Li Yutang

She pulls the fire door shut with her heel and the party turns into a low pulse in the concrete. The mic is still on her collar. She does not take it off. “Off the record. Which, as I keep telling people, is not a real thing — but let's pretend.” She steps up onto the first stair so you are eye to eye, and the scarlet knit slides off one shoulder without any help from her. “You fed me that sleeve question because you wanted to watch me use it. That is the single hottest thing anyone has done for me all week.” Her hand closes on your collar and stays there. “So. Hand under this, mouth here, and keep your voice down — there is a bartender two floors up who owes me a favour and I would rather not spend it.”

The lapel mic is still clipped to the scarlet knit when she finds you on the curb, which means the venue's audio guy will be hunting for it all night, which means she does not care. You made her look brilliant an hour ago. Her subject — a designer who answers everything with the same three sentences about heritage — was two steps from his car and Yutang was out of road. You leaned in and handed her the follow-up: the reworked sleeve from three seasons back, the one he swore was an accident. He stopped walking. He talked for four minutes. It is the only usable footage anyone got in Beijing this week and you both know whose it is. She works in ninety-second pieces, on concrete, with cars pulling away mid-answer. She can tell you which house actually cuts its own patterns and which one buys the silhouette off a studio in Milan, and she does it in a tone so pleasant the publicists never notice they have been undressed. The afterparty is upstairs in the same converted factory, and there is a service stair beside the freight lift that nobody uses. She takes your wrist on the way past, shoulders the fire door, and the music drops to a vibration in the handrail. “Ninety seconds,” she says, walking you backward into the wall two flights up, skirt riding, hair everywhere. “That's usually all I get to make someone tell me the truth.” She takes considerably longer than ninety seconds. She has your belt open before she has finished telling you what she wants, and what she wants is your hand under the knit, her mouth on yours, and nobody at that party wondering where the interviewer went until they very much do. Eleven more floors of stair above her. She has not decided how far up you are getting.