The Effort in Effortless

Kale bag $695 $243, Haute Look.com

“She looks like she’s going to prom.”

The hair stylist pauses mid fluff, Carlota and I curb our cooing over the model’s ringlets, curls carefully highlighted to look sun-kissed. Adam reaches for a handful of organic trail mix. “I want effortlessly elegant. She looks like she’s going to a high school dance with that hair.”

“We can make the model’s waves looser,” Carlota says, “but I like them. Kristopher?”

“I like them, too,” I say. “It’s girl hair.”

“And we’re selling to girls,” says Carlota.

“All right, fine,” says Adam. “After a lifetime of being girls, you guys know what you’re talking about. I’ll go work on a million other things I can do that I actually know.”

The model slips on a vintage Chanel shift, a simple sheath of fabric impeccably tailored so that it melts into a background for the body wearing it. After many minutes of makeup, she naturally looks like a living doll.

“I wanted to tell you,” says a stylist, Mary, pausing her pinning. She’s a hipster hippie in high-waisted, wide jeans and a gold necklace worn as a headband over intentionally tousled hair. “I really love your site.”

“Thanks,” I say. “How long have you been reading it? You don’t have to lie.”

“For months!” she says. “You are hilarious. I loved that c*nt necklace.”

“What’s your site?” asks the model.

I hand her my business card, a sliver of paper half the standard size. “It’s on a diet, like me,” I explain. “My website’s on the back.”

“I’m so glad we met,” I tell Mary. I think about my carefully constructed persona on Kristopher Dukes, the dot-com, and I wonder how it matches up to the deliberately smudged eyeliner, to the perfectly imperfect bobbed curls of Kristopher, the girl. “Are you shocked I’m not dancing in trashy lingerie yelling, ‘F**k’? People seem surprised when they see my Dr. Jekyll instead of my Mr. Hyde.”

“No, no!” she says.

We turn our attention to the photo shoot before I can muse whether it’s true. Carlota, vice president of Haute Look, had invited me to the private sales site’s downtown Los Angeles loft, a penthouse space that bloomed with a walk into it: outside its wide windows was a postcard view of LA’s slowly redeveloping core, of the city’s ongoing rebuilding towards effortless cool.

“Twist your wrist like that, so it looks natural,” the photographer orders the model, a cigar bouncing on his lips as he speaks. I wonder how long it took him to master having that piece of fire balance so safely while he talked.

I turn away from the shoot, back to the rack of designer duds to be photographed for the online sales. Mary safety-pins tags to clothing to be shot: more simply shaped Chanel, Kale’s basic bags, and Jovovich Hawk’s carefully careless, flowing, flowery frocks. I think how the apparel will appear on Haute Look: after days of shooting the clothing, a customer will eye the items online for a few moments, quickly click, and wait for the product to be magically delivered to her doorstep.

“I hope you got enough for a story,” says Carlota.

“I’ll find an angle,” I say. “Thanks for having me.” I toy with how to reconstruct the afternoon into words: maybe it’ll be a simple story about Haute Look selling same season designer clothing for more than half off, perhaps I’ll slant towards the business behind the scenes of glamor shots… I sip my soy latte, and mentally shrug. Whatever I write, it’ll be hours of work readied to be digested in a few minutes.

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