Carnivore Couture

CHAPTER 1

POTENTIAL

Free brunch, $20 parking fee with an additional $5 per hour, and intimidating staff and security personnel made for an orderly open house. Held anywhere else, there may be rumblings, but only the most inane comments on the decor were had that day. No one had quite the guts to speak out in the true negative yet, not when they were some of the first to step inside the home of Recherché and Co.

The newest fashion house to hit Los Angeles, R&C made a splash before it could be dismissed as another social media fashion brand. Media outlets wasted no time covering the company's public debut through its acquisition of three middling brands that it pulled out of bankruptcy through sheer marketing. Rumors of a contemporary mansion, once the property of a businessman who decided to retire in Monaco, that R&C purchased to become its headquarters added to the intrigue of the neophyte fashion house.

Nestling fashion houses, ones that start from a stately position, usually find their homes in upscale business complexes or grand apartments. Most were paid by designers who have massive financial resources amassed from their trust funds, their parents, or the personal fortune and fame they've farmed from a previous, unrelated career. Birthright fortunes, factories and suppliers from familial relations, or existing businesses were parlayed into further reducing logistics and materials costs, and worries on order minimums and media exposure.

To stand in the literal mansion R&C turned into a potential rival to these faux start-up companies was to believe in its potential.

Entering the foyer alone was enough to defrost the sternest heirs who came to R&C's headquarters in the borders of Bel Air and Holmby Hills. Most of those who came to tear R&C apart for supposedly taking shortcuts for purchasing existing brands or attack them for starting like their bourgeoisie betters without their parents mortgaging their homes a second time, either wandered around the mansion or sat in the lobby clutching CV's they wished they spent more time on.

Architecture and interior design helped in this case. Renovation was minimal except for rooms that needed specialization, helping R&C's headquarters maintain its regal look. The main mansion served as its main building, the adjoining guest house in the back its ancillary offices, and the pool and conservatory as a second reception and party area, and external studio.

The foyer was converted into a reception and waiting area. Staircases on either side of the room framed the traditional-style foyer, sectioning the area into two. A front desk served as registration on the first floor and the brunch buffet on the second floor. Stylish sofas, newly-ordered and delivered from the most sought-after boutique furniture designers in the market, peppered the first and second floor with stylistic flair. Their occupants were just as stylish, with each person either sporting designer wear, bespoke clothing, or outfits they created themselves. Others who were not sitting down were watched from an unimposing distance by staff and security.

Entering from the reception area, guests who entered the east wing on the right were treated to a dining hall converted into a break room. Comfortable tables and chairs and various appliances needed for a proper meal replaced the dining set that was pushed to storage. The high ceiling of the hall was torn down to reconstruct the parlor above it into a two-level unisex sleeping quarter. A staircase on the side of the break room lead to the resting area, where bunk beds, lockers, and drawing tables were strewn about in case of crunch.

The break room was separated by glass doors from a Zen garden. The garden was an isolated square of green entirely open to the sky. It was a modern geometric Zen garden that had artistic swirls of pebbles and large rocks, colored in brown, white, and black, and arranged in geometric patterns around a lone, beautifully-maintained pond. Sparse few trees and flower bushes afforded shade under strategically-placed benches and architect's tables, affording a gorgeous view for designers needing inspiration.

If nature didn't help, the library in the west wing of the mansion had thousands of fashion books, portfolios, textile samples, 3D printers, and references that the nearby UCLA would salivate over. From the age of Neanderthals to King Louis XIV, from Africa to South America, and from silver nano-whiskers to macromolecular textiles, the library boasted everything designers could possibly want to find new spins on their designs. Excess energy was taken care of in the ancillary gym, with weights and various exercise equipment strewn around the former bedroom.

Should the mansions various rooms and facilities fail to serve as appropriate shooting locations, photography studios located in the back of the mansion could satisfy these needs. A drawing room was converted into a large studio for ensemble and concept shoots. Because of its size, a small set could be constructed in the room with the furniture and other materials housed in the former house staff's quarters. For catalog and shoots that did not require elaborate settings, the less formal dining rooms were merged to serve as regular studios. All rooms had the same state-of-the art lighting rigs, a dedicated computer for Lightroom and Photoshop, and a sound system for models and photographers who needed to set the mood of their shoots with music.

The room that garnered the most attention was the atelier or workshop. Where the ballroom was once now had three large workstations for three designers who will be charged with reinventing the labels R&C had already acquired. Whiteboard and cork-boards separated each station, which all had a square cluster of computer stations with dressing tables on the side. More dressing tables were arranged in a square pen beside it. Filling it were sewing machines, full female and male dress forms adjustable for US sizes 0 to 24, fabric steamers, irons and boards, sewing tools and machines, and tables and mats for cutting fabrics and patterns. Restrooms were placed on either side of the ballroom, the tiny parlor on the left converted into a nap area, and the room on the right a mini break room, which only boasted one fridge, a microwave, and a small table set compared to the grand break room.

