“I am sure I will,” he’d said, smiling at her.
By midmorning, when the sun was still low enough in the sky to not create harsh shadows, Didier was firing off shots of the three girls lounging poolside, while their male counterparts cannonballed into the water in the background. Only Didier could inject such high energy into a languorous setting. It was one of his signature traits. Compositions that felt alive, dynamic.
“A parasol! Please,” Jaya repeated from her position front and center on her chaise longue. They had just paused to switch over the camera lens when she began voicing her displeasure.
Cecilia watched as James, Sarah’s assistant—a lanky, thirtyish, soft-spoken Brit—hurried inside to their staging area to fetch some sort of covering for the supermodel.
“I burn easily, too, if I’m not careful,” Katrine said from her adjacent chaise. They were wearing matching black bikinis, sunglasses. Anouk’s bikini was white.
“Oh, I don’t burn. I just…” Jaya shrugged her pointy shoulders. “I just don’t like being dark.”
Cecilia looked up from where she was adjusting a reflector. She knew what she’d heard, but when no one on set reacted or even looked in her direction, she buried it. After close to five years in the business, her shell had somewhat hardened. She’d been privy to an onslaught of inappropriate comments. Some insensitive, some ignorant, some downright nasty. Sexist, racist, ageist, lookist. For all its inherent beauty, the fashion world could be an ugly, petty place. But it was a coveted industry, and so Cecilia had learned that it was often best to bite one’s tongue and let the less pernicious remarks slide.
And it wasn’t that she couldn’t appreciate Jaya’s situation. Cecilia did not particularly want to get darker either. That morning, she had donned a large-brimmed utilitarian sun hat and smothered SPF 45 on her face and limbs before leaving her hotel room, before the sun had even risen. This was partly because she’d read an alarming article on skin cancer a couple of years back and how those with more pigment were not necessarily immune. And partly because she was still haunted by the wrath of her mother, who had laid into Cecilia when she returned from two weeks in the Côte d’Azur following her junior year in Paris, darker than she’d ever been. “When you stepped off of that plane, you were so black I was embarrassed,” Olive Chen had chided.
It had stayed with her. That kind of thing always did.
James reappeared presently with a parasol to provide Jaya her protection. For thirty seconds the crew watched in silence while he awkwardly held the apparatus and Jaya lolled like Cleopatra.
Finally, Didier cleared his throat. “On y va, ma belle? T’es prête?”
“Oh, are you waiting on me? I’m sorry.” She flicked her wrist, toshoo James away, and then returned to posing, arching her back and angling her head toward the camera. “So sorry. Yes, I’m ready.”
Anouk snickered then and Jaya and Katrine both turned in her direction. Their expressions unreadable. It was not an admonishment so much as a curiosity. Who was this new girl? And why wasn’t she kowtowing like the rest of them? Fearless (or was it clueless?), Anouk squared off with them, smiled her effervescent smile, and then just as quickly returned to her model pout.
Cecilia could not help but be a little impressed.
Later in the afternoon, after the catered lunch and touch-ups, they’d set up a shot in the salon. Bas and Jaya playing chess on a marble table in the foreground, while Elliot watched them from a nearby sofa. Katrine curled beside him, feigning sleep, her blond head nestled in his lap, his hand in her hair. Anouk angled at the other side of the divan in a pair of minuscule shorts, her bare legs outstretched before her. Her head tucked into a book. To Cecilia, the scene felt forced and improbable. But the Italians drank it up.
“I love it! Love!” the art director Rafaella cooed. “It’s sexy, but smart. The chess… mind games. And these three, so pretty. Serene.” She nodded toward the Elliot-Katrine-Anouk configuration, her big, curly hair bouncing. “You are genius, Didier. Beatriz! Genius!”
“Ti piace?” Beatriz looked up from where she was loosening one of the spaghetti straps on Jaya’s dress, allowing it to drape off her shoulder.
“Molto!”
Cecilia wasn’t certaingeniuswas the accurate term. Didier had shown her and Marc the series of photos he was using for inspiration. A 1964 spread by Richard Avedon, shot in Ibiza forHarper’s Bazaar. Avedon had employed a pair of identical Spanish twins and a fetching Brazilian diplomat to create a story that was both artistic and titillating. A perverse ménage à trois of sorts. Cynical, sultry, narcissistic. All qualities that seemed to work for the di Varenna campaign.
“You have to know your history. You have to know and respect what came before you,” Didier had said to them, two weeks prior, in the studio, just before the epic blizzard that shut down all of New York.“Anyone can be good, but if you want to be great, you have to do the homework. You study them. All. Avedon. Penn. Stern. Bailey. You get to know them. Know what they did. Know why they were special.”
Cecilia appreciated when Didier would impart these little words of wisdom. But at the same time, becoming aware of the technical eliminated some of the magic. Didier wasn’t a genius so much as someone who borrowed from other photographers and then put a fresh spin on it to make it something new. To make it his own. And perhaps at the core, this was what all artists did. Perhaps there was no reinventing the wheel. There was just changing the hubcaps. And something about that made Cecilia sad.
“Viens ici, Cecilia,” he called to her now.
After shooting off a few rolls, he’d had her and Marc reposition the lights, and she’d been securing the last of the stands with a sandbag. She stood then, sweaty, in overalls and work gloves, her hair in a solitary braid. Very little about her job was glamorous.
Didier was fanning a developing Polaroid, and without saying a word, he handed it to her and let her inspect it. Cecilia was struck by the image. He had shifted the focus so that Jaya and Bas were now muted in the foreground. The lines of Jaya’s bare shoulder, the deconstructed chignon, the vertebrae at the back of her neck, the planes of Bas’s chiseled face. All exquisite. But there, between the two of them, at the center of the composition, was Anouk. Her figure cool, composed. Yet there was an intensity in her eyes, a beguiling smile on her lips, just over the top of her book. The other models were likely not aware, but with the slightest of adjustments Didier had made Anouk the star.
“Tu vois?” he asked, pushing his round glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, his eyes twinkling. As if he was sharing a secret.
“I see.” Cecilia nodded, and then without further instruction, revisited the light stand she’d just set, and tweaked the angle, so that it was fixed on its proper subject. She turned her attention back to the scene before her again and realized that from this new perspective it no longer felt forced and improbable. It felt like art.
Maybe Didier was a genius after all.
By the fifth and final setup of the day, they’d hit a groove. They were shooting on the terrace again, this time at the bar beneath the pergola. The sun dipping in the winter sky, bathing everything in an apricot hue. Soon it would be pink, perfect. “Magic hour,” photographers called it. Someone had loaded the remix of Everything But the Girl’s “Missing” into the CD player. Jean-Luc had wanted a shot in which they were gathered around the bar, but because their target demo skewed as young as eighteen, they were trying to avoid obvious references to alcohol. And so, instead of mixing margaritas, Bas and Elliot were somewhat comically tasked with cutting up a couple of watermelons.
“This morning I thought perhaps we were playing at rented cabana boys, but now I’m thinking we might just be the hired help,” Elliot ribbed, while they were going through touch-ups. For the moment, it was just the models, Santiago, Paola (one of Beatriz’s two assistants), Marc, and Cecilia on the set. The others had scattered to the far sides of the terrace, out of earshot.
“At least they gave you a big knife. Mine is, like, for cheese or butter or something.
