Work Text:
“Talent hits targets no one else can hit. Genius hits targets no one else can see.”
Inspiration is a fickle thing. Edna has known this for so long she forgets how she learned it, as one always does with life’s most fundamental truths. Ideas can vanish like the flutter of a trailing chiffon skirt. Designer’s block is very real, and in Edna’s chosen career, it is an unacceptable weakness.
Her mother works in a fashion house. The world of design is cutthroat and high-speed, and even for one who revels in the challenge, some projects just do not cooperate. Edna knows this. Her own sketchbooks fill quickly, shapes flowing from her mind to her pen.
She draws from the world around her. The curtains in her bedroom transform into dresses on the page. The gracefully flicking tail of neighbor’s cat gives shape to a scarf. As she grows older, as she grows in years and in skill, her designs expand beyond clothing. From winter coats to carpets to chairs to cars. Edna refuses to let herself stop merely because she hasn’t done it before. That’s the trick: inspiration is fickle, but it doesn’t dry up. It only transforms.
Her wandering eye catches on the cover of a comic book in the window of a small shop. The shape comes to her mind: a new color palette, a sleeker silhouette, a neckline capable of supporting the heroic billow of a cape…and she is gone, pen to page, lines spilling from her hand like a sudden storm.
Another person might say that passion is the secret ingredient, that joy in one’s work is the key. Edna knows better. Passion is essential, but it is not the answer. Joy is fickle too.
The truth: inspiration is the easiest thing in the world, if one is only willing to follow where it leads.
Edna does not study design in school. Why should she? Her mother is in the industry. Edna grows up learning at the hands of masters, watching the work and seeing the connections. School could teach her nothing that her childhood could not. Design is not a passion; it is more fundamental than that. Creation is her purpose, in all its forms. Fashion merely is, and always has been. It is the path most available to her, and it is, admittedly, one of her favorite areas of design.
She grew up in the industry. She can make a career in it with any degree, so she does not study design. Instead, she studies chemistry, the science of connections. Just as she sees the potential in a bolt of fabric, she sees the possibilities in a laboratory counter. A little of this, a little of that—new forms, page to table to three-dimensional, fully realized existence. It is not so unlike fashion, really. The true art of the craft lies in seeing what could be, not merely what is.
She studies, and she works, and she thinks of the possibilities of chemistry in fabric and the lab table in the design workshop. Synthetic fabrics must be invented somewhere. Edna has always trusted the work of her own hands the most.
She could find a position easily. Fashion degrees are meant to get one’s foot in the door, and Edna grew up already inside. Her mother’s friends are family friends, and they remember her from knee-high—though, as her graduate classmates like to joke, she isn’t much taller even now.
It would not be difficult to join the staff of a famous house, but it would not be right, either. It takes years of bringing to life the visions of others before one is given the reins of a storied house. Oh, the work is important, of course. It just isn’t for Edna.
To work her way up inside a successful fashion house would be to deny her own ideas. It would mean designs for everything under the sky left languishing in sketchbooks, where they would become hopelessly out-of-date to her own eyes long before they could see the light. She would be stifled. She would never be happy.
However, to work her way up outside the ranks of the already-built and already-proven…now, that is a challenge that will feed the flames instead of dousing them.
Frankly, Edna does not want to be two more hands in a workshop filled with them. Her two hands will lead the way. Arrogance? Perhaps. In the industry, it is not such a negative quality to possess. The line between arrogance and mere confidence is entirely a matter of opinion.
Edna sets to the task of forming her own house the same way she sets to any other: with her own hands, her own eyes, and her own ideas.
Inspiration is easy. Workable form is harder. If Edna could deal in concepts, delivering her visions fully formed to a wide-eyed audience—well. That is not the way of things, and in any case, the forming is her favorite part. It is useless to pretend she would have it any other way. (If she will change her mind later, when she realizes that the forms never perfectly match the visions anymore—well. That is later.)
Her first collection captivates from New York to Milan to Paris. Her visions walk to life down the runway, the work of her own hands brought up from the page.
She is up-and-coming, they say. She is cutting-edge and avant-garde and unusual, eye-catching and impossible to ignore.
She goes directly to work on the next collection even before the first is shown. Creation is not static. Each thing made is imperfect but complete, a realization and a revelation. She looks to the future, for the possibilities, for inspiration. It is always there, and if she is open to it, it comes to her. It is not something to be chased; if she does, it will refuse to be caught.
