Spring Collection - Hardcover

Krantz, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517593343 ISBN 13: 9780517593349

Publisher: Crown, 1996

Synopsis

Everyone in the world of fashion has been waiting for months, impatient to learn the names of the three American unknowns who will be picked to go to Paris to star in the debut spring collection of brilliant, bad-boy designer Marco Lombardi.  No one is more anxious than Frankie Severino, twenty-seven years old and second-in-command at the modeling agency owned by her best friend, former model Justine Loring.  The lucky models will be given an unprecedented chance at fame and fortune--one of them will win a $12 million contract to represent Lombardi's couture house.  The agency that represents them will immediately become the hottest in town.

When the three names are announced, Frankie is stunned--all are under contract to Justine Loring.  This outrageous and inexplicable stroke of good luck forces Justine to admit to Frankie that it's no accident.  Jacques Necker--the Swiss billionaire launching Lombardi--is her father, the man who deserted her mother before she was born.  Justine has consistently refused to meet him, and the Lombardi contest has been his attempt to lure her to Paris.  But Justine won't play his game.  She sends Frankie in her place as chaperone for the three young women.

Ambitious April Nyquist, with her deceptive ice-princess facade, is a classic blonde from Minnesota.  Sophisticated, much-traveled Jordan Dancer is a magnificent African-American, the daughter of a regular army colonel.  Tinker Osborn is a vulnerable, timid Cinderella from Tennessee.

Frankie and her charges spend two intrigue-filled weeks in Paris as the adventure-bound girls get ready to face the challenge of a runway show where they will be surrounded by the top models in the world.  Under the magical spell of Paris in winter, all of them, including Frankie, become restless, rebellious and wildly romantic.  In New York, meanwhile, Justine undergoes a surprising, passionate personal transformation that finally leads her to confront her father.

About this title

About the Author

Judith Krantz, one of the world's best-selling novelists, lives in Bel Air and Newport Beach, California.

From the Back Cover

the world of fashion has been waiting for months, impatient to learn the names of the three American unknowns who will be picked to go to Paris to star in the debut spring collection of brilliant, bad-boy designer Marco Lombardi.  No one is more anxious than Frankie Severino, twenty-seven years old and second-in-command at the modeling agency owned by her best friend, former model Justine Loring.  The lucky models will be given an unprecedented chance at fame and fortune--one of them will win a $12 million contract to represent Lombardi's couture house.  The agency that represents them will immediately become the hottest in town.

When the three names are announced, Frankie is stunned--all are under contract to Justine Loring.  This outrageous and inexplicable stroke of good luck forces Justine to admit to Frankie that it's no accident.  Jacques Necker--the Swiss billionaire launching Lombardi--is her father, the man who deserted her mother

From the Inside Flap

the world of fashion has been waiting for months, impatient to learn the names of the three American unknowns who will be picked to go to Paris to star in the debut spring collection of brilliant, bad-boy designer Marco Lombardi. No one is more anxious than Frankie Severino, twenty-seven years old and second-in-command at the modeling agency owned by her best friend, former model Justine Loring. The lucky models will be given an unprecedented chance at fame and fortune--one of them will win a $12 million contract to represent Lombardi's couture house. The agency that represents them will immediately become the hottest in town.<br><br>When the three names are announced, Frankie is stunned--all are under contract to Justine Loring. This outrageous and inexplicable stroke of good luck forces Justine to admit to Frankie that it's no accident. Jacques Necker--the Swiss billionaire launching Lombardi--is her father, the man who deserted her mother

