Escape From Nowheresville

When I worked for Geoffrey Beene he would sometimes call me “vendeuse extraordinaire.”  It was a small shop and I was the manager, the buyer, the chief merchant, the visual merchandiser.  But my favorite and most important job was to sell, sell the brand and the man, sell the aesthetic.  The clothes were so beautiful in their simplicity and required a lot of explanation to make sure a new client understood just how difficult it was to make something so stripped down.  They looked dreadful on the hanger just because they looked and felt so good on the body.  You cannot have both.  And “stripped down” is relative.  A simple jersey dress could be made of cashmere jersey with the tiniest bias cut chiffon piping hand sewn on each seam. Mr. Beene would come to the shop (we didn’t call it a store or boutique) often, sometimes multiple times a day.  We would do the window displays together, choosing the merchandise and dressing the forms.  Once I remember tying a bow four or five times.  When he told me he liked the second way the best, I had no idea what I had done. Same thing when he would tell me to “do what you do” to the sleeves of a jacket.  But when he would call me “vendeuse extraordinaire” I knew exactly what he meant. SPM