Call sheets came by fax. We photocopied them, marked them up, and passed them around backstage. This was pre-email, pre-smartphone. Practically speaking, it was pre-internet. The world ran at the speed of paper, of physical objects moving between hands, of decisions made face to face because there wasn’t another way.

Eugene and I had been working together for about eighteen months by then. The London-based team took multiple trips a year to Paris. It was a working rhythm I’d grown into and enjoyed.

One afternoon I went to his room at Hotel Costes to tell him that I had decided to move to Paris.

I hadn’t planned the conversation. I just knew I needed to say it before I caught the evening Eurostar back to London. I knocked on his door. He let me in and I told him the news.

His response was immediate and calm. He pointed out that his is a London-based team. If I moved to Paris, that would mean I could no longer be on his team. He said it without weight, without accusation. Just a fact.

I think my exact words were something like:

“Yeah, but… Paris!”

That was my whole argument. That was everything I had to say for myself. Paris. As if the word alone explained the decision, the pull, the inevitability of it. Maybe it did.

He didn’t try to stop me. No argument, no persuasion, no friction. He respected me and my decision completely. He said to call back in before catching my evening Eurostar.

I understand his response more now than I did then. At nineteen, I just took it as Eugene being Eugene. Easy, unflustered, ungrudging. It’s only with distance that I see the full shape of what he did. He was losing a team member. He’d invested time in me, brought me to Paris repeatedly, he’d given me a place inside something that obviously matters deeply to him: his team. And when I told him I was walking away from it all, his response was to respect the choice and let me go cleanly.

There was no manipulation. No “are you sure?” No quiet reminder of what he’d done for me. No Devil Wears Prada attitude, just cool calm acceptance.

I know now that this was a kindness most people are just not capable of. Most people, faced with someone leaving, find ways to make the leaver feel the weight of it. Guilt, pressure, the soft suggestion that they might be making a mistake. Eugene gave me none of that. He gave me permission, even though I hadn’t asked for it.

When I came back that afternoon, he came down from his room with a copy of the first Hotel Costes CD in his hand. Mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac. He gave it to me as a parting gift and wished me well.

I played that CD to my friends as soon as I got back to London, I transferred it to my MiniDisc player and listened to it for years afterwards. Listening back to it now, it has become one of those albums that’s so completely of its time it almost stops being music and becomes a portal into the past. Lounge, downtempo, the late nineties / early noughties in audio form. I still have it at home somewhere, in a box with all my old stuff at my parents’ place.

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Years passed, decades in fact. Then, recently, I came across a copy in my local Oxfam bookshop. Of course I bought it without hesitation.

I put a note inside it. More than a note really, a message, and quite an intense one at that. The kind of thing you can only write when enough time has passed to allow you to say what needs to be said. I told him about what that exchange meant, about what his response taught me, about the shape of his kindness, which I only fully understood years later.

The CD and note sat in my kit bag at the salon for at least a month, waiting.

When Eugene finally came in to the salon to prep for a big shoot recently, I gave it to him.

I couldn’t see his expression properly as he opened it. I was in the middle of a haircut, but I’m sure I caught the corner of a smile as I turned back to my client.

He kind of just stuffed the note into one of his unpredictable pockets.

I remember standing in the minimal dark bathroom on that first evening in Paris before dinner. A film set of a bathroom. Looking at my reflection I thought about my school friends; many of them confided that their degrees felt pointless and that they were just going through the motions because they didn’t know what else to do. They were waiting tables or stacking supermarket shelves to pay their way towards degrees which they really weren’t sure about.

I was staying in a hotel on Rue St Honoré ready for Paris Fashion Week.

I did have the unnerving sense that I’d ended up somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be: impostor syndrome. But ultimately it was Eugene who’d asked me to be there and who was I to question his judgement? I knew my way around a hairdryer just as well as I knew how to plug a MiniDisc player into a backstage sound system. I was useful, I was there and I deeply wanted to help. Although I hadn’t planned it, it was great. Having fallen into hair like this, all I had to do now was just figure out a way of staying around and keeping it together.

Eugene gave me his MiniDisc and Creative Soundblaster, a subwoofer with four tweeters, to plug together and place strategically around backstage. This was long before Bluetooth. Setting up the sound system was always one of the very first things we did. Once the tunes were playing, everything else started to slot into place. Eugene introduced me to KRS-One through that glorious setup, and I never let that thread drop.

Individual pret-a-porter shows are hard to separate now, they’ve merged into one. The pace of them, the noise, the cigarettes, the champagne afterwards. Studio visits are calmer and clearer memories. Sarah Moon was cogitating elegantly through a very bright rooflit loft studio. Paolo Roversi was smoking heavily, drinking lots of coffee, he had a patio with trellises and dark ground floor rooms.

The slower Haute Couture mornings I also remember more clearly. One that particularly stands out decades later was Viktor and Rolf in what might as well have been a full-on greenhouse of a studio. Everywhere there was an intense seriousness and dedication about the work. A quiet focused methodical work, timelessly prepared for.

Eugene moved through all of it with a quality I didn’t have a word for then. I do now: Sprezzatura from the Italian meaning something like studied effortlessness. Nothing performed, nothing wasted; just an easiness with existence. I find this calmness about Eugene so comforting; it’s like he emanates peace. Even in places like Paris, which I think he once told me is his least favourite city.

I was watching everything. Taking in as much as I could.

Eugene’s first mission for me was as follows: Get on the Eurostar to Paris. Go to Delorme. Buy plain black barrettes. Bring them back to London.

He conveyed this mission with a particular humility that’s unique to Eugene.

He knew what it sounded like, sending someone to Paris to go shopping for hairclips. He’d tried hard to find the particular design the brief called for – completely black and flat, nothing ornate or unusual; deceptively simple. But they were nowhere to be found in London. So, to Paris it was!

I got off the Eurostar at Gare du Nord having smoked myself silly all the way there in the dedicated carriage. When I stepped out of the arrivals gate, lo and behold there was the chauffeur holding a board with my name written on it! Obviously I had been told that was the plan, but actually seeing this man dressed in a black suit and tie walking me to a a brand new Mercedes, driving me through Paris to Le passage de l’Industrie. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

I hadn’t been to Paris since I was very young. I had no memory of those visits, apart from a vague recollection of going up the Eiffel Tower. Standing there at Gare du Nord, my name on a board in front of me, it felt like a spiritual homecoming.

I stepped out of the car and in through the glass doors of Delorme. There were very many plain black barrettes, I found the specified shape and style, bought them all and made my way back to London.

It turned out the clips on the inside also needed to be black, but the shape was perfect. We spray painted the clips. To this day I’ve never seen a black barrette with a black metal clip.

Believe me, I’ve been looking!