flatly against the walls. Stomp, stomp, clap. Our bodies moved in sync, feet striking the mat together, hands cutting through the air together. The sound filled the room in steady bursts, over and over, until it stopped sounding like noise and became something else.

One of the new girls, Autumn, kept losing the beat. Stomp, pause, stomp. Stomp, clap, pause. Around us, the others began to look at each other; small, quick looks, the kind that travel fast and settle heavily. The air in the cafeteria changed, and the room began to shrink, the edges pulling inward. A faint ringing started in my ears, so quiet at first I thought it was coming from the lights.

At that moment, Autumn stopped being just a girl messing up a chant. She became flesh and bone, just like me — a body in a room full of people who knew exactly where to put their hands.

Later, in the locker room, the team formed a circle, talking in low, excited voices.

“Oh my God, Autumn is so embarrassing,” one of them said, and the others laughed sharp, metallic laughter that seemed to bounce off the lockers and come back louder. The circle tightened slightly, shoulders brushing, heads leaning inward. I stood just outside the center of them and felt the familiar pressure in the room, the feeling that something was being decided.

The ringing in my ears grew louder. It filled my head until it was hard to hear anything else.

They laughed, and I laughed with them, my voice sliding into place half a second too late but close enough. In the mirror across the room, I caught a glimpse of myself under the fluorescent lights — shiny, polished, reflective. My face arranged correctly, my body angled just right, my hands moving when they were supposed to. The tension in the room dissolved. The frequency stilled. My God was pleased.

That night, I stood in the bathroom and tried to make that same face again, the one from the mirror, the one that had worked.

I practiced until my cheeks hurt.

Years passed of me sanding down every sharp edge, every wrong reaction, every expression that lasted too long or not long enough. I learned how to nod while someone was talking, how to laugh before the silence became uncomfortable, and how to say the right thing in the right tone. I built a version of myself that could move through rooms without disturbing anything, something smooth and quiet and acceptable.

***

One afternoon during online school, the screen went black as my classmates logged off one by one. Their faces disappeared into small gray rectangles until it was just my own reflection staring back at me. The house was silent. It was 3 p.m., and I decided to make my bed.

I pulled the sheets tight, folding the corners carefully, smoothing the fabric with the flat of my hand. The sheet had to be perfectly straight, perfectly flat, no wrinkles. I pulled harder, trying to get it smooth enough, tight enough, right enough.

The fabric tore.

The sound was small, but it split the world open. The sheet gave way in my hands, the tension releasing all at once, and suddenly I could feel everything — the weight of my arms, the feeling of my legs touching, the pressure of my chest rising and falling, the fact that I was a body, a living thing, a creature trapped inside skin. My hands stopped working properly, moving too fast or too slow, like they no longer belonged to me. I tried to smooth the sheet, to fix what I had torn, to make it flat again, but the fabric would not come back together.

The ringing came back, but this time it was deafening, a constant scream inside my head. My skin prickled, goosebumps rising like a warning. I felt like prey — like a small animal that suddenly realized it was being hunted, even if it could not see the predator.

Something inside me opened quietly, without spectacle, just a slow turning inside out. Everything I had been holding in place began to spill loose, and I did not know how to gather it again. I pressed my hands against my body as if I could keep something from falling out. I was no longer performing. I was no longer in control. It was grief without an object, fear without a name.

Later, my mom found me in the closet, curled in on myself, rocking back and forth like a much younger child. For years, I had survived by disconnecting from my body, from my fear, from the constant awareness of being alive. But my body had been keeping score the whole time, and it finally collected.

I was fifteen when the world ended, and no one noticed. The next morning, the sun still rose. Birds still screamed in the trees. Traffic still moved in long, impatient lines. People still laughed in hallways, raised their hands in class, and knew exactly what to do with their hands. The world continued with the same quiet certainty, as if nothing had happened.

***

I still don’t always know where to put my hands, but they are here. Resting on desks, wrapped around coffee cups, and pressed into the pockets of my jacket. They are awkward and restless, and sometimes they shake, but they are mine.

I did not think being human would feel like this — this loud and bright and fragile all at once. There is a chaos to being alive, a constant awareness that there is no exit strategy, that the world will keep spinning and the ceiling fans will keep whirring and the birds will keep screaming, whether I understand any of it or not. But I know something now that I didn’t know then: being human is not a performance you perfect. It is something you agree to participate in, over and over again, without ever fully understanding it. There is no moment where you arrive and suddenly know exactly how to exist. There is only the constant, quiet decision to remain.

I am still learning the words. I am still learning where to stand. I am still learning what to do with my hands.

I am still here. ■

By Danielle Yampuler

A myth like Kurt Cobain can play God forever. A woman like Courtney Love will never even be an angel.

