Suddenly Hillary Whitney—a graduate of the very same boarding school and one of Sigrid’s former roommates—was on the phone, asking Cat to be her assistant at RAGE and promising that Cooper could turn her student visa into a work visa. Cat had jumped at the opportunity to work for the magazine and for Margot Villiers, a woman she’d long admired. Margot was the only public feminist Cat could think of who wasn’t painted with the word bitch; instead, newspapers, journals, magazines, and history books described her using words and phrases otherwise reserved for men. Legendary, futurist, visionary, perfectionist, creative genius, hard-nosed leader; never difficult, high-strung, radical, or temperamental. No woman, including President Warren, had ever managed that.
Cat found herself in New York four days later, suitcase in hand, knocking on Sigrid’s door.
Right away her responsibilities at RAGE felt relevant to her academic work, although her parents—a practical-minded pair who lived happily on their hobby farm in rural Belgium—rolled their eyes at the connections she insisted were obvious. You’re too smart to work at a magazine, Katteke, her mother had chided at first, and you are too old to start anew. Choose something you can excel at or you will have a crisis at thirty, and then where will you go? Yet, six years later, now thirty-three, Cat truly felt she was still practicing, on an exceptionally macro level, the theories and arguments she had made all through her master’s and doctoral research on the feminist aesthetic practices of fine art. When asked to explain to others why she’d left academia for a women’s magazine, she often referred to poet and art critic John Berger’s observation on the historic depictions of women’s bodies in photography and painting from his book Ways of Seeing:
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually…
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
She’d had a short, slightly truncated quote from Ways of Seeing screenprinted over a photograph of one of Egyptian artist Ghada Amer’s embroideries of a woman pulling down her underpants. In rose-colored paint, it read: “A woman’s presence defines what can and cannot be done to her.”
Cat had the screenprint framed in blue and hung it next to her desk, where visitors to her office could get a nice long stare at it without having to crane their necks. The opposite wall held an enormous metal bookcase filled with all of her books from graduate school lest her peers forget, even for a moment, where she’d come from.
Still, every day at RAGE was a personal challenge for Cat to figure out how to apologize for the ads, the actual and unfortunate bulk of the magazine’s pages, the quantity of which grew every month. With a staff of seventy-five in New York, seventy in Los Angeles (though only a third were full-time with benefits), and the enormous cost of the lobbyists and attorneys they employed to ensure the accuracy of their claims that the featured apparel was, in fact, made by living-wage workers, RAGE Fashion Book was beyond expensive to publish.
The previous decade’s watershed declines in print advertising rates meant that RAGE was profitable only when domestic newsstand sales matched domestic subscribers, a total monthly goal circulation of eight million. The international editions merely broke even, their continued existence a reflection of only Margot Villiers’s negotiating skills and the importance of the RAGE brand; it was the domestic subscriptions and sales that mattered to Cooper. But it was getting harder every day to be popular, and ethical, and profitable. Their numbers had fallen short every issue of the last twenty, and so they took on more ads for fewer dollars every single month.
The editorials that Cat worked on for each issue served two purposes: to attract the advertisers on the opposing pages and, more to her point, to dispute them. Cat thought that fashion and beauty advertising preyed on the basest human insecurities, showing only legions of poreless, polished dolls serving as human shelves for handbags and perfume, their mouths set into dick-sucking Os and their legs splayed open, slack and lifeless. Buy this bag, the advertisements in RAGE screamed, and you’ll be someone’s princess, so wealthy you don’t need to eat, so successful you don’t need to work.
Those advertisements paid her salary, but they haunted her dreams, too.
She’d spent the last six years working harder than she ever had in school to ensure that the women of RAGE’s editorial pages were aspirational in their strangeness, in their danger, in outfits that very specifically said I am not a woman for sale. Cat was determined that the next generation of little girls would not want to grow up and look like a dictator’s mistress—fake tits pouring out of bandage dresses, feet shoved into bindings, literally immobilized by their roles as living, breathing decoration. She wanted them to grow up to want to look like Isabella Blow or Anna Piaggi: women who wore watermelons on their heads and carpets as skirts, women whose self-presentation was so complex that no stranger could ever presume to know what could or could not be done to them but only immediately consider what those women might be doing to the world.
Today’s challenge: choosing the accessories for Dotty for It, the Sylvia-Plath-in-a-mental-hospital-themed spread for October shooting in three weeks. Bess had placed a tray of possibilities on her desk next to the tray for Judy and the Technicolor Housecoat, Margot’s inspired shoot for the November issue about a bored suburban housewife who decides to eat a fistful of magic mushrooms and Scarlett O’Hara some clothes out of every goddamn upholstered object in the house.
Cat cracked open her laptop and started sorting through the Dotty for It tray, snapping pictures with her phone. Bess had chosen several large bangles covered in enamel polka dots; six pairs of clip-on earrings in solid gold, set with both paste and real gemstones; three silver collar necklaces that looked like chain-mail dickeys; a sterling rope with an enormous triangle that hung down to the belly button; and fifteen rings that sat above the knuckle in thin bands. Cat logged into the company’s private badge board, used to organize shoots across departments, and examined the clothes Margot and Paula had approved: simple shifts with barely there net-textured polka dots from Stella McCartney; tapered cigarette pants and doctor’s-coat-length felted-wool cardigans from Jil Sander; and overstarched French-striped tieback cotton dresses that looked like stiff hospital gowns from Marc Jacobs. The shoot would be on location at Scoria Vale, the venerable and picturesque rehab in Connecticut that had been treating the mental health and addictions of rich New Yorkers since the 1930s. The clothes suggested a quiet kind of mania, and Cat thought that Tilda Swinton would look amazing in all of them.