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  By the end of the meeting, she’d founded her own magazine with a renewable contract for two years and a guaranteed staff draw from existing Cooper titles. She turned that two-year audition into the most successful publication the magazine industry had ever seen; betting on the better angels of the Western world’s women had paid off, and she survived the tenure of not only George Cooper, but his younger brother Matthew as well. Their older brother Pete remained a mostly silent partner, and now George Cooper Jr. ran the show.

  In the nineties, as Gap and Nike suffered enormous public relations crises over their sweatshops, Margot had pivoted the magazine’s focus and moved from the patriotic to the humanitarian, banking on the living-wage appeal of luxury goods that required expensive production to ensure their value. “There are no fucking Gap jeans in RAGE” was an oft-repeated Margot quote, along with “We don’t promote clothes made by children,” a claim easy enough to commit to given the quality of the clothing they featured. Nineties-era RAGE was transformed from “American-made” to “living-wage, worldwide,” with the clothes increasing further still in price. When confronted in 1998 by the Wall Street Journal about the astronomical costs of RAGE’s fashion editorials, Margot pointed out, “It costs a lot to look like you didn’t continue a cycle of poverty for working women on the other side of the globe.” Luxury brands touted their RAGE seal of approval, and the mid-level “designer” labels and luxury diffusion lines sold in department stores had to shift their focus to hold on to their cachet, lest they be branded as fascist fashion. RAGE Fashion Book flourished, and though it spawned multiple imitators, none matched the success of Margot’s original.

  But in the new millennium RAGE’s prospects had shifted, trending downward as technology made luxury accessible to people Margot had never considered in ways she’d never dreamed. Street-style stars of their own blogs, who subsisted on protein shakes while Photogramming images of cupcakes, created their own advertorials faster and cheaper than magazines and got their kickbacks direct from the manufacturers through Mania, a software application that was now RAGE’s biggest competitor. Margot’s specific ethics were taken for granted, and her empire no longer cornered the aspirational market for women’s luxury goods. The magazine’s ad rates had been forced into decline as they competed with Manhattan teenagers willing to sell their lives, without any disclosure whatsoever, to the sponsorship of brands. Why pay $150K per page for an advertisement in RAGE to reach four million American women—once, on paper, without a resale opportunity—when you could just throw some free clothes at a teenage girl who would sell them directly to her own twenty million global followers, while Mania measured their clicks, engagement, and ROI down to the second?

  The founders of Mania, four siblings, all born after 9/11, were teenagers who’d started the entire company three years earlier as a middle-school science fair experiment. The Bishop children’s initial app had allowed users to snap or upload a photo of any object or article of clothing, then geolocate the nearest version or substitute on sale. The results were sorted by price and their “proprietary ethical rating,” which compiled publicly available data to determine the degree of “ethics” in the garment or object in question, a notion so vague it gave Margot hives. Mania had over a million downloads in its first week. In under a month venture capital groups from Silicon Valley were competing over their first round of seed funding. Within six months, they’d discovered a way to gather user-generated content from the street-style stars who worshipped the platform, and created an entire advertorial application from the clothing and objects they were already generating revenue from. “Local, ethical, radical” was their slogan, a stab in RAGE’s direction. The software—open source from the start—worked flawlessly, receiving constant updates and patches from the engineers all over the globe who were eager to help out a start-up, one that was made up of not only primarily female engineers but photogenic adolescent ones to boot.

  It didn’t have any editorial content—only user-generated images and advertising—but nobody cared. Now, two years later, Mania’s content was created by their users and curated directly by their advertisers; they operated out of a warehouse in suburban Los Angeles, of all places; and they had a staff of just ten. They were lean, impossibly young, and successful on every available digital platform. Mania was everything that RAGE could never be—no matter how many times Margot flew around the globe to shower their advertisers with the glow of her attention.