Reviews

High fashion takes some low blows in Krantz's naughty newest (after Lovers), which eschews the author's usual across-the-decades saga for an intimate two weeks of posing and passion. Swiss billionaire Jacques Necker has launched the model search of the century; three unknown young women will be whisked off to Paris to model in the Necker-financed first collection of Marco Lombardi. After the show, one will be given a $12 million contract to represent the designer. When former model Justine Loring learns that all three candidates?blond April Nyquist, red-haired Tinker Osborn and African American Jordan Dancer?are from her Loring Model Management, she's not thrilled but furious. Necker, she confides to her astonished right-hand woman, Frankie Severino, is her father. He deserted Justine's pregnant mother 34 years ago and now wants to be a father to a daughter he has never met. Determined to frustrate Necker's plan, Justine sends Frankie, who narrates portions of the story, to Paris in her place. In classic Krantz style, it's not long before love is in full bloom?Frankie meets her unrequited high-school crush; Tinker falls for an expatriate painter; April comes out of the closet; Jordan wins a tycoon's heart; and, back in New York, Justine embarks on a torrid affair with a handsome contractor. Only when a rival agent tries to lure the models away does Justine give in and board the Concorde?just in time to see a most surprising winner chosen. While not Krantz's crowning achievement, this rich mix of sin and serendipitous love has what it takes. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The glittery new frock in Krantz's own extensive collection (Scruples Two, 1992, etc.) is a romp-for-all-seasons (not just spring)--an in-depth probe into the behind-the-scenes world of high fashion, with plenty of forays into satin-sheeted beds and the hidden pleasures of the city of lights and love. The spring '95 collections in Paris are the setting for this latest foray into riches, romance, and illicit rendezvous, with the focus on the collection of unknown but extremely promising designer and world-class seducer Marco Lombardi. Marco is being backed financially by international mogul Jacques Necker. When Necker holds a contest to select three new models for his prot‚g‚'s premier collection, three of Justine Loring's clients are chosen. Although Justine, a beautiful ex-model herself, has made a small but unequivocal success of her Manhattan agency, it shocks the fashion world when her ``girls'' dominate the contest. Coincidence? Hardly. Turns out that Justine is actually Necker's long-lost daughter and that Necker has invented the whole contest as a device to get in touch with his only child, whom he's never met. A resentful Justine thwarts Necker's manipulations by sending her models--the blond and pristine April, unpredictable redhead Tinker, and elegant African-American Jordan--to Paris with her associate Frankie Severino as a chaperon instead of herself. Once in Paris, April's sexuality, Tinker's emotional fragility, and Jordan's quest for a lover with a mind and body equal to her own take a backseat only to Frankie's own budding romance with a major-magazine photographer. Back in the States, alone, a vulnerable Justine is left to wonder whether she's made the right choice by shutting her father out of her life, until, of course, she too finds the love she's been waiting for . . . . Par for Krantz's own diamond-encrusted runway. (Literary Guild main selection) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Abandoning her usual woman-of-the-world omniscience, Krantz here hands much of the narration over to Frankie, chief assistant to "Justine Loring, my peerless leader . . . a former model who'd intelligently abandoned her career about five minutes after it reached its peak to become an independent agency owner." Justine is sending Frankie and three of the agency's top models to Paris, at the invitation of Swiss billionaire Jacques Necker, for a "modern day version of the Judgment of Paris," a high-stakes modeling contest. It is all a very expensive ruse, however, Necker's plot to get Justine--his estranged daughter--to acknowledge him. Despite the glamorous background, the book is less glitzy than some of Krantz's other offerings, with Frankie's no-nonsense Brooklyn narration cutting through the suds. The body count, too, is relatively low, with some offstage lovemaking, two rapes (unromantically presented), and a luscious lesbian seduction scene, much like the one in the author's previous effort, Dazzle (1990). Justine and Frankie are zesty career gals; the three models are contrasts in temperament and type; everyone predictably finds love in the end, and since they're all so darn likable, we don't mind a bit. Roger Sutton

