Two Sisters, Two Met Balls and One Fairy Godfather

Twins party better.

From a young age, my fashion designer mother Valerie was preparing Lucy (right) and I for our Met Ball debut. Here we are in London in the early 1970s, aged around five years old, about to go to a wedding. We are dressed in matching Valerie Goad, the name of Mum’s label. She has the most incredible style.

One Monday in early December 1997, right after Thanksgiving, I arrived at the Vogue offices on Madison Avenue early as usual. I’d only moved from British Vogue a few months before, and I’d often arrive by 7.30am, so I could read the clips and catch up with news before the day got going. Although my knowledge of the city was limited to where to get my Manolo’s mended, the address of Da Silvano and the phone number for Big Apple Cars, I’d convinced myself I was already virtually a native. In reality I knew almost nothing about how Manhattan worked.

That day, as soon as I arrived I was summoned to Anna Wintour’s office by Kate Young, who had recently become one of her assistants, and a friend to me.

‘Anna’s inviting you to the Costume Institute Benefit next Monday,’ she told me.

The ‘Costume Institute’? It sounded like an educational establishment created by Catholic nuns for earnest girls to study needlework. And a ‘benefit’? I’d never heard of such a thing. I smiled at Kate, acted all thrilled and later secretly asked my assistant to explain. She told me the event was a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which I had not yet visited and knew nothing of, Phillistine that I was) to raise money for the fashion section of the museum. Ok, I thought to myself, a charity ball, as we’d call such things in England. I’d got this, no probs. I knew what these things were like: predictable events most memorable for the flat champagne and hordes of Sloane Ranger girls in puffy taffeta ballgowns.