The sportswear brand was called Kova, and it was, in 2016, precisely the kind of label that occupied the gap between fast fashion and actual athletic wear: good quality, mid-price, ambitious about its aesthetic and not always successfully so.
Lina knew, from everything she’d catalogued in her notebook, that Kova would sign a celebrity athlete endorsement in eighteen months that would push it into a different tier entirely.
The catalogue she was shooting now would be the last one before they became a brand people cared about.
She intended to be in it.
The studio was in an industrial district, the kind of space that real estate developers had not yet discovered was worth converting into lofts.
It smelled of floor cleaner and the ghost of a thousand spray tans.
The lighting rig took up half the ceiling.
There were six other women booked for the three-day shoot.
She arrived eight minutes early, signed in, and went to find the rack with her name on it.
The stylist — a small, efficient woman named Jo who communicated primarily through a series of nods and the occasional clipped sentence — looked Lina over, adjusted two things on the first look without comment, and pointed her toward the set.
“You’ve done this before,” Jo said.
It wasn’t a question.
“This is my first catalogue.” Jo made a sound that might have been scepticism.
“You hold yourself like someone who’s been in front of cameras.
Most first-timers don’t know what to do with their hands.” Lina thought of thirty years of Lucien’s business dinners.
Of industry events where she had stood in rooms full of people who were being photographed and had learned, by absorption and long practice, exactly how not to disappear.
“I’ve been in a lot of rooms,” she said.
Jo nodded and moved on to the next person.
The photographer was not Mike this time — Mike had been for the test shoot.
The catalogue had a different photographer, a woman named Soo-Yeon Park who had short hair and wore all black and shot without speaking except to give precise, minimal directions that assumed the subject would interpret them correctly.
Lina found she liked this.
She was tired of being over-directed.
“Shoulders back, weight forward, chin parallel to the floor — not down,” Soo-Yeon said, not looking up from the camera.
“Think about something you want.” Lina thought about her notebook on the desk in the apartment on Senter Street.
About the eight-week flutter she’d seen on an ultrasound screen.
About the brand contact who was going to call Carla in eighteen months and ask about the face from the old Kova catalogue.
Soo-Yeon lowered the camera and looked at her properly for the first time.
“Good,” she said.
“Do you know what you just did with your face?” “I was thinking about something I want.” “You looked like you already had it.” She raised the camera again.
“Keep doing that.” Lina kept doing that for three days.
✦ ✦ ✦ The other women were at various stages of their careers — two were experienced catalogue regulars who knew every shortcut and had opinions about the craft services, two were recent graduates of modelling schools still performing what they’d been taught rather than being themselves, one was visibly hungover on day one and visibly fine by day two, and one was Cece Romano.
Lina had not expected Cece at this particular booking.
In her notebook she had flagged Cece as someone to watch — she had a profile, a presence, a talent for being exactly what a camera wanted.
She was also, Lina had gathered from the test shoot, strategic in ways that didn’t always serve people around her.
They were polite to each other for the first day.
Professional.
Careful.
On the second day, during a break, Cece sat down next to her at the craft services table and said, without preamble: “You know you’re getting more setup time than the rest of us.” Lina looked at her.
“Soo-Yeon adjusts time based on what the shot needs.
I’m not requesting it.” “I know you’re not requesting it.” Cece picked up a grape.
“I’m just noting it.” “Then note it,” Lina said pleasantly, and went back to her water.
Cece was quiet for a moment.
Then, unexpectedly: “Where did Carla find you?” “I walked in.” “You walked in off the street with no portfolio, no referral, no agency history, and Carla Reed signed you.” “She gave me a test shoot first.” “Same thing,” Cece said.
She was watching Lina with an expression that had moved from competitive to something more like genuine curiosity.
“I had to do four test shoots over two years before Carla would take a meeting.
What did you say to her?” “That I’d work harder than anyone she had.” A pause.
“And she believed you.” “Apparently.” Cece ate the grape.
“Fair enough,” she said, and went back to the shoot.
It was not, precisely, the beginning of a friendship.
But it was the beginning of something — a mutual recognition, perhaps, between two people who both knew what they were doing and were deciding whether to be honest about it.
Lina filed it away and went back to thinking about what she wanted.
✦ ✦ ✦ On the evening of day three, Soo-Yeon found her by the coat rack, already changed, about to leave.
“Hart.” Lina turned.
“I’m shooting an editorial in six weeks.
Small publication, not much money, but the art direction is interesting.
The lead pulled out.” She handed Lina a card.
“If you’re available and Carla can make it work, call me.” Lina looked at the card.
She knew this editorial.
She knew what would happen to the publication in eighteen months — it would be acquired by a major media house and its archive would be retrospectively elevated to cultural significance.
Every face in those issues would matter.
“I’m available,” she said.
She walked home in the early evening, the card in her bag, the city loud around her.
She stopped at the corner near her building and stood for a moment, just standing, the spring air cool against her face.
Three days.
She had a catalogue credit, a photographer’s card, and the beginning of something she was slowly learning to call a career.
She went upstairs, opened her notebook, and wrote down Soo-Yeon’s name with a star next to it.
Then she made tea and sat at the window and let herself, just briefly, feel pleased.
Remember her name.