INTERVIEW WITH THE 'IT GIRL'

A short story

It was only a three minute video but it doesn’t take a lot to go viral these days. It was a simple red carpet interview; me wearing vintage Galliano and a sour face, her in a Miu Miu two-piece and matching sunglasses. At the time, I had wondered if those sunglasses would go down well with fashion critics the next day. To me, they looked undeniably absurd in the evening light, and she could no doubt barely see, but I remembered when Anna Wintour heralded her as a ‘playful subverter of current trends’, so I decided to wait until tomorrow to form an opinion. 

Later, in a TikTok with 2,000,000 views, she would reveal that she had conjunctivitis at the event, so the sunglasses were a last minute addition to cover up her crusty, yellow eyes. It went down extremely well with the public. ‘Our relatable queen’ was the top comment, as it almost always was under all of her videos. For her generation, ‘relatable’ was the new ‘aspirational’.

To match her sunglasses, she’d worn a thin, silver Cartier headband and had a metallic manicure, which curled around the microphone she was holding. I glimpsed a small chip in her nail varnish when she shoved the microphone into my face.

‘Ava!’, she called as she pulled me frantically into the shot ‘You’re my actual icon’. I look almost impenetrable as I appear in frame, tall and twitchy.

During the interview, I hadn’t seen anything extraordinary or interesting about it. To me, to her, and to the cameraman, it seemed like two people having a pretty mundane conversation whilst wearing expensive dresses. She’d asked me the same questions she’d asked hundreds of other celebrities that night, and I’d probably given similar answers. ‘What are you most excited about for Autumn/Winter 2024?’ ... ‘We’ve seen a lot of corsets last season so I’m excited to see how designers play with classical form in the modern era’. We all said vaguely the same thing in interviews, as if we had any idea what we were talking about.

So, without any of the context it looked like a standard interview. But if people on the internet have anything, they have context. They know everything. They were quick to impose a new meaning onto the video, one that I’m glad I hadn’t realised, or had the words to articulate, at the time.

The top comment, which had over 4000 likes after a couple of days, read: ‘Looks like Ava is struggling to hand over the ‘it girl’ baton’. 

I remembered feeling irritated in the interview but the more I watched the video back, the less I could deny the knife twisting in my stomach every time she spoke, with her ridiculous blonde bob and tiny sunglasses. And her name, Klara, felt similar to mine, but cooler. I could feel her youth all over me. After a few hours of the interview being released online, people had created a narrative: the old ‘it girl’ being interviewed by the new one. Or, as I saw it, the original being interviewed by the replica.

The comments called me ‘rude’, ‘bitter’, ‘jealous’, and I felt it. A lot of people said that she’d done a good job of interviewing me, of handling my behaviour. ‘Klara was very professional here’, someone wrote. 7 likes. 1 dislike (me).

When the video was first posted, I sat alone in the stale air of my hotel room, the smell of room service pasta and the subsequent sick still lingering in the air, watching the views go from 40,000 to 230,00 in real time. I watched it for hours, refreshing and refreshing and refreshing the page whilst I decayed cross-legged into my too-big bed. I watched it until I no longer recognised myself in the video - until I was just a faceless, beige mannequin drowned by a 90’s Galliano gown. After around 70 painful watches, I could feel no connection between the girl scowling on my laptop screen and the fragmented person in my bed, sicking up her insides every few hours in a £500 a night hotel room. There in the dark, I watched the remnants of my dwindling reputation crumble up in a three minute Youtube video. I laughed at how much it bothered me, then cried for the same reason.

When I started modelling, people warned me that fashion moved quickly, but it didn’t seem possible to go from ‘up and coming’ to ‘one to watch’ to a ‘force to be reckoned with’ only to fade damply back into irrelevance in a matter of years. I suppose my reign as ‘it girl’ lasted longer than most, but that makes it harder to surrender to some girl who seems as undeserving as I did when I emerged on the scene. There’s something distinctly painful about working your way up the food chain, one Vogue cover and Met Gala at a time, only to reach the summit to discover that someone is close on your heels. Don’t get comfy at the top, I was warned. At least I made it to my early thirties before my irrelevance started to dawn on me. The more I watched the video, the more I felt like an ageing queen, unable to handle the growing popularity of my prettier successor.

