Category: Backstage

The editorial shoot for our Winter lookbook took place on Saturday in an alley behind the Grand Whisker Hotel, with Pippa Angora, a photographer named Lucien Bokeh, and a rain machine that refused to work.

After 2 hours of waiting, it began to rain naturally, which Pippa regarded as a personal insult. She stalked back to her cushion. Lucien shouted, ‘Give me danger!’ She gave him a sneeze. We captured 940 frames, and in 3 of them she appears to be thinking. The cover is being decided. The sneeze may be used.

Madame Tulle, 17, is our head of quality, and she has said ‘no’ to 2,114 collars this year. We found her on a velvet chair beside the cutting table, supervising a steaming iron.

‘The seam was a whisker too wide,’ she explained, regarding a rejected piece. ‘It would have been noticed by six cats and a ghost.’ Asked about her secret, she blinked slowly. ‘I want to love it,’ she said, ‘and I cannot, because it is not perfect. And that, my darling, is why you are here, and why I am on this chair.’ We were dismissed with a flick of the tail.

Pippa Angora, our house model, rises at 11 a.m., stretches for a luxurious 40 minutes and is carried to the studio on a silk cushion. She walks for 6 minutes a day. She naps for the remaining 1,434.

Her runway technique is the stuff of legend: a slow, glacial pace, an unblinking stare and a tail held aloft like a conductor’s baton. She has never smiled, though on one occasion in 2023 her left ear moved. Her agent, a stern Siamese called Mr. Octavian Prowl, takes 15 percent and an unreasonable number of lunches. She is, simply put, the face of the house, the neck of the house and occasionally the entire house.