The Knockoff Read online

  The day Eve Morton walked into the Glossy offices for the first time she was a single class shy of graduating from New York University. Wearing a rumpled trench coat, she’d been sopping wet, hair strung around her face, giving her the appearance of a bedraggled kitten. Outside it was the kind of rainy April day that transforms even hardened New Yorkers into timid tourists in their own city, reluctant to venture out without the promise of a car ready to whisk them off to their next destination.

  While tall and broad, Eve was mousy and shy. Yet there was a gleam in her eye that sparkled all the more as she pulled out her laptop to reveal a PowerPoint presentation with slides featuring magazine pages from the early nineties to the present.

  “I’ve read every magazine you have worked on,” she let spill from her slightly lopsided, but not altogether unpretty, mouth. “This is the most exciting moment of my entire life, just sitting here in this office. You’re seriously one of the best magazine editors in the world. I think I have read every single story about you, too. I just love all the parties you throw with the designers during Fashion Week and the way you expressly asked not to be seated near Kim Kardashian at the London shows. I love all the changes you’ve made to Glossy. You’re the reason I want to work in magazines.”

  Imogen wasn’t immune to flattery, but she did have a finely tuned bullshit detector. Still, she didn’t think she had ever met anyone who had read every single issue of Glossy for the past three years, Harper’s Bazaar for the two years before that and Elle for two prior. She wasn’t even sure if she could say with a straight face that she herself had read all of those issues cover to cover. Imogen peered at the girl with a measure of incredulity, the edge of her J.Crew skirt still dripping onto the white hardwood floors of her office.

  “Well, thank you, but you seem much too young to have been reading my magazines for that long.”

  “Oh, I’ve been reading fashion books since I could read. When you shot the couture collections on window-washing scaffolding seventy floors above Times Square, I mean, I literally died.”

  Eve was referring to a shoot later described in the press as “Do or Die,” where Imogen envisioned the models in place of window washers, with photographers as spectators on different floors. Iconic supermodels dangled like insects from ledges, their hemlines catching expertly on the breeze. The magazine’s insurance premiums skyrocketed. That didn’t stop Imogen from taking over an entire subway station for the following month’s shoot, and a supermarket in Queens for the one after. They’d brought in Chanel-branded ham for that one.

  “When I saw that—it completely altered the course of my whole life,” Eve said, bringing Imogen back to the present with words she didn’t entirely believe could be true.

  “I did? It did? My God, how?”

  “I couldn’t get those images out of my mind. They stuck with me. It was an out-of-this-world experience. The clothes came alive for me then. From that moment I knew there was one thing that I was meant to do in the entire world. From that moment I knew I was destined to come to New York, where these magazines were made. I applied to New York University and FIT. I was accepted to both and I chose NYU so I could design my own major focusing on marketing, management and the history of fashion. From then on all I ever wanted was to come here and work with you. The innovations you have made in fashion magazines have been the most exciting thing to happen to editorial content in decades.”

  Eve’s shoulders finally shrugged a bit, as if a weight had been lifted now that she had delivered a monologue practiced many times in front of a dorm-room mirror covered in fingerprints and Windex smudges.

  Imogen smiled at her. She was good at accepting praise, but this was difficult for even the most seasoned egotist to swallow. “Well, now that you’ve been here and seen all of this up close, what do you think?”

  Eve looked around the room with her saucer-sized green eyes. “It is even better than I expected. I just know that I can learn so much from you and I’ll do whatever it takes to make your life run as smoothly as possible.”

  She added, “Give me a chance. I’ll change your life.” That line should have sent chills up Imogen’s spine, but she was no Cassandra, and she was desperate for someone hardworking and eager who could start right away.

