The Knockoff (11 page)

“Not yet. Seriously. She didn’t even bring it up to me. I can just tell that she saw it and it raised her hackles. If it happens again, I’ll tell you.”

Tilly, the voice of reason. Tilly, the one who could seamlessly juggle
all of the emotional baggage of this entire family, switched gears and gave Imogen a sympathetic look.

“You’ve been irritated since you walked in the front door. More Evil Evie? What’d she do now? Drown a sack of kittens in the Lincoln Center fountain?” One of the reasons Imogen loved Tilly was that she was saltier than a curbside pretzel.

“Not just yet.”

Tilly reached into the stainless-steel fridge.

“Hold on. You need a glass of wine. You will be less irritated with a glass of wine in your hand.”

It was true. Imogen felt her ever-percolating annoyance begin to lighten as she sipped her Sancerre and unloaded it all—the Twitter fiasco, Eve’s leak to TechBlab and finally how she found out about it from Ashley, which might have been the most embarrassing part of it all.

“And it will only get worse tomorrow! I am still going to be crap on the Twitter and I am supposed to be live-tweeting throughout all of the shows. I am not spontaneous. I like to think about what I want to say. I’ve never been good at the spur of the moment. I need to let ideas marinate before they’re ready for an audience—an audience on Twitter that now outnumbers Eve’s, by the way.” The two women exchanged a small high five.

Tilly was pleasantly round all over, with a toothy grin and a smattering of freckles. She unleashed her incongruous fiery Irish temper against Eve for the better part of the next five minutes, using language that would have made a whore blush. The girl slurped at her glass of wine, twirling a piece of her strawberry-blond hair around her little finger, the gears in her head obviously turning.

“Tell me again why you need to be tweeting all day?”

Imogen allowed her lips to linger on the rim of the wineglass as she considered Tilly’s question.

“Eve says that it’s good for the brand. It breeds intimacy, makes the reader out in Wisconsin feel like she is sitting next to us at the fashion shows.” Imogen used some of Eve’s words verbatim. “Everything is much more personal these days. I’m sure Eve will want me live-tweeting my selection of knickers in the morning.”

“Mmm-hmmmm.” Tilly continued to mull. Imogen felt immense gratitude as Tilly poured them each another glass of wine. She swore that Tilly’s liver was made of coal. She had, at more than one dinner party, drunk Imogen and Alex right under the table. “I’ve got it!” Tilly slammed her hand so hard on the granite countertop that Imogen almost cried out in pain on the stonework’s behalf.

“You are not a words person. You’re visual. That’s what makes you such a genius at creating a magazine. You can turn a photo shoot into a movie that just dances off the page.”

Imogen smiled at the compliment.

“And what is more intimate than photographs, especially the photographs you take with your wonderful eye?”

“Can I put photographs on Twitter? That seems even more complicated than putting words on Twitter.”

“No, no, you’re gonna to use Instagram. Have you tried it before? It’s wonderful.”

Imogen knew a bit about Instagram since Karl Lagerfeld made a huge deal of joining and taking pictures of his imperious white kitten, Choupette, but, like with Twitter, she never bothered to create an account for herself. She didn’t get it.

“This is going to be so easy. The brilliant thing about Insta is that you can link it to your Twitter account, so that everything you post there is immediately tweeted. Instagram is a lot easier and you really don’t have to worry about the words. You can focus on taking wonderful pictures and just write down your emotional reaction to a piece in the caption. That will go to Twitter and everyone will be happy. Your followers and Glossy.com’s readers really will feel like they have been sitting next to you at the show.”

Tilly pulled her iPad mini from a cute red patent leather case with gold piping. She opened up the app of the teensy brown camera lens and began typing.

“What do you want your screen name to be?”

“Can it be the same on Instagram and Twitter?”

“Sure thing. That makes it easier.”

“Then @GlossyImogen, I suppose,” Imogen said, crossing her eyes and making a face. “It makes me sound like a seventies porn star with
a particularly good bikini wax. Glossy Imogen, at your service.” She did her best Valley Girl accent, making Tilly snort a bit too loudly.

“@GlossyImogen it is. Okay, you’re all set. Let me show you how to use it.” Tilly was a genius instructor and in fifteen minutes Imogen was using filters and borders. Tilly showed her how to practice first without actually posting anything so as to avoid a repeat of the morning’s Twitter debacle. Filters were truly magical things. She adored how “Rise” provided a soft lens over the picture, something that would come in handy when taking close-up shots of anyone over the age of twenty-five. “X-Pro II” made everything feel so vibrant and warm. “Sutro” emphasized the grays and browns in the family cat Coco’s face, giving her a positively sinister Cheshire grin.

“You should keep that one,” Tilly said, glancing over Imogen’s shoulder. “Everyone loves a cat on the Internet.”

