Chapter 1Eugenia Ward had spent the morning minutely going over her personal accounts and all her accounting records online, the same records that had been causing her endless anxiety and sleepless nights for the last eighteen months, ever since the pandemic began. She was a tall, slim, blond, serious-looking woman, impeccably trained as a fashion designer, and had been in the business for thirty-three years. She checked her accounts diligently, while making notes on a yellow legal pad of things she wanted to move and change and watch out for, expenses she could carve out of her overhead, and others she would eliminate from her life if she was forced to. It had been a long, slow process as she did everything to keep her business afloat. She was divorced with five adult children, two of whom she still helped to support. She had started her own company fourteen years before, when she turned forty. She made the most elegant, luxurious evening gowns and wedding gowns. They were ready-to-wear that looked like haute couture. They were worthy of the finest design houses and high-end labels in Europe and the U.S., and a year after she’d opened the doors of her Eugenia Ward stores, she added another dimension, her own haute couture line of evening and wedding gowns, which was her dream come true. They were made to order, entirely by hand, in her own ateliers by sewers who had been trained in Paris. Like some of the finest French designers, she now created both ready-to-wear clothes and haute couture. Her made-to-order handmade gowns were shown, ordered, and fitted in her exclusive private salons. She made it a memorable experience for her clients.
Her business had been a brilliant success and had taken off like a rocket, and much to everyone’s amazement, Eugenia had been able to pay off her investors in five years. She had loyal clients around the world, and had had several offers to buy the business, but she had always refused. Both arms of the business were a gold mine, and she loved what she did. Eugenia was involved in every aspect of the business, with her haute couture gowns made under the label Princess Eugenie and her ready-to-wear line eponymous, as Eugenia Ward.
As a respected American designer, she showed her next season’s line of ready-to-wear gowns at Fashion Week in New York twice a year, in February and September, and her haute couture line in Paris, with the other remaining couture houses, in January and July. She had a store in the Seventies on Madison Avenue in New York for her ready-to-wear gowns, and above it her very elegant haute couture salons, where they had fittings. She also had an office on Seventh Avenue where they took ready-to-wear orders. She had a store on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and a business office above it for orders in Europe. It was an impeccably run operation, and extremely lucrative for Eugenia. Until the pandemic hit them like a bomb. The entire world had been in lockdown for months, repeatedly, and curfews were in force around the globe. Social events, even small dinner parties, were canceled, as well as every socialite jet-set wedding. No woman in any city in any country had worn an evening gown in almost two years. Evening wear and the events where one wore it had vanished overnight. Eugenia was one of the most famous and successful designers in fashion history and poured much of what she made back into the business, and in the blink of an eye, she had become obsolete. Now women were wearing yoga pants, exercise clothes, blue jeans and sweatshirts, fleece-lined slippers and running shoes, and down jackets instead of satin evening coats. Their jewelry to go with the evening clothes had been in vaults at home or the bank for almost two years, and the calendars of the most popular socialites were blank.
Eugenia hadn’t arrived at the pinnacle of her success by accident or casually. Her father had wanted her to get a law degree, and her mother thought she should study art history and work at the Louvre in Paris or the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Her parents were serious, conservative, well-educated people from respectable families. Her mother had gone to Vassar, her father to Yale. Her mother had never worked. She played bridge, served on charitable committees, and oversaw their only daughter’s education and well-being. They were good parents. Her father was the president of a New York bank, and both came from solid but not wealthy families. Her mother had gotten a master’s in Renaissance art at Columbia, and painted still-lifes and landscapes in the style of the Old Masters as a well-executed hobby. The walls of the Park Avenue apartment where Eugenia had grown up were covered with her mother’s art.
Eugenia had been passionate about fashion all her life. It fascinated her, particularly the glamorous gowns created for movie stars and famous women. Creating them herself was all she wanted to do. It was her dream. Her parents thought it undignified, irrelevant, and frivolous, but they couldn’t stop her.
Her mother had tried to redirect her artistic impulses into a more educated, intellectual career, and her father thought she would do well as an attorney and tried to convince her to go to law school. But Eugenia’s passion for the fashion world was limitless. She was constantly sketching clothes, and fascinated by the history of fashion and great designers, both in France and the U.S. She made her mother an evening gown for Christmas when she was sixteen. It was inspired by a gown designed by Christian Dior in the 1950s, and she sewed it herself. Her mother was bowled over by it and it fit perfectly. Even her parents didn’t deny she had talent, though they wished she would turn it in a more intellectual direction. But all Eugenia wanted to do was design beautiful clothes for real live women to wear, to make them look like movie stars. Before that, she made clothes for her Barbie dolls that were miniature works of art. She turned them into an art project in college and made a video of them. She had spent hours dressing her dolls as a child, and making their clothes by hand. She made clothes for her friends in school. She was obsessed with fashion.
Her determination to work in fashion was the cause of the first major disagreement she and her parents had ever had. Their relationship had been strong, easy, and harmonious before that. Her mother was properly dressed, but not interested in fashion.
After tearful battles with Eugenia, they had finally given in, and Eugenia had gone to Parsons School of Design, as well as NYU, majoring in fine arts, with a minor in art history to satisfy her mother, and graduated at the top of her class with honors. It had calmed her parents down for a while.
She had done an internship in the haute couture ateliers of Valentino in Italy, right after she graduated, and then worked at Dior in Paris for two years, at first in ready-to-wear and then in the sacred halls of haute couture. It was the high point of her time in Paris.
She came back to New York after two years at Dior, and at twenty-four, was hired by Oscar de la Renta, where she became his head designer and stayed for sixteen years, until she started her own business with his blessing. He was her mentor and advisor, and the man she respected more than any on earth, other than her own father. Oscar thought her immensely talented, which no one denied, not even the critics, who worshipped her and rarely criticized her work. They said she was “inspired,” with an undeniable gift for creating the most glamorous gowns in the last thirty years, gowns that no one wanted now, because they had nowhere to wear them. Eugenia knew they would come back eventually, when the last of the pandemic had skittered away like a rat off a ship, but in the meantime, no one was there yet. People were depressed and suffering the effects of PTSD, after a year and a half of fearing for their lives and watching the world crumble around them.
Copyright © 2025 by Danielle Steel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
