Killer Look

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“I don’t design clothing,” Ralph Lauren once remarked. “I design dreams.”

The business side of the fashion industry that is based on those creative dreams is now valued at close to four trillion dollars globally-about two percent of the world’s gross domestic product. The seasonal visions showcased in glossy magazines and on designers’ runways are elegant and chic, bold and original. They are meant to attract and entice women and men, to make us believe our lives could be altered if only we could own that particular look. And yet the process to get the products from the drawing board to the factory to the catwalk to the showroom to the retail outlet and into our closets is as tough to manage and to control as the most rough-and-tumble kind of enterprise.

New York’s famed Garment District was long the capital of America’s fashion industry. A neighborhood that once produced ninety-five percent of our clothing now makes only three percent. But it has a riveting history and is still the heart of a business that thrives on the illusions of its great masters.

My very dear friend Fern Mallis-a brilliant fashionista and former executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America-was one of my most important muses in this endeavor. I am grateful for her time spent with me, her unique insider’s view of Seventh Avenue and its inhabitants, and for her fabulous book, Fashion Lives: Fashion Icons.

Jimmy West, formerly of the NYPD, has been a great friend and a lieutenant detective with unparalleled investigative skills. He gave me an unusual idea for a murder, for which only a crime writer-not a perp-can publicly acknowledge thanks.

As much as I love style, all my information about the business came from well-researched and written news articles. TheNew York Times is a favorite resource-especially stories by Vanessa Friedman, Jean Appleton, Ralph Blumenthal, Ben Schott, and so many others; Kirstie Clements in The Guardian; Nicholas Coleridge in The Fashion Conspiracy; and regular reads in Women’s Wear Daily.

Once again, my heroes are the women and men of the NYPD and the New York County District Attorney’s Office, always working on the side of the angels.

Thanks always to my Dutton team: Ben Sevier, editor and publisher; Stephanie Kelly; Carrie Swetonic; Christine Ball; Emily Brock; and Andrea Santoro. And to all who work with me at Little, Brown UK.

Laura Rossi Totten keeps me tweeting and Facebooking and linked in to the world of social media with grace and intelligence. Thankfully, she has Matt and Julia at her back.

Esther Newberg at ICM-about whom I have not much more to add after thirty years-remains simply the best. Thanks, Zoe Sandler, for all you do for me.

My family and friends are my greatest joy. I’ve said it before and it’s still true. Lisa and Alex, Suzy and Marc-and all the “Mighties”-this one is for you.

Justin Feldman, Bobbie and Bones Fairstein, and Karen Cooper-you are all always with me.

Michael Goldberg has my back, and more important, my heart. We are still swaying, which is a wonderfully happy thought whenever I am poised to pound the keyboard with Coop and Chapman.