Vogue UK - March 2020

Star of the season

O

nce a year at the annual Society Ball, the most

extraordinary outfits were displayed as the

gathered designers, wearing their own garments,

competed with each other to become the

anointed Star of the Season. A lot was at stake. The

designers, most of whom worked hard and earned little,

barely survived on the outskirts of the city, where they lived

in cramped accommodation near the municipal rubbish

dumps, which released toxic fumes, causing multiple health

problems. In this divided society of extreme wealth and

extreme poverty, the winner’s fortunes would be changed

forever as their sartorial concepts would thereafter be sold

around the world, securing them not only a place in history,

but also a home in the salubrious suburbs, where the walls

of the spacious houses pumped out fresh oxygen that

rejuvenated its occupants and kept diseases at bay. This was

clearly not an egalitarian society, but it was a decidedly

multiracial one. There were no hierarchies based on skin

tones, which ranged from transparency to all the shades on

the green, red and silver spectrums.

The ball was held in the grounds of Madame Assoula’s

palatial home; she who came from a long line of matriarchs

whose wealth originated in the oil fields of the East. Each

woman had conceived the next generation, only one child, a

daughter, through an ambitious and tenacious sperm worm

cultivated in a laboratory where it eventually became human

enough to take home. This warm evening, her house was

floodlit by exquisitely shimmering lights as the visitors

mingled on her polka-dot orange-and-black lawn, which

rolled down to the luminous green sands of the shoreline –

and beyond that, to a mile-long pier where ocean liners waited

to accommodate them for one night only in ostensibly small

pods that, upon entering, were transformed into luxurious

suites replete with Jacuzzis, servants and masseurs.

In a short story for Vogue, Booker Prize-winning author

Bernardine Evaristo conjures a world of high-concept couture, where a cybernetic

socialite decides the future of fashion. Illustration by Laura Gulshani

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