  George Cooper Jr. had made it clear he was less inclined than his predecessors to support RAGE’s insane budget, including the lobbying firms, labor attorneys, and global auditors who verified their living-wage-only editorial claims. Until twenty issues ago he’d been unable to do or say anything about how Margot ran the magazine, but now he’d made it crystal clear that if they didn’t move forty-five million global issues by the end of the year, he’d be taking control of the magazine. His staff was checking their expenses line-by-line, and she felt Cooper’s fountain pen swinging over her head, ready to drop and reduce her kingdom to nothing in a moment.

  She stalked through the lobby, Paula trailing behind with her ever-present cellphone glued to her ear, before taking the escalator steps two at a time and striding confidently across the upper lobby. Paula hung back to finish her conversation. A handsome young man in a tuxedo—one of Cooper’s doormen, his uniform designed by Margot herself in the late nineties, although he probably didn’t know that—directed her to elevator B with perfect timing. As she rounded the corner into the elevator bank, the doors opened and the assembled crowd instinctively parted. She swept in and stared down at the black screen of her phone, incapable of making eye contact, until the doors parted on 46 and Margot glided seamlessly into the cavern she’d once built from nothing.

  At 11:00 a.m. the editors of RAGE Fashion Book filed in and took their places around Margot’s office, each unfolding one of the custom camp stools that were stacked next to the door. There were exactly enough stools for the twelve members of the editorial team, no more, no less: Margot’s own foolproof attendance system.

  The walls of the office, a twelve-hundred-square-foot glass rectangle that took up most of the building’s north side, were lined with plants—hearty succulents, lush cascading ferns, potted trees, tuberoses, and even a lilac bush. A corner of the room was arranged with silk sofas, dressmaker’s dummies, and sewing machines, but the empty space in front of Margot’s desk was where Cat and the other editors placed their stools and sat in a semicircle.

  Margot remained behind the lacquered pearl-gray slab she used as a desk. A single yellow legal pad lay on her blotter. Paula sat on the left, a laptop open beneath her narrow fingertips. Constance stood to the right, commanding a large rolling corkboard used to plot stories and issues.

  When the group was seated—Cat let her dress fall around the stool in a perfect bell—Margot spoke five words in the dense Scottish accent she’d never shed.

  “We are losing our edge.”

  No one responded, but Paula’s narrowed eyes and embittered face showed the group all the emotion that Margot’s blank visage so automatically repressed.

  “Mania’s outpacing us, has cornered us on every front, every platform, every angle. I need to hear stories that are original today. Nothing that is a retread. I want new. I want the future. I want you to give me elegant full frontal: provocative, exclusive, salable. We have to go all the way. I want ideas that the little children of Mania cannot even conceive of.”

  Oh shit, thought the editors collectively, each of them scrambling for a spin to place on their pitches by the time their turn came up.

  Margot nodded slightly to Paula, who pointed at managing editor Constance Onderveet, a hawk-nosed, birdlike woman swaddled in Prada.

  “Connie, go,” Paula ordered.

  “I got an update yesterday from Maddie Plattstein,” Constance reported. “She’s nearly done with her exposé on unregulated beauty products. In terms of the fallout, she takes retailers to task but
manages to place a great deal of the blame squarely on Congress and on the manufacturers, so I don’t think we’ll see too much trouble—I can give a quick heads-up to Barneys, Bergdorf’s, Net-a-Porter, and Sephora that they’ll need to check newsstands and be ready to pull product. That should be sufficient courtesy.”

  “Issue and pages?” asked Paula.

  “September, barring any hang-ups with research and legal. Four or five pages.”

  Janet Berg, the senior features editor, nodded in agreement. “It’s solid. I don’t anticipate too much trouble, but we’ll turn it around in time no matter what.”

