“There they are,” Elena said, pointing to a truck from which photographic equipment was being unloaded and brought into a wholly nondescript brick apartment building. “We’re here.”
         Several of the staff, including Nicola, looked at each other, wondering why they were here at a place that seemed like the most unphotogenic spot in the world.  They piled out and Elena turned to everyone and said, “People, you are standing on sacred ground.  Welcome to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where hip hop was born.”  Then she turned to a young, good-looking black man in baggy jeans, a New York Knicks jersey, aviator glasses and baseball cap turned backwards and said, “FX, tell them about this place.”
         Amazingly, the young man began to perform a history of the place they were standing in front of, all in rap.  
 
       “Now you people prob'ly didn’t know it,
        ’Cause there’s nothin’ ‘round here to show it.
        And there’s nothin’ on the Exxon map here
        Make you think someone invented rap here.
        But back in nineteen seventy three
        In this South Bronx community
        A funk DJ who was Jamaican
        Showed everybody he wasn’t fakin’.”

    The rap went on to describe how a Jamaican immigrant named Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool, on August 11, 1973, had presided over a house party in the building’s community rec room (below), where kids started improvising lyrics to a continuous funk beat.  Other Bronx deejays joined the parties and soon hip hop groups were forming around the borough, with names like The Herculoids, and the neighborhood took on the name “Boogie Down Bronx.”
         After finishing the rap,  the young man received applause from the Willi staff, and Elena introduced them. “People,” she said, “This is FX Sledg, who’s kind of unofficial keeper of the flame here, where rap all began.  And he’s got an album coming out just around the time of Willi’s first issue.  So, he’s going to pose with Nikki in the community room here.”
         Still astonished, the staff now realized why they’d brought the clothes they did, for they showed off some young designers’ take on hip hop gear, with finer fabrics in more striking colors and patterns.  Nicola’s outfit was of a kind a girl in the Bronx would wear to a hip hop party—with a red, off-the-shoulder Latina blouse that left the midriff bare, worn with ballooning black pants cut mid-shin and decorated with ribbons down the outer seams.
         Everyone went inside and down to the basement rec room, which looked like every other basement rec room they’d ever seen, completely without décor except for a folding table with some plastic red and blue soda cups and liter bottles of Coke and Gatorade.  On the floor was a boom box the size of a suitcase.  As the lights and reflector screens were being set up, Diana took Nicola aside and started on her makeup and hair—which was a wig streaked with fluorescent colors—while Banks got the clothes ready.  Fifteen minutes later, with FX Sledg’s album blaring from the boom box,  Hector Saint-Nazaire began snapping photos and fifteen minutes after that he’d finished, insistent that taking any more time would spoil the spontaneity of the moment.
         When it was over, Diana turned to Elena and said, “Nikki’s a natural. I can’t believe she hasn't been modeling for years.”
         “I told you,” said Elena. “Okay, people, let’s pack it up, get some lunch and try to get in a second location today.”
         After nibbling some food from a local tacqueria, the staff drove just a few blocks south before Yankee Stadium loomed into full view. “Our next location,” said Elena.
         There was no game that day—and Elena had not only managed to get clearance for the photo shoot inside the stadium but also to enlist the participation of  29-year-old Yankees catcher Juan Espiño, originally from the Dominican Republic, to pose with Nicola.  He was dressed in a stunning featherweight wool one-button suit woven in the Yankees signature white-with-blue pinstripes, an elegant take on an iconic uniform by another Latino designer.  The suit had razor-sharp trouser pleats and a perfect break at the cuffs, the shoulders slightly roped, the buttons on the cuffs unbuttoned.  Espiño’s shirt was white, with a wide navy blue club tie with the interlocking letters N and Y that formed the Yankees emblem.
        Opposite Espiño, Nicola stood wearing a sexy take-off on the very un-sexy umpire’s uniform—a knit shirt stretched to the breaking point over the inevitable corpulent paunch of the official, with gray slacks in an equally poor fit.  Nicola’s version began with a perfectly fitted dark polo shirt with white collar in cotton lisle, with the designer’s logo on the breast, and beautifully tailored pleated gray gabardine trousers that hugged her hips then flared at the bottom.  On her head she wore a black sequined umpire’s cap.  The finished photo showed the two of them pointing fingers in each other’s face as if in an argument in the batter’s box.
