Scrapped by the Snow Leopard

I am the most beautiful thing in this building, and the building is a couture house with a marble reception desk and a wall of awards, so weigh the size of that claim and then accept that it is merely true.

I am a snow leopard. My name is Antoinette. The house is called Maison Antoinette, and I feel the arithmetic speaks for itself.

For six years I have been the face of this house — the scarf, the campaign, the reason anyone photographs the building. My human, Andrea, makes the clothes, at night, with pins in her mouth, which no one photographs because there is nothing photogenic about effort. And her husband, Leo — Creative Director, and the creative vision of a parking structure — has spent those years taking the bow for work his own hands could not do.

Now he means to scrap her. Cut Andrea from the house she built, relabel her genius as his "fresh direction," and install his mistress — a woman named Candy, and I use the word loosely — as the new muse. The new face.

The new Antoinette.

There is one flaw in his plan, and it is the same flaw in every plan a mediocre man has ever made: he did not consult me. You cannot crown a fresh direction at a house named after a snow leopard without the snow leopard. And I do not roar, and I do not lunge — that is what a lesser animal would do.

A diva withholds.

The seasonal show is in three weeks, and Leo requires me to sit prettily beside his mistress and bless the succession with six years of accumulated mystique. Instead, in front of four hundred of the most aesthetic people alive, I intend to render a verdict.

Scrapped by the Snow Leopard is a laugh-out-loud, closed-door revenge romantic comedy narrated entirely by the vainest, most magnificent, most impeccably dressed snow leopard in couture. Completely standalone. Guaranteed happily-ever-after. One credit-thief, cut from the collection.

I require, now, to be groomed. And then photographed. And then obeyed.