Beat Girl

Chapter #7 | My Best Friend

In a Soho studio, an impeccably groomed Steve was tending to a customer, a portly middle-aged woman. With his gleaming side-parting and sartorial flair, Steve looked like he had stepped right out of a 1940s Hollywood movie. I had just crept into the studio, mindful of the fact there may be customers inside and tried not to make any noise. Taking a colourful piece of fabric that was lying beside his sewing machine, and ignoring the plain jacket that lay next to it, Steve draped the customer in the material.

‘You can choose everything – the cut, the fabric, hey, you can even choose which designer you want to copy,’ Steve enthused, then looked up when he heard me approaching. ‘She’s in the back,’ he said, giving me a quick smile, before returning to the customer.

I nodded and made my way towards the office part of the studio, where I found Amy sitting at her desk, laden with invoices. Amy appeared to be staring at something in a magazine.

‘Great, you’re here!’ Amy leaned from behind her desk. She knew straight away that I had walked in, as there was only one person with whom Steve would have been so informal.

It was good to finally see Amy after my self-imposed period of solitude. I don’t think we’d ever gone for longer than a couple of days without seeing each other, so this was definitely the longest stretch, save for the odd holiday, but even those we tended to take together. From the back we could still hear Steve talking to his client about the fact that their studio boasted two designers. Amy gathered some half-finished pieces and positioned one of them over me, while consulting a design sketch pinned to the wall.

‘Who needs fit models when your mate’s a perfect ten!’ she said.

As Amy studied how the piece looked on me, we heard the customer enquire about when their jacket alteration would be ready to pick up. Amy made a little face at me; I smiled sympathetically. When Steve answered, promising it would be ready for collection the next day, the deflated tone in his voice was unmistakable.

The sound of the door opening and closing was followed by Steve joining us in the back, where Amy was now in the middle of pinning her creation on me.

‘And this is what we have a fashion degree for!’ Steve lamented, but Amy didn’t respond. With pins in her mouth, she kept her head down, working away at the dress.

Steve and Amy had bonded during their first week at London’s Design College. Like an old married couple, they had told the story of how they first met countless times. Amy had noticed Steve on the first day; it was hard not to. This had been before his current 1940s phase, when he was dressed in a black kilt, military style boots and a conservative striped shirt in a salmon shade, the kind favoured by City bankers. Although all of the fashion freshmen wore something distinctive on their first day, none had stood out quite so strikingly as Steve. His look was so thoroughly thought out and his attitude was so confident that all eyes were drawn to him. Yet no one had approached him, as he cut an intimidating figure. But Amy hadn’t been in the slightest put off by his elaborate get-up. She walked right up to him, a question on her mind, but it wasn’t to enquire what his name was. 

‘Top three designers?’

Steve looked at her and then, without the briefest moment of hesitation, he rolled off his favourites. ‘Haider Ackermann, Dries Van Noten and Yohji Jamamoto.’

Amy had nodded slowly, a smile spreading across her face. This was a fashion nut after her own heart. Following this unconventional overture, which established that they were both into deconstructionist fashion, they soon discovered a shared sense of humour and ended up becoming close friends. So strong was their bond that, after finishing college, they had teamed up to run a studio. Steve was helping Amy set up her own clothing line but, as with any business start-up, they were experiencing more than their share of teething problems.