femslash09</lj> 
Recipient: annaalamode 
Writer: egalitarianmuse
Beta: istumen 
Summary: Sharing shoes meant sharing clothes, meant sharing space. They did that anyway, but the shoes were a catalyst.
AN: I realize that you love fashion, so I’ve done a little research. As you make your way through the text, I’ll link you to some visuals that I think will help you enjoy the story more.
ANII:  Inspired originally by these shoes from the Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer ’09 collection among many other things.
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: I don’t own any characters recognizable as being from The Devil Wears Prada. They are the property of their producers, writers, and studios, not me.  No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

 ~!~  

              There was a code among women of fashion, about clothes and accessories; chief among them, about shoes.  If there was anything that was not to be taken without permission, it was shoes.  A borrowed purse could be explained, a ‘misplaced’ GF Ferre jacket could be returned, but to slip away with another’s pair of Alexander McQueen black and silver booties from the 2009 Spring and Summer Collection? No. There was simply no woman in their field that would tolerate such an act of vindictiveness.

                Perfect ensembles were destroyed for want of an ideal wedge or a cleverly concealed platform. Reputations had been ruined.

                And, then, there were the times when it was purely unintentional.

                Like tonight. Or last night, Emily remembered somewhat guiltily. 

She’d been helping an uncharacteristically drunk Serena to her bed when she spotted the most tempting sandals on the floor beside the foot of Serena’s bed.  She hadn’t yet had the opportunity to review all of this year’s Spring Collections, but she knew Lacroix when she saw it. Ribbons, charms, and a lethal heel, she saw. Lacroix, Lacroix, Lacroix, she thought.

They were a work of art—and she had the very Christian Dior clutch to match them. So, she picked them up and carried them back to her room. 

Of course, she never intended to keep them. She’d just wanted to wear them the next day to a meeting with the Chief Editor of Socialite. They made the very impression that Emily was desperate to make: that she was serious about her work, but could be serious and still devastatingly in-style at the same time.

Serena will understand, she told herself and strode down the chic minimalist halls of the Trent-Swayne building that housed Socialite.  As Runway had been, it was the flagship of the publisher’s fleet. To be on top at Socialite was to have full-run of the company.  Emily wanted full-run.  Emily wanted to be the Miranda of this company. She wanted to rebuild it from the near-nothing it currently was to something truly great. And she could do it…

…With the right shoes.

~!~

                It cannot be sheer luck, Emily thought as she took a seat behind her desk.  She simply couldn’t believe that the fashion gods had looked upon her this favorably.  With an adoring smile to the shoes that had made her morning a dream, she clicked ‘compose message’ and began what was likely to be an obnoxiously gleeful email to Serena.

                She hit ‘send’ and sat back, resisting with all her might the urge to shout “Thank you, God!” even though that would have been entirely out of character for her.   Had Trent-Swayne thought to invest in walls made of anything more substantial than glass, she might have taken the chance anyway. Alas, they had not and she had to content herself with a celebratory spin in her chair.  She was out of this world.  She hoped Serena would be as happy as she was.

                Speaking of Serena, she spared another glance at the sandals for which she had to thank her flat mate and best friend. They had done great things for her in the space of a single hour.

                Emily had arrived at the conference room second only to the assistant of the Editor-in-Chief. The slip of a girl had stood behind the head chair, shaking in her undoubtedly borrowed Chanel slingbacks.  She had nodded to Emily, who simply raised a disinterested brow in return and took her seat. The others stumbled in later, matching patent leather expressions of fear on their faces.

                The former assistant to the Devil in Prada herself had laughed inwardly, because they knew no such thing as fear. Claudia Kingston could only wish to attain an iron fist on the level of Miranda Priestly; all she had done to date was play dress-up.  Still, they trembled and Emily sighed.

                Once they were all assembled—their confusion obvious and their loins gradually ungirding—the assistant began to speak. She sounded nervous and stumbled over herself at the start, until she finally got to the topic at hand.