Everything in “Valencia” looked like it was taken by a Polaroid camera in the eighties. She used it to snap the kids making funny faces, Annabel’s tongue hanging lazily out of the side of her mouth and Johnny attempting a headstand. Tilly showed her how she could switch from photo to video and actually produce her own tiny bits of B-roll to add to her Twitter feed. Who knew that her phone could do so much more than text and receive email?

She was hooked. Instagram captured a brighter, more highly produced version of your life. Imogen was pleased with the idea of herself as professional retoucher. Instagram filters were the Botox of the Internet. They made everything Insta-fabulous. She snapped a pic of her shoes. “I love you, shoe!” she captioned it.

Imogen wrapped Tilly in a hug, the two of them giddy from the wine.

“Matilda Preston, can I please make you my mentor for all things related to the Internet from here on out?” Imogen asked. Tilly folded at the waist in a small curtsy.

“You most certainly may, my lady.” The four of them, two women and two children, collapsed in a pile of giggles.

“Selfie time!” Annabel yelled.

“What?” Imogen asked. “No. I don’t think I should be taking a selfie and then posting it on the Internet. I…it’s not me.” She
couldn’t get the image of Eve, puckering her lips into the camera for her own close-up, out of her mind.

Annabel made a face. “Come on, Mom. Everyone takes selfies.”

“They’re so annoying.”

Annabel crossed her arms in a fake huff.

Imogen relented. “Fine. One selfie. C’mere and take it with me so I don’t feel silly.”

Her daughter posed, shoulder forward, teeth showing. Johnny galloped over, carrying the reluctant cat. Imogen held out her arm to steady the camera.

“Okay…say
fromage
.”

I
mogen felt a bolt of newfound energy as she bounded out of bed the first morning of Fashion Week. The day’s schedule was packed, beginning at nine a.m. She perused the bright red Fashion Calendar pages folded into her pale blue Smythson diary in the cab to Lincoln Center, making circles around fifty-seven out of three-hundred-plus events she knew she would attend in the next eight days.

It was starting to feel like fall. Imogen pulled her jacket tighter around her middle and breathed in crisp air, wet leaves and diesel punctuated by something mysterious and sweet, not unlike maple syrup. She took in the scene as she exited the taxi and approached the grand fountain in front of the complex. Photographers hungrily milled about the open space looking for someone famous or elaborately dressed to shoot. Street-style posers skulked behind them, begging to be snapped. If there was a polar opposite to DISRUPTTECH! this was it. In place of soft-bellied men in flannel were statuesque women in stilettos and dark sunglasses.

If you were someone who belonged at Fashion Week, you strode right up the stairs toward the head of security, Max Yablonsky, and his squad, and looked them directly in the eye. Citadel Security was a crew of Queens- and Brooklyn-bred tough guys right out of a story by
Nick Pileggi. Yablonsky knew how to weed out the gate-crashers who kept their eyes down, focused on their iPhones or fumbling in their bags for anything that resembled an invite, but was actually a receipt from the nail salon.

Flanking Yablonsky were the brothers Tom and Mike Carney, a former court officer and former transit police officer, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the entrance to Fashion Week, who would engage in endless banter while on their feet for ten hours at a time.

Max wrapped Imogen in a bear hug so tight she was overwhelmed by his scent of cigars, sweat and Old Spice.

“How’s my favorite fashion gal?” he asked. It was a wonderful thing to be referred to as a gal, even by a man old enough to be her father.

“I’m great, Max. How are the kids?” Yablonsky, a high school dropout, had put four kids through Georgetown and Notre Dame as the leading security provider for everything fashion-related in New York City. Imogen adored Max. But she knew mentioning his children was a mistake that could cost her the next fifteen minutes.

“Can I look at the new pictures on my way back out, darling?” She squeezed his arm. “I want to make sure I get a seat.”

“Imogen Tate. You know they always have you in the front row.” She winked at him and strode past the Carney brothers.

The one thing DISRUPTTECH! and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week did have in common was the branding. Everywhere you looked there were floor-to-ceiling banners and branded kiosks. There was a MAC pop-up makeup salon. Two new Mercedes S-Class sedans, with models casually draped across their hoods flanking a small bar area serving $17 miniature bottles of Piper Heidsieck champagne and $8 espressos. Bins filled with Smartwaters and teeny-tiny cans of Diet Coke dotted the room. A wall of Samsung Galaxy tablets broadcast the shows in a corner. A second smart wall updated instantly in real time with Instagrams from the shows.
My photos need to be on that wall
, Imogen thought. She was beginning to see things differently.