  Eve Morton did exactly what she promised. She was on the ball. She was prompt. She was a fast learner and an overachiever who proved her worth in matters large and small. All day long they talked to each other through Imogen’s open door. Imogen’s baby son, Johnny, had pneumonia for weeks on end soon after Eve took the position. Together they crafted a furtive system that kept the rest of the magazine in the dark about Imogen leaving for hours to take care of him. Eve sat guard outside her office, routing all calls to Imogen’s cell phone and assuring visitors that she was hard at work and must not be disturbed. Eve would print new versions of the layouts and bring them to Imogen’s town house after everyone else had gone home for the evening. Imogen would make her changes by hand and Eve would whip them into impressive mock-ups before the next morning’s meeting. Her help was invaluable.

  From the very beginning Imogen had been struck by how desperate Eve was to conform and please. If someone mentioned they needed a restaurant reservation, Eve would send them five options. If they said they liked her bracelet, she would buy them one for their birthday. When Imogen added new honey-colored highlights to her hair, Eve did the same.

  The girl’s wardrobe graduated from basic J.Crew to much more aspirational designers, funded mainly by a string of older gentlemen suitors who consistently picked her up from the office in their Town Cars late at night. Eve kept her ambition tucked inside her like a set of those Russian nesting dolls. Each time she shed a layer, she appeared more confident, more self-assured.

  Just as Imogen was seriously considering promoting her to assistant editor, after two and a half years of dedicated service, Eve knocked on Imogen’s door with red rings around her eyes. To please her father, a hard-nosed high school football coach with the most state championship wins in Wisconsin, a man who wished he had a son who would be a big-time banker and not a daughter who worked in fashion, Eve had taken the GMAT and applied to business school. She’d never expected to get in, but Harvard offered her a scholarship to get her MBA. Eve couldn’t say no to her dad.

  And so Imogen lost the best assistant she ever had. As a parting gift, Imogen presented Eve with a red vintage Hermès twill silk scarf.

  Eve sent flowers twice when she learned Imogen was sick. One of the bouquets came with a card that said “Get Well Soon,” with a picture of a sad kitten nudging an older and chubbier orange tabby cat. The other, a vase of ivory magnolias, Imogen’s favorite flower, came with no real card at all. Just a piece of paper with “Eve” scrawled large across it.

  Before the elevator doors opened into the executive suite that housed Worthington’s office, Imogen gave herself a small pep talk. She was Imogen Tate, successful editor in chief, the woman responsible for breathing new life into Glossy and turning it around when everyone said it couldn’t be done. She had won awards and wooed advertisers. On her brief ride up, Imogen had decided to play the next moments as dispassionately as she possibly could with Worthington. Her boss liked and respected her because she was always so levelheaded. Imogen considered her ability to read both people and a room to be one of her best qualities.

  Her shoulders thrust back, she coolly strode past Worthington’s two homely assistants. The publisher’s fourth wife, a former beauty queen and one of his old assistants (while he was married to his third wife), mandated their plainness because she knew exactly what her husband was capable of doing with ambitious young women. One of the young assistants moved to block Imogen, but—too late—was tripped up by an unflattering floor-length skirt. When Imogen broke through the imposing oak doors, Worthington, always an early riser, and especially more so now that the company was doing so much business with Asia, was standing parallel to a wall of windows overlooking do
wntown Manhattan. The office was a mixture of steel, glass and dark wood—cruise ship Art Deco—with German brass sconces that had once graced the ballroom of a Cunard ocean liner. With his puffy fingers looped lazily around the top of his putter, he resembled a Hirschfeld sketch of a well-fed executive. He was an ugly man, made handsome by virtue of being wealthy. With his bulbous nose and tiny pink ears he was Piggy from Lord of the Flies, all grown up as an alpha male. She’d heard him described as hilarious, eccentric, a genius and a lunatic, all by women who had once been married to him.

  “Imogen,” he boomed. “You look incredible. Have you lost weight?” His eyes cruised up and down her frame, resting too long at her breasts. Was he trying to figure out if these breasts were an improvement? Yes, Carter, these breasts are about ten years younger, perkier and firmer. Perhaps a tad rounder. Thank you for noticing, Imogen couldn’t help but think. When a mechanic replaced an engine, he always gave it a little tune-up.

