The Last Collection

Chapter Originals

Noor Rahimi is twenty-six and has been in the atelier at Maison Veneri for four years, which means she has made about eleven hundred garments that other people have been photographed in and has never once been named on anything. She is the best hand in that building and everybody in it knows, and none of it is written down anywhere. Luca Veneri is thirty-two, he inherited a house that was dying and has three seasons left to stop it, and in March he picks up a repaired jacket off a rail and finds a seam he has never seen in his life. It is his grandmother's cut and it is not his grandmother's technique, and it takes him nine days to find out who did it. What he does next is put it in the Paris collection. What he does after that is put his own name under it. And Noor Rahimi is standing four rows back at the Palais de Tokyo watching eleven hundred people applaud her mother's sleeve, and she has six weeks, a contract with a clause in it, and one very good reason not to burn the entire house to the ground.