In the mid-2000s Fashion Week went entirely digital with iPad check-in. Clipboard girls checking invites were replaced by a legion
of iPad girls, scrolling through lists of names on their shiny screens. Row after row of Fashion GPS machines allowed you to scan a bar code to receive your seating assignment. Where it used to be a scrum of editors and buyers crowded around a single entryway, now the landscape was as efficient as airline check-in. Imogen strode over to the GPS terminal and expertly scanned her printed bar code for the Senbi Farshid show, glancing around to see who else was in the room as she waited for her confirmation to print. Just coming through the doors in a sea of bodyguards were Olivia Wilde and Jessica Chastain, both in full looks from Marc Jacobs. Sofia Coppola walked slowly by herself behind the movie stars, understated and beautiful as always. As junior reporters mobbed the two starlets, Coppola strode right up to her own GPS and quietly printed her ticket. An even larger crowd stampeded toward the entrance.
Who could that be for?
Imogen wondered. Gwyneth Paltrow perhaps? No, Leandra, the Man Repeller, an Instagram-famous blogger with delicious street style.

A reality star was trailed by a camera crew, her overfilled face bursting with pride that she had arrived at Fashion Week when only a year earlier she had been the bored bride of a celebrity podiatrist in California. Small women with big handbags threw elbows to scuttle in front of Asian men in large black overcoats. Everywhere you looked there was fur, real and faux, despite the temperature hovering above fifty.

Imogen didn’t even bother to glance down when her little slip of paper popped excitedly from its slot like a lottery ticket. She knew she would be in the front row, eleventh seat in. All the magazine editors sat in the front row, since it put them within breathing distance of the clothes. Plucking a design off one runway and then pairing it with something from another show and then translating them into a photo shoot for the magazine would set the bar for how these clothes would be worn by women around the world. Photographs of clothes never did them justice. You needed to see how they moved on a model, what the color did under the lights and how the fabric felt to the touch. The attention to detail, even the music that accompanied the models down the runway. All crafted an emotional and visual
message. That was how you knew what to include on the pages of a magazine. It was a mysterious and complicated process, one that Imogen believed began in her front-row seat.

Plus, this way the designer could spy on the editors. The black cloth that separated the runway from the staging area was see-through if you pressed your face against it. If an editor didn’t smile, a wounded designer would conspiratorially pull ads from her book. Imogen would go backstage afterward to do her obligatory oooohhs and ahhhhhs. Molly Watson was the one who had taught her the importance of going backstage at every single show to congratulate the designer.

“Lord knows you didn’t want to sit at their show for three hours,” she had told Imogen. “At the very least they need to see your face and know you were there.” Most designers were exhausted after a show but would hold court for their loyal subjects. Valentino was the exception. The Italian sat alone, off in a corner, slowly sipping a glass of champagne.

Imogen was caught off guard walking into the Senbi show. Two hands grasped either side of her buttocks and gave them a very firm squeeze. “You saucy minx!” She turned to see Bridgett Hart.

“When did you get in?” Imogen hugged her.

“Three hours ago on the red-eye.” Her old friend and roommate, now the most sought-after stylist in Hollywood, had been in Los Angeles for two weeks pulling dresses for a very cool and chic seventeen-year-old starlet who was expected to be nominated for an Academy Award in just a couple of months. Bridgett always developed a kind of bonhomie with her clients. She wasn’t just their stylist, she was their girlfriend. “You’re seeing the most beautiful, most private and most insecure women in the world completely bare,” she once told Imogen. “They need to feel like it’s their best friend sitting in the room.”

Bridgett looked no worse for the travel. She was a champ at sleeping on planes and Imogen hadn’t seen her look at all tired since she discovered thrice-weekly oxygen facials in 1999 and somehow expertly wrote the expense off on her taxes each year. She’d been scouted as a model at seventeen, while living in the suburbs of Toronto. The scout flew her to New York, where she lived with Eileen Ford for her first
year before she positively blew up. They’d given her the model nickname Birdie, not because she looked particularly avian, but because shoots made her so nervous she barely ate a thing.

Imogen first met her on a shoot for
Moda
and soon after they moved in together.

Birdie was the first black girl to land both a CoverGirl beauty campaign and a
Vogue
cover. Her body was disarming, featuring curves that Victoria’s Secret was always dying to get in their catalog (even though she kept turning them down!). Her green cat eyes loved the camera. But it was her warm wide smile that took over her face and kept getting her gigs. She had hated being a model. Hated the long hours, the overnight flights, the skeevy photographers asking her to fuck them all the time. She confided in Imogen that she never planned to have a career as a celebrity stylist; it had simply become her second act. Years of being photographed had taught her exactly what would and wouldn’t work on women’s bodies. Soon after she started styling she began booking major campaigns, including Versace, Valentino, Max Mara. The Italians loved her. She was great to look at and talented to boot. Ralph Lauren had begged her to work for him full-time as his creative eye, but for Birdie, one client was never enough of a challenge.