                “Claudia” – just Claudia and not Ms. Kingston because she was trying so very hard – “is ill.” They had all gasped and clambered to be the first to offer their best wishes. Ill? Claudia Kingston did not do ill. Emily had read the disbelief all around her. She’d begun to finger the Dries Van Noten bangle necklace she wore—which she’d worried might have been too much—and wondered what exactly Claudia’s game was now.

                If she was ill, she’d be unable to attend the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York. Her absence would deal a terrible blow to Socialite’s fledgling reputation. They had only been in existence for the past three years, of which Emily had been aboard for one, and their sales weren’t exactly keeping their competitors awake at night.  They couldn’t afford not to cover Fashion Week, which could have meant only one thing.

                “Claudia has asked me to take pictures of all of you in order for her to decide which of you would best represent Socialite as her replacement during Fashion Week.” The girl with a fair resemblance to Miranda’s daughters—if they were older and possibly addicted to heroin—smiled apologetically and held up her Blackberry.  “Who wants to go first?”

                Those words had signed Emily’s ticket. As she was the only one present with anything resembling personal style, her head-to-toe shot naturally stood out.  She was a shoe-in and she would be shown in. It had been inevitable in the eyes of her colleagues and their fears were confirmed in the sixty seconds it took Claudia to sift through their digital pictures from her penthouse in Manhattan.

                “She chose you, Emily,” said the nervous girl—ironically and pitifully named Nancy.

                Emily hadn’t been in the spirit to mock her. She was too enthused, too overcome. Not that that she’d showed an ounce of her excitement. No, that would be for later, in a bar with the one person in all of New York who would understand how much this meant; then, in the townhouse shouting at the top of their lungs until the neighbors were too exhausted to complain. The woman that she wasn’t when she was at work had to wait.

                “Hmmph,” Emily had murmured, rising from her seat and gathering the materials with which she’d come.  “Well, don’t just stand there. I need my itinerary and,” she’d revolved quickly on the unsuspecting staff, “I need to see a layout—a completed layout—illustrating how we’ll be presenting the newest trends. And please, do try and make sure the trends you pick are, in fact, new,” she’d condescended.  She had to; they could be so utterly hopeless when it came to recognizing what qualified as fashionable. It was a wonder that the company didn’t simply do away with the rag, for all it was worth with them at the helm.

                Or so she’d thought then.  So she still thought, although she was much less likely to admit it now.

                Emily sat with a lap full of phone messages, all originally addressed to Claudia, all that needed to be tended to during the coming crucial week.  Apparently, Claudia, however un-Miranda she may have been, had made it a point to build relationships with all the currently-in and eventually-in designers that would be showing during New York Fashion Week. Also apparently, it would be Emily’s job to maintain those relationships by having a word with every designer, attending every fashion show, and drinking at every reception. These were all good things, of course; things that Emily had looked forward to with bated breath since her days as Miranda’s second and, then, first assistant.  She was absolutely elated.

                She was also absolutely out of her depth.   She didn’t talk to designers. She talked to designers’ secretaries and personal assistants. She dealt with staff, a lot of staff, but only staff. What she was having right now could be considered a crisis of confidence. It was the last thing she could afford.  Clicking between the windows on her screen, she held her breath and hoped for word from Serena, which she eventually got.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of word she’d been looking for.  Serena had written, ‘I had a pair of Lacroix’s last night. I need them for a shoot today and they’re gone. Please tell me you’ve seen them—that you maybe put them in a safe deposit box for safekeeping, because you knew instinctively how valuable they were. Please tell me you didn’t wear them.’

                Emily couldn’t tell her that; however, she could tell her that she was on her way right now. Her new assistant looked on bewildered as she dashed through her office door. Emily Charlton wasn’t Miranda either. There’d be other times to be graceful and forbidding. For the time being, Serena was in a spot of trouble of Emily’s making; the least she could do was get her out of it.

                Even if it meant coming back to work on bare feet.