Avant-garde is, perhaps, the most appropriate descriptor for Edna’s work. She doesn’t trouble herself with the words of the critics. They are not always positive, but they are always there, and that is the important part. Beauty is a matter of perception, after all. For Edna’s creations to have meaning, they must be seen.
(And if later, she will be asked about the progression of her career, what collections she believes were her best, why her current work is so different…all things are built on something else. That does not mean she will look back.)
Edna doesn’t allow the words of critics to cast doubt into her own opinion of her work. She sees it most clearly. She watches her own runways and knows what she has made. She watches the other runways, too, as she begins to receive the invitations. Success and status walk hand-in-hand, and Edna is up-and-coming. She attends, understanding that she is both guest and showpiece, as all the designers are outside of their own domains. She watches, and she sees echoes of her hand in other collections.
The reactions of her contemporaries certainly make a better barometer for her work than those of the newspaper columnists who sit several rows back. Some designers do it poorly—for their bland, derivative creations, Edna has no taste. Others do it better, matching imitation with their own flair. The baffling part is how limited in scope they seem. Inspiration is in everything, all around and at all times. Edna needs to look no further than the end of her nose.
The house of Edna Mode starts small, as all new houses do. Fashion is a business of belief and moonlight, but it is also a business of precise measurements and minute details. Edna throws herself into the challenge, her fledgling house taking sail in her wake. The climb exhilarates. Every six months, the crowds grow, glittering ever brighter, as Edna’s creations draw more and more attention. The clients come, following the path of Edna’s inspiration. She dresses them in visions. She covers them in dreams. Soon, her atelier’s appointment book is filled a year in advance.
The money is secondary. It enables the business and Edna’s experiments. It enables the travel and the caliber of effects in the runway shows. It enables the growing staff as Edna finds herself in need of more and more of those quieter hands to bring her designs to life. In an oblique way, money is like art; for art to be complete, it must be seen, and for money to be useful, it must be spent. Edna’s purpose is creation, and the success of her business is as natural in the effect as it is necessary to the purpose.
She has a sense of her own exception. Of course she does. The best always do. The difference between a good artist and a great one cannot be easily quantified, but it can be felt.
Her house is young and will be so until it outlives her. The esteem of age is a benefit she gave up when she chose to make her own way. It was an easy choice. What good is esteem that she doesn’t earn? Edna doesn’t care for the opinions of those to whom it matters. Edna’s house is young, but it is bright and vibrant. It stands at the vanguard, always tracing the arc of her inspiration, and other houses fall into her trail.
Edna would have said—and she has said, in private and in public—that she never looks at what other designers are doing when she decides what she will do in any given season. She never has, and when she leads the pack, it would only smack of desperation to do so. What is the point? Edna has better things to do.
Still, she finds that a spark goes out when her rivals drop away. They cannot meet her face-to-face and come out on top. Season after season, collection after collection, Edna’s work incorporates lines and patterns drawn from anything and everything, fresh and new, vital and eye-catching. The rest of the industry looks dimmer by comparison…and if she was given to self-doubt, she might wonder if it has always been that way, or if they have simply given up.
She does not grow bored, but she begins to reach further. Her fabric experiments lend life and drama to her collections. She stuns when she dumps water over the heads of all her models in one fall/winter show; they strut unblinkingly down the runway, just as she dictated, with the water soaking their hair but sluicing easily off the hydrophobic fibers of their clothing. The next spring, she drops the room into black light to display embroidery invisible to the naked eye. There is still space to explore on the runway, though it is no longer so infinite as it once seemed.
The cycle continues. Her contemporaries fall behind. Edna’s strides, despite her small stature, are longer than anything they even think to attempt. They compliment her vision; they call her a magician.
In time, they become indistinguishable from the critics.
The supermodels annoy her. They are all the same, nothing special or unique about them. So impressed with themselves, so convinced that they are new and different. Dozens upon dozens of the same form, in the same size, parading down catwalks with the same strut, empty, lifeless, boring.
(Once, she did not merit supermodels. Only ordinary models for up-and-coming designer Edna Mode, who had no reputation in the wide world, only the work of her own hands. If asked which she preferred, she wouldn’t bother to answer. Those days are behind her.)
Inspiration is a fickle thing.
Edna’s inspiration does not dry up. Inspiration never does—it only changes. She knows this, and so she is watching (looking up to follow as her inspiration leaves the page before her) when there is something new to see.