Early on in her career, the chairman of LVMH had pulled her aside to give her some financial advice. She did everything he said and became one of their first shareholders, building herself a small fortune.

Imogen’s friend was the embodiment of someone who lived life to the fullest even during its most mundane moments. To this day, Bridgett sent Imogen a postcard every single time she landed in a new city. Bridgett was outspoken and outrageous, which made her a hell of a lot of fun. She was also loyal, sometimes to a fault, particularly when it came to men who didn’t deserve her.

“I assume I get the pleasure of sitting next to you?” Imogen said, linking her arm through Bridgett’s.

“I wouldn’t expect any less.” Bridgett grinned. Publicists had been putting the two together in the front row for years now.

“What is your seat, darling?” Imogen asked.

“Twelve A.”

“And so I must be eleven A. Brilliant. I can’t wait to hear all about Hollywood.”

“And I can’t wait to hear all about Eve!” The two women laughed at the movie reference like the girls they were when they met twenty years earlier. Imogen had managed to fill her friend in on what was happening in the office in only a few brief emails but emails couldn’t possibly tell the whole story.

They easily glided past one of the senior publicists at the entrance to the main hallway. At the entryway to the Main Stage, the runway where all of the major shows were held, a diminutive iPad girl surveyed the crowd with a lazy eye.

“Ticket?” she said in a nasally twang, glancing down at her screen. The two women handed their small passes over. “Ms. Hart, follow me to your seat, twelve A. Ms. Tate, please wait one moment and someone will escort you to VIP Standing.”

The words didn’t make any sense to Imogen. She had a ticket in the front row and there was nothing at all VIP about standing. She had never stood at a show. And this show of all shows! She was here as a favor. She was just here to support her friend. Imogen was the first editor to put Senbi’s collection on a cover model. She had helped to put her on the map.

“Is Senbi playing a hilarious prank? I always sit in seat eleven A, not just for this show, but for all the shows. Please take me to my seat now.” Bridgett had assumed Imogen was directly behind her and was now absorbed into the paparazzi flashbulbs.

iPad girl rolled her stubby finger along her screen.

“I believe Orly is in seat eleven A. You know Orly. She has the best of all the fashion blogs—FashGrrrrrl-dot-com. Actually. Oh, Orly, HELLLLLLLLO!”

Behind Imogen was the aforementioned Orly. The girl couldn’t have been older than twelve. Her chin-length bright blue hair turned out violently at the ends as if the Flying Nun and Ken Kesey had borne a love child. She wore a green cape over an orange Senbi onesie with seven-inch Stella McCartney wedges. She looked wonderful and
startling all at once. Frameless glasses with a small camera attached to the right lens perched on her pixie face.

“Love your work,” Orly said to Imogen as iPad girl gushed over the diminutive elf, begging her for an autograph. Orly leaned in and kissed the check-in wench’s iPad, leaving a bright pink lip mark as a signature, before sashaying to seat 11A.

“Imogen Tate doesn’t stand.”
Whose voice was that?
Low and husky, vaguely condescending. Eve. How long had she been standing there, watching?

“She can take my front-row seat,” Eve said loudly. She repeated herself. “I want to give my front-row seat to Imogen Tate.”

She would rather stand than accept help from Eve, who was now breathing heavily onto her neck.

“I do stand now, Eve. I am so excited to stand…right now.” Imogen straightened up to the full five feet eleven inches she commanded in her heels. “We’re all about the consumer and the consumer is in the standing section. I want to be where the readers are. I want to see how they react to the clothes. I’ll be backstage with Senbi after the show anyway. I’ll see you later.”

The girl with the iPad, still recovering from her brush with Orly’s greatness, forgot her social graces when dealing with anyone with a VIP Standing ticket. “Move over along the wall. We’ll let you in right before the show starts.”

As Imogen carefully found her way to the edge of the hallway, a security guard shouted, “Along the wall! Move it along the wall!”
This was what prison would be like; I feel like I’m in
Orange Is the New Black, Imogen thought.

The scrum of VIP Standing ticket holders was a little rougher around the edges than the line of people filing past them. They had more hairs out of place. Their eyeliner was just a little heavier and their designer outfits hung less than expertly on their bodies, announcing the fact that they purchased them at bargain prices at the sample sale rather than at the department store. The guests swooshing past iPad girl didn’t just have better clothes than the people in VIP Standing, they had better bone structures.

Imogen ducked her head so that none of the seated ticket holders would see her as she shuffled dutifully toward the wall. The more people that came, the hotter it got in the hallway. Imogen could feel drops of sweat begin to pool at her temples as she picked up on bits and pieces of conversation.