Krantz's reputation for writing sexy, glitzy sagas (e.g., Lovers, Crown, 1994) will dim a bit with this publication. The story takes place in the glamorous world of high-fashion modeling. The five female characters are infused with a great deal of physical beauty but are sketched without much depth of character, personality, or charm. All kinds of plot developments hit the page: A successful businesswoman avoids contact with the father she never knew; a model begins a seasonal romance with a Swiss billionaire; another falls for a photographer. These scenarios and more take place over the span of two weeks in Paris. The sex scenes, which seem to pop up every other chapter or so, are dismal, graphic, or simply crude and do nothing to enhance the storyline or the characters. Author recognition will demand that public libraries purchase, but patrons would be better served by rereading Scruples (1979).?Margaret Ann Hanes, Sterling Heights P.L., Mich.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Optimistic idiot that I am, I sprinted from the subway to the office at a ridiculously early hour in the morning. Believe me, nobody can move faster than I can on the streets of New York. Call me snake-hips Frankie Severino but I've never needed to push or shove in an unladylike way. During my many years of taking the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan I've patented a way to twist, sidestep and slither through any crowd. If I'd been a man I'd have made a hell of a linebacker. Riding up in the elevator to Loring Model Management where I work, I knew that today was the day. Last night I'd had a dream about getting the long-awaited fax from Necker in Paris that had been so incredibly real--not dream-real but real-real--that I woke up this morning with my heart beating like crazy. I was filled with wild anticipation, every competitive instinct I have was up and screaming, all that fight-or-flight stuff made me leap out of bed, get dressed in ten minutes and race to the subway without as much as a bagel inside my stomach.

The fax wasn't there. The little incoming tray was bare, the smug metal fax machine sat primly on its table, too high to allow me even the satisfaction of kicking it the way you do an empty vending machine. Short of taking an ax to the thing there was nothing I could do except stomp away in disgust. At least I had my cowboy boots on so the sound effects weren't wasted. After I'd coaxed a cup of coffee from our fancy, temperamental coffeemaker, I took it into the main room of Loring Model Management where, in an hour, seven bookers would be sitting at their phones around the circular desk. There our models' schedules hang on a rotating file. All day long the bookers, each responsible for ten to fifteen girls, would be talking into their headsets, twirling the file and consulting their computers. An unglamorous setting, I thought, yet on any given day a memorable page in the history of glamour could so easily result from one of the calls our bookers field so adroitly. When I'd been a booker, right after I started work here, every phone call had been a thrill to me. Now, at twenty-seven, I'm second-in-command of the business and a damn sight less easily thrilled.

It was freezing in the booking room and I still hadn't taken off the old duffle coat and two extra sweaters I'd piled over my usual uniform of tights, a leotard, leg warmers and a cardigan knotted at my waist. I decided that the warmest place in the agency on this icy morning in January of 1994 would have to be the enormous, enveloping leather chair behind my boss's desk. Justine had definitely built herself a great little fortress, I realized as I cuddled way down into her amazingly comfy chair and sipped coffee, well within earshot of the phone ring that announces a fax. Justine Loring, my peerless leader, is just thirty-four, a former model who'd intelligently abandoned her career about five minutes after it reached its peak to become an independent agency owner. She'd hired me seven years ago. The timing was perfect for me because a bad fall--where else but in the subway?--had recently brought my dancing career to an end. I'd been a serious modern dance student at Juilliard but the injuries to both my kneecaps meant that disco was the only dancing I'd do in the future.

Sitting in Justine's chair, I thought that, although no one outside of the business realizes it, it's essential for the head of any successful model agency to have a strong personal style. Every successful agency in town is defined by a single personality, ranging from preacher to pimp. Justine's style? Good question. In many ways she qualified as the ideal Girl Scout Troop Leader with all the virtues that implies, radiating strength and trustworthiness; straightforward, infinitely capable and, above all, reassuringly calm. She's the person anyone, even I, would agree to follow up a slippery mountain trail or cling to in an avalanche, certain of being rescued.

On the other hand, Justine's probably too gorgeous to be a convincing Scout. If thirty-four is mature, which I deeply tend to doubt, maturity has made her far more seriously alluring than when she was modeling, blandly ravishing, throughout her late teens into her mid twenties, a full-fledged member of the prom-queen all American league. You know that look: all but-impossibly blue eyes, features too ideal to describe, a quick, indiscriminately adorable smile, infuriatingly good teeth and the faint beginnings of deliciously squinchy laugh lines.

Now Justine's grown so interesting to watch that you wouldn't think she'd once been only conventionally stunning. Her eyes, still the very hue of victory, are thoughtful and often pensive. Her smile is meaningful and selective, a smile that has forgotten how to turn on automatically for a camera. There's a fascinatingly slow play of changing expressions on Justine's lovely face that shows a mind always at work. She's my idea of a woman who has just barely entered into the beginning of the best part of her life and eligible men, heaven knows, agree with me. But she turns them down, one after another. Sometimes I find myself in a lather of outrage listening to her explain, with that maddening, reasonable calm, just what is wrong about each one.