~!~

                Serena was unbelievably lucky—or as lucky as one could be while still working for Miranda Priestley.  The Socialite offices were only three blocks from Elias-Clarke.  If necessary, Emily could have—and would have—run the distance. As it was, she’d spent a knuckle-blanching fifteen minutes in the back of a very hot cab making the trip.  The idea that she simply could have had them delivered to the shoot by messenger never occurred to her.

                Her Blackberry firmly attached to her ear, she swept through the lobby floor without so much as pausing to flash her hard pass.  She had once all but lived in this building, the guards knew her and knew not to get in her way.  Were she in less of a rush, she would have enjoyed the thrill.

                Nevertheless, she was in more of a rush than was likely healthy for the human heart and she could sense the approaching doom known as Miranda barreling down on her.  She sped into the location, which for a change was a studio in the building.  She threw herself into a cast chair and kicked off the shoes.  Serena was already halfway there by the time she’d touched the charms.

                There were really no words at the moment.  Emily wanted to gush with a dozen apologies.  It hadn’t occurred to her that these shoes were to be the centerpiece of the photo shoot, the photo shoot that had the potential to end or extend Serena’s career. They’d discussed this moment that had approached with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. 

Miranda had grown tired of the way editorial photo shoots were done in Runway. She wanted something new, more authentic, more “breathtaking”—her word.  She wanted something so original as to be unrecognizable to the magazine’s current readership.  She had been prepared to fire the entire Art and Editorial staff to make it so.  The only way they could hope to be spared was to design and execute the perfect photo shoot around a single article of fashion.  Miranda herself would attend each one to observe and judge their vision, to decide if the future of her magazine could be found anywhere within it.

Emily held her breath as Serena passed the shoes to a non-descript girl in a frumpy if expensive coat. She moved quickly across the simulated cathedral floor to the model frowning unattractively in the center.  Words were exchanged, not that Emily noticed.  She was trying too hard not to have a panic attack.

                Serena, to her credit, looked absolutely calm though her glasses hid the bulk of her emotion.  Her hands, however, gave her away: curled into fists that looked ripe to strangle someone, namely her dearest friend. Emily felt as though that was exactly what she deserved. She really hadn’t thought about how badly things could go if those shoes had somewhere else to be.

                They were just so lovely—and they’d fit! How was she to know?

                You’d know if you listened, her conscience chose, then, to interject. That was not what she needed to hear.  She just wanted to apologize in peace.

                “I’m sorry,” she finally managed to say.  The crisis was largely averted, though they were dreadfully behind schedule.  She could hear the loins girding as the hour ticked to ten, uncharacteristically late for the unbearably prompt Editor-in-Chief.

                Serena waved her apology away. “It happens to everyone. You know I don’t mind when you borrow my things.” She smiled weakly, one hand going to her temple to rub away visibly growing tension.  “Just tell me. That way, I know when I need to get them back.”  She shrugged. “You had no way of knowing.”

                “Of course,” Emily confirmed, as happy to alleviate herself of the guilt as anything. She nearly asked whether she thought the model would mention to debacle to anyone important. She didn’t see why, all was well that ended well.  Except…this was Runway. Telling tales out of school was how one got ahead.  She really didn’t feel any better now.

                Quite suddenly, she heard the sounds of clacking heels on the marble floor.  She knew that sound, recognized the cadence of those feet as Pavlov’s dogs recognized the ringing of the bell.  Instead of saliva, Emily secreted terror. I don’t even work here anymore and this woman may be the death of me.

                Looking every bit as wired, Serena jerkily removed her own shoes and shoved them into Emily hands as she simultaneously pushed her towards a side door.  She had enough against her, Emily imagined. Being seen with a less than beloved former employee couldn’t exactly count in her favor.

                Emily didn’t take it personally, nor did she go back to work barefooted.

                They didn’t quite match, but she felt like a queen wearing them—metallic twisted heel, platform, and all.  And just for the duration of the ride back, she thought that maybe she could be the next Miranda. Or even better.


~!~


Part II