“If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.” - Lord Chesterfield

Bessie Mae Fontlow had spent the first fifty-seven years of her life with the kind of self confidence that can only be imparted to a girl growing up in a small Ohio town as the great-granddaughter of the original founding fathers and possessed of a reasonably attractive face and figure, along with a family fortune that was still pretty darn nice. Until that fateful day when Aleksandr Martel opened his little dress shop at 12th and Main. Yes, Bessie could see the handwriting on the wall with her first look in that shop window!

After twenty plus years as the local fashion leader and Junior League Chairwoman, her time of ascendancy in Port Fontlow was about to come to an end. Sure she'd be able to hold on to the reins for a little while longer by utilizing her well known powers of biting sarcasm after church and in the beauty parlor to belittle that upstart Martel. But Bessie was too much of a realist to imagine she'd be able to stave off the rampantly chic for long . . . and too long an Ohioan to think she'd be able to pull off the new look herself.