In April of 1994, Kurt Cobain picks up a shotgun and becomes God. He flies higher and higher in the sky just to find that his wings cannot melt, so the sun swallows him whole.

The supernova of the world’s youngest and brightest star leaves behind an acute darkness. Kurt’s only been famous for three years, but he changes the world in his wake. He was the newly christened voice of a generation, the messiah of the outcasts. Five days after his death, thousands of fans gather for a vigil. Each holds a candle in their hand, attempting to recreate the light he emanated. A scratchy, congested voice plays from a speaker to the crowd. It’s a recording by Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife. She sounds like she’s been crying for days. She’s lying alone in the bed she and Kurt once shared, reading his note.

Kurt wrote of loving too much, of being too much. Of feeling that his music and performances no longer evoked anything in him. He wrote of not being able to handle his audience, their adoration for him. As she reads his note, Courtney begs with words that feel worn out, tired of pleading the same thing over and over to a man who won’t listen. She begs him to just step away from being a rock star, to enjoy what he has. She ridicules his inability to. It’s too late for him to hear it.

She’s angry, she’s sobbing, she feels as empty as she ever has. Their daughter, Frances, is in the other room. She’s barely two years old.

“And don't remember this, cause this is a fucking lie!” she growls out, before reading the end of Kurt’s note. “It's better to burn out than to fade away.”

Since her husband died, Courtney spends most of her time in bed. Kurt’s mother keeps her company. It is there that she rethinks every moment of her and Kurt’s life together, searching, scavenging for anything she could have done to prevent this.

Maybe she should have tried harder to get them both sober. Kurt figured out early that drugs were an easy way to numb the constant thoughts that raced through his head. He first started using heroin under the nose of his previous girlfriend. Courtney also used. Their mutual addiction made it hard for either to quit. The couple had checked themselves into separate rehab facilities, but he broke out. He died one week later, a bullet in his skull and a lethal dose of heroin in his veins.

Maybe she should have never left his side — not since he locked himself in a room with a gun and threatened to set it off. Not since he swallowed over 50 pills with a glass of champagne.

Maybe she should have never said a single fucking thing to that journalist. Vanity Fair’s 1992 article was, to an extent, the beginning of his end. The magazine quoted Courtney saying that she had used heroin early in her pregnancy. CPS temporarily removed their newborn daughter over the public outcry the story caused. Kurt and Courtney got their child back quickly, but the loss would linger. The couple became erratic, paranoid. They sent death threats to journalists. They refused most interviews.  The media became a predator, one intent on ripping them limb from limb and sewing them into something they could no longer recognize. Their bodies were not their own. Their daughter was not their own.

Courtney tries to shake the thoughts out of her head, tries to quiet her mind enough to sleep. She rolls over in bed and stares at the sleeping form of Kurt’s mother. In the dark like this, she can believe her skinny frame is his instead. The deep ache in her chest sharpens.

Two days after the vigil, Courtney’s band Hole releases a new album, “Live Through This”. This shocks a public who expects her to drown in grief. The brevity of the couple’s four-year romance compounds the public’s suspicions: Courtney married Kurt too quickly, had his child too quickly, and then he died too quickly. Rumors fly of a black widow who killed her husband for his estate and fame.

These rumors neglect that Courtney is simply grieving the way she does all things — loudly, publicly, whether others like it or not. Despite its recording the year prior to Cobain’s death, her new album is all about grief. Grief over the loss of her child, over her loss of control, over the slow loss of her husband. Everything had been taken from her, again and again, until she had to scream about it.

Four months after the album’s release, Courtney looks over a roaring crowd, every eye locked upon her. She looks just as she always does — her hair is messy, bleach-blonde, chopped to her shoulders. Her dress is vintage and torn. Her lips are red. This is her first performance since her husband died, and his ghost hangs over everything she does. The crowd feels it, and so does she. “They really want you, and I do too.” His absence is such a presence that he practically takes corporal form next to her.

The crowd wants to watch Courtney fall apart. Luckily for them, she has never tried to be put-together. She self-identifies as an amalgamation of doll parts, like the ones her late husband collected. She is always ready to break apart. They should know this about her by now.

Kurt was obsessed with his image. He was known for thinking his words over, lest he said the wrong thing and was misinterpreted. Courtney lays everything out on the table. Her mouth is as quick as her brain. She starts fights with little intent to finish them. She’s brash, loud. Where Kurt always cared for how he was perceived, Courtney builds her brand on chaos. That was probably what he loved about her: her ability to verbalize the things he could never dream of saying.

