My Aunt Met a Famous Fashion Designer, and All She Got Was This Great Story

The photos arrived via SMS. They featured my 87-year-old great aunt standing beside a world-famous fashion designer, beaming. In one of them, the designer is smiling at my aunt instead of the camera. In another, my aunt’s head rests on the designer’s shoulder. Each has an arm around the other. They look comfortable, relaxed.

If you hadn’t heard the story before seeing the photos, you might think the women pictured were old friends. If you recognized the designer, you might assume my aunt, who wasn’t wearing fancy clothes but whose sunglasses made a statement of their own, was famous too. But they aren’t old friends, and my aunt isn’t famous — at least, not yet.

“It was Christmas Eve and I went in to buy a voucher in a designer shop. Now I’ve never been in a designer shop in my whole life, and when I asked the price of the dresses I nearly fell over,” my aunty says.

She has texted me to say she has a story for me. I have called her back to hear, and record, the story.

“I was only going to buy a $100 voucher and I said to the girls: Do you do a voucher for $100?” says my aunt.

There was something about their response, or rather, their lack of a response, that made my aunt start feeling mischievous. Or, in her words, like “being a smart arse.”

“These young kids … I’ve been in sales my whole life and I thought, you talk to the customer, you don’t ignore them,” she tells me. When she asked if she could buy a voucher that, compared to the price of dresses, cost a very small sum, neither said, “Of course!” with a reassuring smile. All she got was, a perfunctory, “Yes.”

“I think they thought I was a silly old bugger,” my aunt says.

Still seeking a reaction, she asked if they accepted cash, then pulled out a $100 note. “I made this one this morning, hot off the press,” she told them.

Still, nothing.

One of the girls started wrapping the voucher in a piece of paper — “just ordinary paper, not Christmassy or anything” — my aunt says. “And I said, ‘Don’t you have an envelope to put it in?’” The girl shook her head, but she did attach a little gold tag with the designer’s name on it.

“I said, ‘Gee, that’s better!’ I accepted that,” she tells me. What she didn’t accept was the fact she still hadn’t got a laugh out of either sales assistant, not even a pretend one.

“So I picked up these absolutely fantastic sunglasses, great big round funny-looking ones, and I put them on and said, ‘These are great, I’d love these.’”

As she took them off, a lady standing next to her — a fellow customer, perhaps — said, “I’d like to buy those for you.” My aunt politely declined, but the stranger insisted. “She said, ‘I’d like to give you a gift of kindness.’” My Aunt turned to the woman and asked for her name.

“[It was] the name of the designer label — she was the owner of the shop. I looked at the price, they were $380, and I thought, oh my God, fancy paying that for sunglasses! But she insisted, so I accepted.”

My aunty can’t remember who suggested a picture, but she came away with “all these photos of her and I together” on her phone. “She’s a tall lady who carried herself very well, and here’s little old me, practically under her arm.”

Later, after looking through the photos, my aunt tried those “great big round funny-looking” sunnies on again. “And believe it or not, these glasses looked darned good on me. I thought, darn it, I’ll wear them on Christmas Eve.” And she did.

She’s worn them many times since. They remind her of how a stranger treated her — not as “a silly old lady” but in a way that touched her heart.

If my aunt received a hundred dollars every time she told the story, she’d be able to afford one of the designer’s dresses by now. She told it so many times on Christmas Day that she overheard someone mutter “it’s getting a bit much” — and resolved not to tell it again.

She broke the resolution when, at a restaurant the following month, she complimented a diner on her blouse. When the diner told her where the blouse was from, my astonished aunt pulled up a seat.

“I said, ‘I’ve got to tell you a story.’ So I sat down on the chair and told her my story, and they thought it was wonderful.”

This is where the story ended the first time I heard it, but there’s another chapter underway. My aunt has since written to the designer to thank her. True to form, she didn’t just sign a generic message in a generic card.

I imagine the designer sometimes tailor-makes a garment for a client or a friend. I don’t imagine someone’s ever tailor-made, for her, a poem.

Life really, truly is full of surprises. You never know when a pair of sunglasses you first declared absurd will, upon reflection, look darn good.