‘Ava!’ I watched her squeal for the hundredth time as I appeared awkwardly in frame, ‘You’re my actual icon’.

‘Thank you’, I said, my eyes searching for life behind her black sunglasses.

‘I used to have your pictures from magazines all over my bedroom walls’.

Almost immediately, I turned icy. ‘Magazines? Are you calling me old?’

She squirmed, but in a ‘relatable’ way. ‘You’re timeless, Ava. An icon’.

That annoyed me. ‘You’ve said that already’.

Rewatching the video, I couldn’t stop cringing at my defensiveness, but my hands and cheeks became hot and red every time she called me ‘iconic’. An icon is someone who’s been around a while, it’s code for irrelevant but memorable. It’s a word reserved for actresses in black and white films, retired runway models doing their final walk, and grandmothers who wear bold colours and occasionally swear. Old, basically.

On the many reposts of the video, there seemed to be some dispute over my magazine comment. A user called ‘@tinykitt3nn’ called me ‘passive aggressive’. Someone called ‘@missmollycarmen99’ said: ‘she’s clearly insecure about her age’. Someone replied saying ‘calm down she’s only 34’. I winced at the number and ordered room service again. Pizza with cheesy dough balls. The reply below said ‘that’s old for a model’. The comment below had the final word: ‘don’t you mean former model?’. 46 likes.

Towards the end of the video, I really turn on her. She asked me some mundane question about ballet flats making a comeback and I, as I can see in excruciating 1080p, interrupted her.

“-I see that you’re wearing Miu Miu’.

She seemed startled, but went with it. ‘I am. Do you like it?’.

In the video, the cameraman pans down to her ruched skirt as she performs a little twirl, but in real life I was annoyingly close up to her ceaseless smile. I think she blew me a kiss, but since it wasn’t filmed I can’t really remember.

‘Do you like it?’ she prompted again.

I laughed.

Again, she looked confused. ‘Is that a no?’

I took my time to answer. The cameraman zoomed in on me as I spoke, slowly, like he was filming a dramatic monologue in a bad film. I stepped into my role as villain.

‘You know what, Klara’, I winced at how apparent my hatred was in my voice ‘Are you totally oblivious of what your little look today is referencing? Your stylist for this evening, whatever their name is, was referencing the Prada two-piece I wore to the 2016 Brit Awards when my ex-boyfriend won best album. Remember that album?’

I turn to the camera here, as if pleading with the audience to remember my legacy. Then, I turn back to face the sunglasses and continue.

‘I thought I was an icon, Klara? To fill you in, my ex-boyfriend’s album was called ‘Cigarette Sagittarius’ and it was widely known to be about me, so I went with him onstage to accept the award, which is where he proposed to me’

She looked blank-faced. I gave up.

‘You should watch it on Youtube some time, honey’.

‘I definitely will’.

‘So, Klara, for you to ask me whether I like your outfit tonight is actually fucking hysterical. What you are wearing tonight was designed for me back in 2016 by my good friend Miuccia Prada specifically for my proposal at the Brits. So, yeah, Klara, I do like it. I liked it when I wore the original, like, 10 years ago, and I still like it now’.

There seemed no dispute in the comment section about whether I was ‘passive aggressive’ here. Everyone called me ‘rude’, ‘spiteful’, ‘jealous’ and I felt it. Some people said that I was in my ‘villain era’. Most seemed to agree that Klara had done a good job of interviewing me, in handling my behaviour.

After my speech, the camera jolts a little, as if the cameraman stumbles, unsure whether he should keep filming or not. Klara looks behind the lens for help, then her PR training kicks in with an infuriatingly polite response: ‘Wow, my own personal fashion history lesson!’.

There was a pause. I let out a little, bitter laugh. And the words that came out after, my final words in the video were: ‘Yeah… history’.

“Thank you - I’ll see you inside!’ she called after me as I walked off, but I was already out of shot. I can’t remember whether I smiled back at her or not.