When Courtney performs, it’s messy. She screams the things she sang on the album. She is all flesh and blood and never tries to act as though she is anything more than human. When she tells the audience, “Someday you will ache like I ache,” they can see her guts spill out onto the stage. Every performance of the “Live Through This” tour is a funeral for the one who didn’t.

“I want him! He’s all gone!” she screams, changing the lyrics of a song that she had previously written about losing her child. “Where is my baby? Who took my baby?”

She asks the question, but she knows the answer. As she looks out over the crowd, she knows that they took her daughter from her. They took Kurt from her. They’ll keep on taking, for as long as they’re allowed.

However, “Live Through This” is not just about loss. It’s about waking up to a world that would take everything from you and facing it regardless.

In “Asking For It”, Courtney promises this: “If you live through this with me, I swear that I will die for you.” This line is the thesis of the album, and she repeats it, like a prayer. This refers to the media circus that surrounded their lives. Kurt’s voice is mixed into the backing vocals. He sings the line with her, but his voice is murky and hard to discern. They were making a promise to each other, one he broke when he died. For better or for worse, Courtney refuses to die for someone who can’t live for her.

A few years after Kurt’s death, Courtney still constantly contemplates his final words. She still hates them. She writes down this lyric, a response of sorts: “It’s better to rise than fade away.” In words less eloquent, she is saying: I am not going to burn out for any fucking one of you. I’d rather live.

Maybe that’s the best thing a star can do: rise above it all. To refuse to give any more of yourself to a public that doesn’t know the difference between loving someone and killing them. In her refusal to burn out or fade away, Courtney remained distinctly human.

Coutney lives the rest of her life in the public eye, and some rightfully question whether she should have. She says unforgivable things to her fans. She has a knack for turning friends into enemies, and she assaults more than a couple of them. She continues her drug use throughout her daughter’s childhood, in Frances’s view. The woman, regardless of her pain, is infamous for a reason.

Kurt tied up his image neatly. He was a rock legend, and he died at the peak of his legacy, forever immortalizing himself as untouchable. No one has to question what Kurt would have been like in his old age, whether his voice would have continued to resonate with the youth of today. One could even wonder if his death was the best thing he ever did for himself.

To that, Courtney would respond: Fuck you. ■

By Ariel Barley

"A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life. A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty.” — Elsa Schiaparelli

1952, just before a comeback


A Hollywood man asks Marilyn Monroe what she wears to bed.

Marilyn, a tactful woman, doesn’t necessarily want to disclose that she sleeps in the nude. So she smiles. Her golden curls bounce as she comes up with something clever. She thinks of her nightstand and of jasmine misting over her neck.

“Well, I wear Chanel No. 5.”

Months later, Coco Chanel sits at a desk chair in Switzerland, at Beau-Rivage Palace. This is where she has been in exile since the war, hiding from the truth of her German lover — a Nazi intelligence officer. She will be buried here, a few decades from now, under five stone lions that will watch her grave. Even later than that, in 2011, the world will find out she did more than just love a man for Nazi Germany. The House of Chanel will dissociate from its maker.

But in 1952, all is not yet lost. Pages slip between Chanel’s fingers. She reads the same interview, over and over again, a familiar spark settling in her gut. The culprit: LIFE Magazine — an interview with Marilyn Monroe herself. Chanel thumbs the square neck of her own personal bottle of Chanel No. 5. The edges of the stopper make pink imprints on her fingertips, and those same fingertips draw circles into her phone dial. Tucked under her desk is a sketchbook full of collarless tweed suits, a slap-in-the-face for Christian Dior and his restrictive New Look.

She has to make a call. Chanel has never been one to waste an opportunity like this.


Late 1930s, just before the second World War

The scene is a Parisian costume ball. Distinguished guests adorn masks and gloves and big shoes for making dancerly noises — as much noise as possible. They sparkle, because they must in these times, and they speak in tittling whispers when Elsa Schiaparelli enters the hall dressed as a tree, illuminated by candlelight.

By design she ignites conversation. Her name brings a certain association — ”Schiap” is what they call her sometimes — ”shciap” like the sound of velcro teeth ripping apart. That name pinballs from guest to guest, wild hot gossip. If it weren’t a costume ball, people may have been discussing her daring outfit — the whorls of brown paint that form slabs of bark on her skin, blurring the line between dress and body — but today, they wonder if she’s heard who else was invited.

Coco Chanel chose not to dress up tonight.

Her own silhouette — a slinky skirt, sharp shoulders, a shape every distinguished woman will don come morning, after this foray into extravagance  — is iconic enough. She cuts through the throngs of people with her practiced smile. This ball is business for her — hands locked with potential collaborators, lips brushing lightly over the cheeks of loyal and lavish customers. The elite gather naturally around her. They want to touch, to see, to dance with her. They wonder if her glamour will rub off onto them. A smudge of rosewood lipstick, a bit of her signature scent grabbing onto the fibers of their costumes and lingering. She will make them chic by association. She’s so…effortless, they think.