  Determined to maintain an air of quiet control, she smiled, easing into the buttery leather of the couch to the right of the putting green, and got straight to the point. “I am delighted to see that you have rehired Eve Morton.” Copies of Worthington’s new memoir were placed at right angles on the steel Gemelli coffee table. His jowls, air-brushed into a jawline, sat above the bold title letters on the bottom of the cover—WORTH.

  “Yes. Yes. Smart girl, that Eve. She has an MBA from Harvard, you know…and legs that go on for miles…like a young Susan Sarandon. Man, that broad could party back in the day.” He winked to no one in particular. Imogen had long ago grown accustomed to the fact that women, including Susan Sarandon, in Worthington’s lexicon were broads, chicks and gals, all an assemblage of beautiful or not beautiful parts, rather than a competent whole. He spoke in the language more befitting an Atlantic City cardsharp than a Manhattan publisher. Her boss was never interested in idle chatter, but still Imogen wondered if he had any clue that today was her first day back in the office. And what having an MBA from Harvard and legs that went on for miles had to do with working on a website of a magazine, Imogen hadn’t a clue. Imogen had friends who had gone off to business school in the late nineties and early 2000s. She had no idea what it was like when Eve went, but for many of those friends, MBAs meant two years of adult summer camp with keg parties and field trips: delayed adulthood that indiscriminately catapulted them into the next tax bracket.

  She could tell that Worthington had a measure of goodwill toward Eve, so she played along.

  “Top of her class, apparently. I am so excited that we have her back,” Imogen said with a perfectly calibrated smile. “The website can always use good people.”

  “It’s going to be much more than a website, Imogen. To be honest, I don’t entirely get what it is going to be myself, but I think it will make us a shitload of money!” Worthington paused as if to consider the benefits of once again making the company an enormous amount of money. It wasn’t too long ago that the consulting firm of McKittrick, McKittrick and Dressler set up shop at Mannering to try to figure out why the company, particularly the magazine division, was bleeding cash. It didn’t take a $500-an-hour consultant to figure out where the money was going. There was the editor at large who kept an apartment in the first arrondissement in Paris for weekend trips with a revolving door of young male suitors. There was a permanent suite at the Four Seasons in Milan available for senior staff to enjoy during the fashion shows and other alternating weekends. There were the riders installed in editor in chief contracts (Imogen’s included) for cars, clothes and dry cleaning. Worthington released a sigh for the good old days as he knocked his golf ball a couple of inches into the hole of the putting green.

  He continued: “I’m happy you are excited about it. I was worried that you wouldn’t take the news well. I know how devoted you are to the glossy pages. I was worried you wouldn’t like the switch over to a digital magazine. In fact, I was worried you might just leave us for good. But we all know it’s time for this company to put digital first.”

  What was a digital magazine? Nothing coming out of his fishlike mouth made any sense. Of course she was devoted to those glossy pages of the magazine. It was her job. Did he mean that they would be putting more of the magazine on the Internet? Was that why they brought in Eve? Maybe today’s MBA programs taught you how to finally make money from putting a magazine on the Internet, something Imogen hadn’t really thought was possible. In just the past few years there had been so much change. Publishing was a different world now. She knew that. Blogs, websites, tweets, linking and cross-posting. These were all things people cared about.

  Worthington pulled a shiny new ball from his pocket and continued, “The new business model that Eve came up with is unlike anything I have ever seen. It is Amazon meets Net-a-Porter on steroids. And to think…we get a cut of every single item we sell. This is what will save the company. Not to mention the money we are saving on printing and shipping.”

  As the weight of this new information sank in, Imogen felt the office walls move inward. The muscles behind her eyes tightened and twitched. Her head pounded and her stomach twisted. She dug her fingernails into the fleshy parts of her palms. Pull yourself together. She’d been a fool to think she could leave her job for months and expect everything to be just as she left it.

  Imogen strained for another smile.

  “Carter, what are you trying to tell me? What is happening to my magazine?”

  He looked at her, very matter-of-factly, and then said in a tone he typically reserved for his five-year-old twins, “Your magazine is now an app.”