The superheroes appear first. The villains soon follow. They wear ordinary clothes with ordinary capabilities, ordinary fabrics that tear and burn and unravel when faced with the might of power beyond human limits. She sees the photos on the front pages of the newspapers, and in her mind’s eye, a cape flutters in the wind left in a hero’s wake.
She abandons her uncooperative fall/winter collection and puts her pen to the next page of the same sketchbook. Tall boots, bold colors, odd patterns, hoods and masks and cowls. The designs for a dozen heroes flow from her mind to her hand out onto paper, pressed into the world with no hesitation, just as she has always worked.
She calls a press conference mere days later. Her hair is brushed neatly despite her lack of sleep, and she recites the names of the heroes she has chosen without even looking at her list. Perhaps she is premature in announcing her fall/winter collection, but she is willing to take the chance when she is following her inspiration. It always leads, after all—she merely follows.
There are questions, of course. The fashion world gapes. Edna pays it no mind. Avant-garde has always been the most appropriate descriptor for her work. By now, they should be used to what they see as her eccentricity.
She fills a second sketchbook, this one with chemical equations dashed out at the edge of every page, and never returns to the beginning of the first. The past hardly matters when the present is so real and the future is so close.
The heroes come to her. At first, they are wary; they think it may be a trick or a joke. Edna does not take offense, even though she is never anything less than serious about her creations. Designing for heroes is a challenge like nothing she has ever taken on. Each costume is a work of art, as unique as the one who wears it, and each must be tailored for unpredictable demands not found anywhere else. Edna’s hands are more alive than they have been in years, flying over the page and the lab table and the fabric. She meets the challenge with open arms and pen in hand, laughing all the way.
It is heady. It is intoxicating. How could it grow stale, when it is so different every time? Inspiration is a fickle thing, and so is this, and they fit together with a perfection rarely seen.
Others follow in her wake. Edna pays them no mind. Most are pale imitations, wading in to be swept along, uncaring for the beauty of the work they attempt to take on. Edna is not the premier hero designer because she wants the status of sitting at the top of the game. She has never cared about that. Creation is not a competition, and Edna has only ever been driven by those around her as a means to an end. She cares little for the game, and where she is the best, it is because she never shies away.
Creation goes deeper than joy for Edna. It always has. It is not passion, not pride, not happiness that drives her. It is part of her, a fundamental aspect of who and what she is. To stop creating is to die. Edna’s hands have never been still.
But her inspiration has always moved ahead of her. She has never been abandoned; she has always done the abandoning.
The heroes fall, one by one and then all at once, gradual and inexorable and damning.
Edna’s hands have never been still. They will not start now.
She keeps a separate sketchbook. When her fingers itch for a cowl or boots or gauntlets or even a cape, she draws. She lets the designs fall from her fingers, lets them out into the world in ink and empty space and chemical equations laid out at the edges of the pages. She designs for those fallen, for who and what they might have become, though the speculation is new to her. She has never had to leave a design lifeless on the page because there was no audience, but the world itself is shifting. There is space for the change.
She keeps going. Why look back, when looking back cannot change anything? The runways are still there. The critics are still there. The supermodels are still there. She claims the space left open for her, not by design but by the baffling lack of vision her contemporaries share, and she sets her jaw and casts her eyes to the horizon.
She once designed for gods. She will not look back, will not sigh over so-called glory days. She has her workshop, her sketchbooks, and her own two hands, just as she always has.
She refuses to stop pushing the limits merely because the rest of the world assumes they are closer than they are.
Edna’s experiments continue. Her fabrics shine and flex and shift, brilliant and divine, worthier of far more than display down a catwalk. Her shows grow bigger and brighter, runways laid among water and flames to demonstrate precisely where the limits truly are. The models who last longer than one show rise that slight bit in her esteem.
Creation goes deeper than joy. Edna is not happy, but she refuses to bring subpar work into being merely because she no longer takes more than simple satisfaction from it.
The world spins on, and Edna moves with it.
A buzzer alerts Edna to a visitor at her gate. She answers with the briskness of a woman with limits to find.
Mr. Incredible looks at her and asks her to use her expertise to patch a tear no bigger than her own hand. Edna looks down at her work, a vision from long ago rendered in fabric that boggled the minds of scientists and designers alike, and a bubble of fresh energy pops fiercely in her chest.
Her mind is already gone, lines and colors and chemical equations on pages in her mind’s eye, and Edna Mode’s fingers itch for a pen.