  Constance moved two yellow index cards—I Stopped Using Soap and Heaving Bowls: Secrets of the Jockey Diet—across the corkboard from September to October, replacing them both with another that read Skin Deep in Their Pockets: The Big Business of Beauty Lobbyists, before she ran down the remainder of her list. Upcoming pieces included a set of first-person essays from transgender students at three different elite men’s colleges; a class-picture-style profile of twenty-one female Fortune 500 CEOs; a digital map of the New York and Paris Garment Districts; and an essay from a scientist who was developing the next big stain-resistant fabric.

  Janet jumped back in and listed pitches she’d gotten in from freelancers. Margot voted yes or no with a simple nod or shake of her head, occasionally smearing her liver-spotted hands with hand cream as she stared out the window; everyone else remained quiet. During Cat’s early days at RAGE they’d all spoken up excitedly during meetings, throwing ideas back and forth. Now everyone was treading on eggshells. Margot’s management style—ruling with fear and absolute control, choosing the covers and coverlines mere days before each issue closed—had previously been motivational, but now…now it seemed to be paralyzing the room.

  Paula pointed to her next victim, senior photo editor Rose Cashin-Trask.

  Reading from a single sheet of paper, Rose robotically recited the shoot schedule and her various updates. As she spoke, Constance layered pink photo cards on top of the yellow story cards, Paula nodding in approval, while Margot’s face remained blank and unimpressed. Cat didn’t look up from the jellied Mary-Janes Rose wore, a slightly more sophisticated version of the ones Helen had on the previous night.

  Lou was next. She read quickly from a sheet that Bess had put together for her, updating Constance on the status of the fashion layouts planned through December; it was efficient and logical. When she reached the end, she folded the paper in her lap and looked up, her eyes bright.

  “I examined Mania last week and I think we still have something they don’t. They’re accessible. I think it doesn’t matter how much couture you pile onto a seventh grader from Texas, or whatever; they’re still just little girls playing dress-up. I think we should drill down on the biggest weapon we have in our arsenal. Age,” she said enthusiastically, gesturing to Margot, to herself. “We have access to the world’s aging socialites. I think we should play that card every month, you know? They certainly won’t put their lives online, but I know they’ll talk to us. And we can arrange compensation, sponsorship, anything. I know that hasn’t been the standard in the past, but it seems prudent to open ourselves up to new budgetary approaches.”

  Cat’s mouth dropped open. She’d never expected Lou to deviate from the script in the slightest, much less float ideas about how RAGE should structure their business practices. Everyone looked at Margot, who nodded her head carefully.

  “What’s the pitch?” Margot asked Lou.

  “I want us to lean more on real women over thirty, on their real lives, every month. We could debut a new section, something that’s ‘at home with,’ but really it’s ‘at one of their homes with.’ The Hillary piece in September could kick us off, if Cat would be willing to expand it from tribute to memorial.” She looked at Cat.

  “Maybe.” Cat shrugged, amazed by Lou’s bravado. “What are you looking for?”

  “Talk about her life—show her accomplishments, her depth, her taste, her friends. Really get into it. Especially photos. Do you have anything from school? From when you were younger? Let’s see everything you can find. Her life is the editorial, it is the story. And then I think we should do it again in October but with, you know, someone living.”

  “Are you willing to be one of those women?” Margot interjected.

  “If you are,” Lou replied boldly, “but let’s wait on that. I want to call Princess Sophie from Denmark. I think she has a property—it’s a castle in Bavaria—that needs some updating. If we can convince some advertisers to sponsor, then we could probably get her to commit to a weekend shoot. She’ll do it if we hire locally. I want to show women like her who are now in the positions, socially, that men used to occupy—women whose wallets manage to keep entire towns alive. The benefactors. The matriarchy…the new maternalism…is materialism? Is that making sense?”

  Margot was nodding vigorously now. “Matriarchy. I love that. Older women ruling the world.”

  “Like you,” Lou said to Margot. “The RAGE woman has always been a reflection of you. Let’s not try to be something we’re not. We’re you. That’s our strength.”