         The next day and the day after that the locations and themes were always very different, illustrating not only the diversity of Bronx culture but of young Bronx designers.  So, one morning the shoot was done at Fordham University, in the Duane library (left), where a handsome football player sat with his legs up on a desk while Nicola leaned seductively over him, trying to disengage him from his studies.  His clothes were a savvy parody of college dress—a wide herringbone tweed jacket of many color weaves, with broad shoulders and lapels, an Oxford shirt with a wide tie in a blazingly loud rep pattern, and yellow chinos with little embroidered figures on them that, if you got up close, were revealed to be marijuana leaves.
         Nicola was in tight black jeans with pink seam stitching and an oversized sweatshirt in the school’s colors—maroon with two white letters for Fordham University: “FU.”  This time her hair (another wig) was an extended mass of tight curls.
         That night the crew went to a salsa club, where the clothes were outrageously sequined and boldly colored dance outfits.  The male model was a well-known salsa dancer whose chest was almost totally exposed and whose shiny black pants were engineered to survive every dance step, lunge and split.
        Nicola was not expected to keep up with the dancing—though she surprised herself—but there was no sexier or more revealing salsa dress on the dance floor that night, and no more beautiful woman.  Her hair was pulled back very tightly, with a white gardenia at the back. Her heavy makeup loomed large in the final plan.
         The issue’s cover photo was intended to be very high class: Nicola and a gorgeous black actor from the borough—posed in front of the stunning Art Déco green bronze entrance gates of the Bronx Zoo on Fordham Road, whose sculptures of bears and deer by Charles A. Platt were beloved by every child who ever saw them upon entering the zoo.  
         Against this backdrop the actor wore a silk and cotton black turtle neck and tight tuxedo crêpe pants under a great cashmere coat the color of a lion’s skin, with a large fur collar the color of a lion’s mane.  Nicola wore a body-hugging leopard-spotted silk dress to her knees, sashed with a wide, pleated leather belt, beneath a waist-length coat of flamingo-like feathers in white and pink. 
         Saint-Nazaire shot barely a roll of film, positive he could not take any more shots that would be any more beautiful.
         The final location was a form of a gift to Nicola: they shot the session at Bella Napoli, with pizza for everyone.  Elena agreed with Saint-Nazaire that having regular customers in the shots gave the room vivacity.  Joe Bastone didn’t understand why they had to change the lighting and move statuary but he didn’t complain, he was charging a fee for the restaurant’s takeover during what was the slow afternoon period.  Of course, all of the Santini family game to ogle, applaud and be impressed by Nicola, who that day was dressed not unlike Olivia Newton-John in the movie “Grease,” including the very big teased hair—with a headband—and very red lipstick. 
         Just as Saint-Nazaire announced he was almost ready, there was a commotion at the door.  People were gasping, screaming, applauding—for through the door came a short, skinny guy with sunglasses and a golf cap turned backwards. He was dressed all in black, a silver medallion around his neck, and it was obvious to everyone from the neighborhood who it was:  Elena had hired Dion Dimucci, former lead singer of Dion and The Belmonts (left)—Dion, the man who, with his group, was the most influential pioneer of doo-wop music in the 1950s, a style he’d perfected singing on the corner of Arthur Avenue and 187th Street in the neighborhood that gave his group its name.
         Nicola was as giddy as anyone at Dion’s arrival and told him how much she loved his work. Dion thanked everyone then said, “Okay, let’s get this show on the road,” posing with Nicola over a huge pizza set on a red-checkered tablecloth while Joe Bastone quickly slipped in a cassette of Dion’s greatest hits. 
         And as Dion’s high-pitched wailings in “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love?” and his grinding growl in “The Wanderer” filled the air at Bella Napoli, Nicola thought this had been perhaps the most amazing week of her life. 
        Later that night, in her bed in the building around the corner, that thought worried her.