No CCTV cameras were installed in this room. Servers for technical illustrations and other designs were also local-only and could not be accessed from the outside. Minimizing security breaches was a priority for the workshop. Far too many fashion houses have had their designs stole through poor security management.

A set of stairs took a quarter of the workshop's middle space. The stairs were one of the biggest renovations in the mansion, as they were reconstructed on the opposite side of where it originally was. Now, they obscured the workshop's inner workings from anyone entering from the main doors behind the first floor's reception area.

The stairs lead to the offices on the second floor. The gallery on the east and parlors on the west were converted into a conference room, a smaller consultation room, and offices for the chief officers. The rest of R&C's operations—accounting and finance, HR, marketing, production, among others—had offices in the guest house. An elevated walkway was constructed for easier access to their chiefs' offices from the second floor.

Taking up the entire side across the staircase was the CEO's office. Beyond the waiting room, in the main office itself, was a wall of bookshelves that took up the side of the room opposite the entrance. In a square in the midst of a bookshelf filled with books genuinely dog-eared from use, were dozens of monitors showing the goings-on of every room and monitor in the entire complex, excepting the restrooms and a few unimportant blind spots. The screens complemented the impressive rig and set of monitors that adorned the glass-and-metal desk in front of it. The high-tech set-up looked at home next to the Bottega Veneta modular Rudi seating that circled the desk, if only because the mishmash of styles in the office made the discordant looks gel together. The only concerted effort at harmony was the single color of the furniture and walls, all colored a light to medium shade of grey-blue prescribed to be a calming color.

Swiveling between the computer and the screens was R&C's CEO, Nina de Costa. One of her talented hands was clacking away at the main keyboard of her desktop, while the other hand busied itself switching between cameras on the set up under the screens. One hand was busy ensuring that everyone was playing nice in her new playground, and the other hand was busy laying down the foundations of the next few days.

At 12 p.m., Nina grabbed her phone from her desk and rang her HR staff to check how well the interviews were going. She would not be at the interviews herself. Her underlings were trained in the previous weeks to deal with the daily inanities of working in a fashion house. The more experienced personnel taught others what they've learned from working in such madhouses. She was confident that all of them knew how to interact with the designers sniffing around her new playground for a job by now. Failing that, the Chief HR Officer and Company Secretary were there to put fires out while Nina was occupied.

What kept Nina occupied were her various duties as CEO and her personal meetings. In an hour, she was to dine with the chief officers who will fill the corner offices on the same floor as her. The lunch meeting was for her benefit as much as it was for them; she needed to know now if these people can work together as well as she hoped they would. She had no doubt the group she was meeting the next day would be the source of endless migraines.

Only one of the four persons she hired for the chief positions had a stable personality: Jakob Armansson. Which was just as well, as he would serve R&C as its Chief Operating Officer and Chief Administrative Officer. With a reputation for practicality and being a background man, he was lauded in inner business circles for his outstanding reputation as a fundraising director for various companies in addition to working out the logistics and distribution chains of the very same companies.

Talking him into working for R&C had been surprisingly easy: all Nina had to promise was equal say on how he would handle the company's outsourcing, production lines, and distribution agreements. He gave off the same vibe of anal-retentive precision underneath a veneer of calm, an aura Nina had always thought was impressive as she had tended to be explosive in her younger years.

He began work last week, along with the Chief Marketing Officer, Matthew Higgins Bradshaw. The two helped ease the pressure of today's events and refloating R&C's three brands—Alpha Wolf, Coppélia, and Crowne Séductrice—while Nina busied herself with the formal launch of the company.

Matt, the former paparazzo, just made working with him a little more difficult than Jakob. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, talented. Matt and cameras were like people and breathing natural, inescapable, essential to life. What brilliance he could not achieve in engineering like his dear old dad he poured into getting pictures that truly embodied the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, he translated these talents into becoming the picture beside the word vulture in dictionaries. He was, for the briefest of moments, called Galactus Jr. For all the lives and careers, he destroyed with his devastating pictures of illicit meetings. The tag only got removed when the case that lead to his ejection from the United Kingdom.

His natural volatile tendencies and insistence on acting like a lone wolf had also made him undesirable as a business entity. His personality was pointed at as a major factor for the disintegration of his position as the marketing head of a corporate entity, editorial position on an entertainment website, and CEO position on a gossip rag he helped establish. Thankfully, the mollifying presence of Jakob and his need to prove his worth—without letting others know that he's trying to prove his worth—after years of not getting decent work pacified Matt's fickle habits for now.

Paul Marchetti, the Chief Financial Officer, and Shannon Kara Sahota, her new Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer were the last pieces to R&C's puzzle and would officially begin their work at the mansion today.

Marchetti was the kind of man who Hollywood wished they could write. His lifestyle was mimicked by the extravagance seen in movies inspired by slick stock brokers, the skills and methods actors studied for their award-winning films, and the dashing that most young movie stars wished they he had. All of this persisted even after he left law and his vices for the boring trappings of accountancy in 2005. It was hard to erase his rustic kind of charm, even when he's crunching numbers.

