Fashionistas Read Online Free PDF

picture frames and the quirky, useless things that clutter other people’s desktops.
    I sit down and search my brain for an old favorite sport that skate-skiing has supplanted. I draw a blank.
    “Forget snowboarding,” she says, handing me a brochure with snow-covered peaks and après-ski fireplaces, “here’s the sexy new alternative the stars are racing to learn.”
    Although snowboarding never really made an impression on me and is easily forgotten, I somehow doubt that the sexy, new alternative will take up permanent residence in mymind. My psyche is a revolving door for trends. “All right.”
    “Excellent,” she says, pleased by my amenability. “Give me five hundred words on the Hippest Fashions To Skate-Ski In. Call the designers and get a list of celebrity clients. We’ll only shoot those outfits with names attached. Start with Versace. I think they have a line of outerwear. And for That Perfect Touch of Whimsy, call Sanrio and see if they make Hello Kitty skate-skies. We want to hold on to our under-twenty-fives.”
    The nanoconference is over and I get up from the chair. I stand up and marvel that I even bother sitting down at all. “I’ll get right on it,” I say, as though I’m Lois Lane and skate-skiing is a threat to the citizens of Metropolis. What we do is not journalism but sometimes I forget.
    “And what is skate-skiing?” I ask before leaving the office. Usually I feign familiarity with esoteric topics during these meetings and then run to Netscape for elucidation the second they’re over, but not today. Today I don’t feel like playing. Today I want to have things explained. I don’t know what to attribute this odd occasion of orneriness to, but I wonder for the very first time if I’m reaching the end of my tether. Five years might be all I can stand of nothing.
    Dot sighs heavily at my ignorance. “The Most Fun You’re Not Having,” she says definitively, before picking up the telephone.
    But she’s wrong. Skate-skiing is not the most fun I’m not having. The most fun I’m not having is nothing so innocuous as a sport that combines the heart-healthy endurance of cross-country with the stimulating thrill of alpine.

Getting To Know You
    M arguerite Tourneau Holland Beckett Velazquez Constantine Thomas calls me into her office for a talk. Since Christine, Kate and Allison have already gone before me, I’m expecting the summons and don’t leave for lunch until it comes. Then I walk down the hall to a small office that shares a wall with the elevator shaft. You can hear the lifts going by.
    This is not Eleanor Zorn’s old office. Eleanor had a large corner suite with a comfortable sitting area and wide windows that overlook both Sixth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. She had bright spots of sunlight in the mornings and the iridescent glow of Radio City Music Hall in the evenings. Marguerite has none of that. Her office is so tiny, it can barely accommodate a desk and chair. There is no place for a couch or a coffee table, and for the moment visitors have to sit on a plastic folding chair that is missing its fourth leg.
    Marguerite has a window, but it’s the sort you find in nineteenth-century French adventure novels, the type that reminds you of the world outside but doesn’t let you see it. All you can see are brown panels from the building across thestreet, and the view itself hangs on the wall like a piece of modern art.
    This is further evidence of Jane’s vehement dislike.
    Although this meeting has been advertised as an informal chat, I’ve brought half my file cabinet with me and several old issues of the magazine. I don’t know what to expect and I want to be prepared.
    “Bonjour,” she says, holding an antique watering can. She’s in the middle of watering her plants. This is only the afternoon of her second day, but she has already imprinted herself on the little office with African violets and flowering geraniums and wandering pathos, and her imprint has the