For a little over a week, I've had a very pretty guest who is a friend of a friend. She got a much-coveted job as an intern for one of the big designers, just for Fashion Week, and I have scarcely seen her. Yesterday she opened her phone and let me see a photo of the showroom where she and the other interns serve coffee or tea, arrange clothes, and generally help with all the work of showing collections to department stores, rich women from all over the world, and fashion journalists.
"What are the people like?" I asked. "Is it interesting see how different nationalities react to the clothes?"
"It's more interesting to see how they react to the interns!" she said. "The Japanese are so polite. You feel you should be bowing back. The British joke with us and treat us like one of them. The French are not so friendly, but always polite. The Russians and Ukrainians are not polite at all-- they just breeze right past us as if we didn't exist. No please or thank you, and they wouldn't even speak to us. And a Saudi women sent in her assistant to make sure everything was ready for her before she would even get out of the car.
"The most difficult customer arrived with her little girl, who was about five. She was there for two hours, and ignored the child, so we interns had to take care of the little girl all that time. She was a beautiful child with long blond hair, beautifully dressed. When someone asked about her dress, even though she didn't speak much English, the little girl said 'Jean-Paul Gaultier.' And she asked for green tea! But she was the most spoiled child any of us had ever seen. She treated us like servants and bossed us around. When she didn't like something we said or asked her she would just sweep out her hand: 'NO!'"
Fascinating and dishy! I'm not sure I would enjoy seeing Goga Ashkenazi in action. I would be okay with being ignored by the Slavs because they weren't trying to do anything to me either way - neither to charm nor reject.
Posted by: CLEO | 22 October 2012 at 16:14