What made him difficult to deal with was his persistent refusal to take anything Nina said seriously. Fashion was completely outside his expertise of corporate defense and taxation, his skill of fixing problems with legal loopholes perhaps the only know-how that could easily be translated for the company's use. His legal expertise could be of interest to the lawyers Nina assembled, though his disbarment entirely removed any possibility of him being on the legal team. He had even pointed this out, before telling Nina that he would only accept her offer if he could handpick the members of the finance department. Nina had agreed, and secretly put her own investigators to run a background check on every person Paul wanted to hire.

Shannon was the youngest by a lot. Second-generation, from a well-to-do family, she grew up disassembling motherboards and writing code for programs later aped by high-profile software giants. Because of her excellent academic record and Harvard peerage, she became an in-demand cybersecurity consultant and licensed penetration tester for various Fortune 500 companies.

Hiring her at the rate that Nina did was a snatch and a true value move. The value outweighed the risks that came with hiring her. A prodigy like Shannon, who started her career as a white hat hacker, were always a risk. What truly made Shannon risky was the very real possibility that she may unravel the past that Nina had done her best to obscure in a cat's cradle of code and shadows.

Another CEO would reconsider their choices for chief positions based on these negatives. Nina de Costa was not any of them. She picked these people because of their competencies, negatives be damned, because she knew they were the kind of people who reached the horizon with their dysfunctions and could set them aside when they have work they could throw themselves into. By the way things were shaping up, the chief executives—even the executives housed at the guesthouse—will definitely have no shortage of work when dealing with the intricacies of raising a start-up fashion brand and the underperforming labels it acquired.

And the chief executives will certainly have no shortage of work once they meet the premières of R&C's three atelier de couture.

The auditions held today were more for show than anything. Certainly, the promising candidates that will be handpicked from the designers milling around R&C's building will remain in Nina's files for future reference. But the premières, the primary lead designers who will be put in charge of R&C's atelier de couture or brands, were already handpicked—though they would never know this. They would be interviewed like everyone else, having been sent the same invitation given to top designers, and they will be given the jobs Nina already primed for them.

Guillaume-Alexandre Guy Gaétan, Zoya Nadozha, and Lily Tress Mackinnon. Unusual names meaningless to those unengaged with the fashion world or born after the year 2000. Even to Nina, they were a meaningless string of names, though this was out of choice than ignorance. She may have picked them after a thorough assessment of their assets and talents, but she knew that their output would be what matters at the end of the day.

The chief executives will get to have their say on what their names mean at lunch and know their true tasks in relation to this group. After all, the work of the lead designers will determine if R&C will grow into an exquisite, uncommon brand or a pretentious, overblown monster.

As if right on cue, Nina's landline rang. The number on its digital display indicated that it was HR.

Good morning, Nina said when she pressed the speakerphone option. How's the morning going?

Running smoothly, the HR underling on the line answered. But all three of the lead designers pushed their schedules back an hour. And I think we do need to send a driver for Mr. Gaétan. He told the assistant assigned to monitor him to ask zookeepers at L.A. Zoo for bird feathers.

Of course. Did the others give a reason for the time changes?

Ms. Nadozha is claiming to have a hung over, and Ms. Mackinnon is having an extended brunch with out-of-town friends.

Mackinnon couldn't move that for this?

We were informed that it is essential to her creativity, or something similar to that, to have mimosas at 12 p.m. with her fellow sorority friends.

Nina shook off a flashback to a time when, she too, would ignore a plan that could turn her life around for unwise impulses that made sense at the time. Over the past few years, I've discovered that people who are not accustomed to controlling their impulses tend to either make up for it with their talents or flounder in mediocrity. Let's hope that the chief executives are the former.

You hired them, ma'am, against all advise, the HR underling said readily. We're just here to keep the fires at bay.

Glad to know you and HR aren't cowed by things such as seniority to tell the truth. Keep me posted, Nina said, cutting off the call.

She swiveled her chair to face her desktop and brought up the profiles of the chief executives and the lead designers. Anger or annoyance couldn't rise in her chest over what happened. She knew something like this would happen, given the groups that she assembled. What she felt was amusement.

I have a feeling I'll know what you felt when you dealt with me, Nina said as she spun away from her desktop, "Mr. Dupré."

She hasn't said that name out loud in years.

CHAPTER 2

JUGGERNAUTS

I bloody hate haute couture, Matt half-shouted as he burst into the conference room with his laptop tucked under one arm. He almost displaced a few interns tasked to bring food to the room from the conservatory on his way in. Some of these publications and suppliers talk to me as if I've done some ghastly wrong against them. All I've ever done is what paparazzi do best. That shouldn't affect our publicity arrangements now.

"Invade their privacy and make a few quick bucks off