  <<< CHAPTER TWO >>>

  By the time she made it back down to the Glossy floor from Worthington’s office, a sea of new faces had gathered in the conference room for the morning meeting. Imogen had expected to have more time to prepare to see her staff. Over the past week she’d practiced the speech she would make during this very meeting on her first day back. Looking through the glass walls, she didn’t recognize anyone sitting around the table or slouched against the wall at the back of the room. Her managing editor, Jenny Packer, and creative director, Maxwell Todd, were conspicuously missing. Imogen’s eyes searched for a familiar face as she walked in and took a seat at the head of the long white table. Now she recognized a couple of people from sales and marketing, but she still didn’t see any of her editors.

  A young woman across the room smiled giddily at her. As soon as she made eye contact Imogen knew it was a mistake.

  “Imogen Tate!!!!” the girl squealed. “I just love you. I am so happy that you are back! You’re like a fashion goddess. A goddess. I just tweeted that you were sitting here in our meeting and I got, like, fifteen retweets already. All of my friends are completely jealous of me for getting to sit here in this room and breathe the air you are breathing.” She reached her hand—nails painted a neon pink and decorated on the tips with what looked like vanilla cake frosting—across the table. As she clasped it with her own, Imogen spied a chunky black rubber bracelet on the girl’s wrist with pink writing: “Good, Great, Gorgeous, GLOSSY.com!”

  “I’m Ashley. I’m your assistant. I’m also the community manager for the site?” Ashley’s voice was childlike and twinkly and she ended the last sentence like it was a question even though Imogen was sure she hadn’t meant it as one. Imogen had been looking for a new assistant when she left, so it would be helpful not to waste energy trying to find a new girl, but she was skeptical of this packaged deal. How was this girl going to be both her assistant and do whatever it was the community manager did?

  “Which community exactly are you managing, darling?” Imogen asked as she took in Ashley’s long corn-silk hair and huge pale blue eyes with absurdly long eyelashes that might have even been real. Her bee-stung lips were coated in a dark red lipstick that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow just made her look more intense and beautiful. She was certainly an original in this room of girls who otherwise all looked the same.

 
Ashley laughed and jumped out of her seat with the energy of a Labrador puppy, her hair rippling in a silky wave. “The community. I manage all the social media. Twitter, Crackle, Facebook, Pinterest, Screamr, YouTube, Bloglogue, Instagram, Snapchat and ChatSnap. We’re actually outsourcing the Tumblr right now to a digital agency, but I’m still working with them on it.”

  Imogen nodded, hoping to convey that she understood more than half of those words.

  Just then, Eve walked into the room balancing her laptop in one hand and an iPad in the other. Eve shot daggers toward Ashley and reprimanded her. “This isn’t a sorority meeting, girls.”

  Imogen had no university degree. Molly Watson had scooped her up as a shopgirl back in London when she was just seventeen and she had been hard at work ever since. Still, Imogen had immediate uncomfortable associations with sorority girls, imagining them as a prelude to the Real Housewives of New York, beautiful bitchy bullies.

  She surveyed the gang of new women gathered around the table, most of them in their early twenties. Where was her staff? The fashion sense of these girls was of two flavors, hooker or gym bunny—too-tight dresses or coordinated track pants and hoodies.

  No one here in this room followed the unwritten rules of how the fashion industry dressed. Sure, magazines were filled with bright colors and over-the-top accessories, a cast of characters in elaborate designs all bedecked in taffeta, techno leather and, more than once, an entire rainbow of furs. But the people who created fashion were, for the most part, simple and bare in their personal style. You could tell who belonged from the interlopers who snuck past security at Fashion Week because the fashion editor typically wore something effortlessly thrown together—a Céline look, perhaps a YSL blouse with a vintage Hermès trench. Their clothes maintained a sense of uniform and calm in a chaotic world. There was a reason Grace Coddington still wore black every single day. Most of the top editors and designers never even wore nail polish. Imogen had never seen a speck of color on Anna Wintour’s nails—perhaps her toes, but never on her hands.