  “I want to see fifteen potential names on my desk next week,” Margot said. “And I want you to reconsider the fashion editorials for winter in the eyes of older women.”

  “What if we started using older models?” Cat asked. “Or made a deliberate move to diversify—in terms of both size and age? I can start calling around.”

  “I don’t think that we’re quite ready for gray-haired models,” Margot replied. A sneer rippled across her face so quickly that Cat thought she might have hallucinated it. “This isn’t the J. Jill catalog. But maybe we can start using some bigger girls. I think that’s not…a bad idea. It’s where the market is going. Everyone’s getting so fat these days.”

  Cat nodded, writing have Molly call agencies for plus-size girls for Nov issue forward on her legal pad. Margot stood up behind her desk and started to walk around the room, muttering quietly to herself. The editorial team remained on their stools.

  “I want…okay…I want…to pivot. We will pivot. We will be a new RAGE, again. We will recapture the exact same women who bought this magazine for the first time thirty years ago; we will grow up with them, but we will not pander.” Margot’s voice grew louder as Paula typed furiously. “I do not want…older actresses advertising for yogurt that makes it easier for your aging bowels to take a shit. I do not want advertisements for condominiums in warm places. I want to see the most glamorous old ladies the world has to offer, and I want their most dangerous opinions. I want the fucking…Queen of England, shooting a handgun, drunk on sherry, saying she wants to dismantle the monarchy. I want the Empress of Saudi Arabia behind the wheel of a convertible, her headscarf flying just so in the wind, reading Christopher Hitchens. I want women in charge talking about who they pay and how much and why. I want to find icons. I need icons.”

  Margot turned sharply to face the staff. As she leaned on the porcelain autopsy table she used to water her plants, her eyes gleamed.

  “Go back to your desks and pitch me something new, and how to do it here in New York with advertisers or sponsors footing the bill. We must be the critical RAGE we have always been, but for now we must clip some coupons. If we succeed, however, I promise you: I will personally fly the whole staff to Paris in October and we will all go to every show.” She walked back to her desk and sat down. Cat’s eyes grew wide: Margot sure knew how to motivate her team.

  “Now get out. Go eat lunch. Make your minds strong. Each of you draft me a full wheat pitch for next week—no chaff. I want your best work.” She nodded firmly, then took the laptop and turned away toward the windows. Paula picked up her cellphone and disappeared into a thicket of ferns. Bess, Cat, and the other senior and associate editors filed out of Margot’s glass house and bolted back to their desks with new drive.

  Chapter Five

  Back in her office, Cat surveyed the PMS window and added “
studded jelly with thick wool socks” to the plus side. The minus side remained intact.

  She cracked open her computer, opened the document on Hillary’s tribute, flexed her knuckles, and got to work. She’d been avoiding this file for weeks, but it was nearly due and now she had to expand on it, turning it into a full memorial and the first entry in MATRIARCH. She got to work, drafting copy for Margot to approve.

  HED

  Our Heartbreak: Hillary E. Whitney, 1979–2017

  DEK

  At Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and RAGE, she made a brooding strangeness fashionable for all.

  BODY

  Hillary Edith Whitney, a longtime and beloved member of the Cooper House family and fashion director at RAGE, passed away tragically on May 15 of this year from a heart attack brought on by a long-term eating disorder. Ms. Whitney’s trademark work revealed women and their homes together in spectral visions that stayed with you long after the page had been turned. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including the ASME section award for her monthly feature on totems and curios (NikNak) for three years running, and she received multiple commemorations from the Junior League for her work with the Dress for Success program. On behalf of Cooper House, we send our love and condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues in the industry, and we offer the following pages in a memorial to her wit, kindness, grace, and impeccable style—a life well lived, and well loved, despite the devastating illness that killed her. She is the first entry in our new monthly section, MATRIARCH: women who rule the world, and we hope her memory will inspire the millions of RAGE women reading these pages.