It must be some inherited Anglo-Saxon character trait that allows Justine to shrug off any problem she can't do anything about and simply let it go. My preferred mode, when faced by a defect--in a man or in a situation--is to attack, charge and make it right! Fix it! But then my ancestors on both sides came from the south of Italy.

The difference in our ways of approaching life was probably why the two of us made such a good team, I thought, not for the first time, probably the reason why I'd advanced so rapidly from the ranks of bookers to become Justine's right hand as well as her closest friend. I'm explosive enough to allow Justine to remain her glowing blond self at all times. I'm the one who understands exactly when and how to pull a major-league freak-out, who remembers to carry necessary grudges, who won't settle for the difference between the possible and the impossible, who doesn't believe in any sensible Twelve Step maxim about having the wisdom to accept things you can t change. Accept, my ass! Not when you're from Brooklyn!

"Have you been here all night?" Justine's voice asked, interrupting my reverie.

"You scared me!" I yelped, almost spilling my cold coffee. "I got in ages ago . . . I had this dream . . . oh, never mind . . . you don't want to know."

"You're right about that, girlfriend."

"I love it when you try to sound hip." I couldn't help grinning at her, vile as my mood was. "And just what are you doing in at this hour?" I demanded, recovering my poise.

"Ah, I had one of those bad nights...."

"You have bad nights?"

"Even I, my mouse, even I. But last night was the worst. Every time I managed to fall asleep I had a nightmare. Finally I got smart enough to realize that I should give up on sleep and get in here and do some work in peace and quiet. I see now that was not to be."

"Not while I'm around feeling itchy."

"That sickening contest, of course."

"What else?"

Justine had the nerve to sigh at me, just like she would at a peevish child.

"Don't give me that superior attitude," I growled. "You know it's important even if you refuse to admit it. I'm going to make more coffee. Want some?"

"Desperately. Blessings on you, my child."

While I hung over the coffeepot I allowed myself to brood over the events that had started this whole waiting-for-the-Paris-fax business. It all started about three months ago. A woman named Gabrielle d'Angelle arrived in New York on a mission to all the model agencies in town. Gabrielle was a highly placed assistant to a guy named Jacques Necker. You know, the Swiss billionaire who's head of La Groupe Necker? He owns four of the world's most important fabric mills, two major fashion houses and a fistful of highly profitable perfume and cosmetic companies. Even civilians have heard of him. GN, as everybody in the business calls it, had recently decided to back the designer Marco Lombardi in a new couture house. Lombardi's first spring collection would be shown in Paris in a little more than two weeks from now.

"I'm here to find a group of completely fresh faces," the Frenchwoman had told Justine and me in her impeccable English.

``I need girls who are as unexposed as it is possible for models to be, girls who are entirely virgins to the Paris collections, yet they must not be too raw, too green to work with--even if they are technically children they must not look it." I tried unsuccessfully to catch Justine's eye. Of all the glossy, brilliantly dressed, annoyingly overconfident females I'd ever come across, Gabrielle took the cake. "I'll be searching for them," she had continued, "at every agency in town and making videotapes of the best of the lot. Three among them will be picked to come to Paris to take part in Marco Lombardi's very first spring collection. One of them will ultimately be chosen as the incarnation of Lombardi's style." She had smiled loftily at us. "I suppose you Americans would call it a contest, I prefer to think of it as a modern-day version of the Judgment of Paris."

"Just exactly what plans do you have for this lucky little contest winner?" Justine asked. Amazingly I heard clear suspicion in her voice. My mental eyebrows shot up at Justine's tone. What was there to be suspicious about?

From the moment it had been announced, everyone in the fashion world had been agog to see what would come of the Lombardi launch. How come Justine wasn't delighted to hear of this chance for new girls to be showcased?


From the Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0517593343
• ISBN 13: 9780517593349
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 358