Schiaparelli pays Chanel no mind at first. She has her own rounds to make, her own charm to pour onto her own clientele. Schiaparelli’s girls come to her; she never seeks them out. They prod her with questions and wait for her outlandish responses. Her words demand eyes, and her hands command attention. Those hands are rugged from countless pins poking into them. They tell the story of her newly dyed furs at home — of the icy blues and shocking pinks she’s woven into her upcoming collection, bright against the drab of a looming war.

“Elsa,” one of her girls indicates, pointing behind Schiaparelli. Mid-spiel, Schiaparelli turns around.

Chanel stands, all smooth hands, head cocked in an unspoken proposition. “Shall we dance?”

The hall holds its breath.

“Sure, hatmaker.”

Their dance is tight, practiced, one woman trying to lead the other. Sharp heels clack. Guests pretend not to watch. They are backing up, backing up, and —

A scream from outside their dance is their only warning. Schiaparelli has misstepped — or maybe it was Chanel. Either way, Schiaparelli falls into an ornate candelabra, and her dress is on fire.

An explosion of smells. The sea of guests condense around them and extinguish the fire with whatever they have on hand. Soda water seeps into Schiaparelli’s skin. Onlookers mourn the destruction of her dress.

But Schiaparelli just stares at Chanel, at the twitchings of a red smile on her lips. Chanel is thinking: checkmate, and she wants Schiaparelli to hear it. Instead, her sentiment echoes through the guests, and later to the streets of Paris, over coffees and dinner: She pushed her. No, she didn’t. I saw it — no, I saw it!

But in that moment Schiaparelli does not speak. Instead she pictures a dress made of fire, wondering what fabric could capture the intensity of that brief luminescent explosion. What could make the sounds of the guests around them? Chiffon? Rayon? Cellophane? She thinks of construction, where seams will meet.

She’s in her own world, back in her studio, waiting to materialize this moment and then touch it a thousand times.


1937, just before Time Magazine's first cover with a female fashion designer

At 21 Place Vendôme, everything is pink, and Elsa Schiaparelli sits in all of that pink, observing the fruits of her most recent collaboration.

Models slink by her, donning the combined work of her and surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Schiaparelli met him by chance a handful of years ago on the streets of Paris, their early friendship culminating in a compact powder compartment shaped like a rotary phone dial. Now, they bask in what they are able to do together — the fact that their work gets people talking.

A model stops in front of her, her hair blending seamlessly with a hat shaped like a shoe. Another wears a dress painted with the form of a lobster; Schiaparelli still feels that copper paint dried on her palms, sticky and cracking. A ribbon cinches the model’s waist, pulling the eye towards the point before the fabric swells.

Schiaparelli thinks of what that Coco Chanel calls her, in place of her name, to anyone who asks — press, other designers, Schiaparelli herself: that Italian artist who makes clothes. She turns it over in her head, and watches as a model breathes life into her dress. Or maybe the dress brings life into the model. Either way, it’s creation. She wonders: how could clothes be anything but art?


1903, just before her big break

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel is almost twenty, and she kicks her legs high, face adorned in dark, thick makeup that will show up well under the bright lights of La Rotonde cafe. She is poseuse for today — the act sandwiched between the main acts, and she can’t stand that thought. She is a seamstress on the days where she doesn’t dance, and she can’t stand that thought either.

Chanel will not settle for mediocrity. She will be great — she is great. She just knows it. And so she sings, and she sews. Her lucky break will come soon, in the form of a rich man who will fund her first shop under her new name — a name given to her by the cabaret girls. There, she will sell elegant hats for elegant women, and her empire will blossom.

Until then, she sings, and she waits for her opening.

In Rome, Elsa Schiaparelli fancies herself ugly. Her sister is the natural beauty of their family, but that thought does not enrage her. Instead, as she travels with her father to Tunisia, she borrows beauty from the world around her and tucks it away for later, in sketchbooks and in the folds of her ever-rippling mind.

Tunisia is only the beginning. Schiaparelli will write over the next few years, because she cannot help but create. She will write poems of mythology and sex and love and call them Arethusa. Those images will later appear in her collections — in a button shaped like a bow or a painting of a nude woman on fabric. She will stun — her family, her friends, the world — she just knows it. She will be shocking, and she will turn wars into gloves because she is an artist.

A hatmaker and an artist. Clothes that comfort women and clothes that redefine them. The fashion world will chew you up and spit you out, merciless. It wants to — but for them, it waits. ■