The Knockoff Read online

  All of this was because of that damned cancer. The surgery hadn’t been easy. Then there were the kids and Alex’s new case. Imogen hadn’t gone out professionally or socially while she was away, preferring to spend most weekends at their cottage in Sag Harbor. A workaholic for so many years, she’d had to let herself heal. This happened so fast. Eve just finished school in June and came back in July. The site would become an app next week.

  Before dawn Imogen woke to the sound of an ice machine dropping its cubes insufficiently into something obviously not meant to contain ice. The frozen water plunked out of the chute into what sounded like a plastic bag. Plop, squish, plop, squish. Plop, squish. Eve snored away on the other side of the bed, eyes twitching beneath a purple sequined sleep mask.

  Imogen opened one eye and then the other. Light filtered through cheap nylon curtains, revealing a too thick television set bulging off a plywood dresser, a relic of the nineties.

  Like me, Imogen thought with a smirk as she briefly flashed back to her last business trip—four days in Italy for the Milan collections the previous February. Those already seemed like the good old days. Back then a shiny black car would collect her from home and deposit her at the airport. She would be ushered into first class and handed a glass of champagne, a warm towel and a soft blanket. The flight attendants knew her name and wished her sweet dreams. She’d sleep for six hours, before being shepherded into a second shiny, fresh-smelling black car upon landing and taken to one of the nicest suites in the Four Seasons. Those rooms were so luxurious she didn’t mind sitting through thirty ready-to-wear presentations during the day. If she tried hard enough she could still feel those downy white sheets, adorned with a perfect white orchid accompanied by a small vellum card that simply read in beautiful black handwriting “Love. Tom Ford,” a flourished dash through the “Ford.”

  Back in San Francisco, the ice machine down the hall gave up with a heavy groan followed by the sound of three swift kicks punctuated with an expletive Imogen could hear clearly through the paper-thin walls. Someone was truly unhappy about their inability to chill whatever it was they were drinking at the crack of dawn.

  Imogen stretched as she got out of bed, her nose twitching at the smell of paint permeating the room. She spritzed her favorite Jo Malone, Red Roses, to sweeten the air as she opened the closet to search in vain for a hotel robe to take into the bathroom with her, but found only a few wire hangers.

  “Dress ‘nerd,’ ” Eve advised her when she emerged from her own shower twenty minutes later, with just a towel wrapped around her waist. Between her left hip and her belly button swam a happy dolphin tattoo, its snout cocked to smile adoringly at Eve’s face. A small blush crept over Imogen’s cheeks. She was no prude. For years she had watched as models pranced around her in various states of undress. But Eve was not a model and this was no photo shoot. Her perfectly round and pert boobs, the lack of lines betraying evidence of a spray tan, fixed themselves on Imogen, bare and judgmental.

  “Let’s put on some getting-ready tunes.” Eve bounced over to her bed, and, before Imogen could object, Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” began blaring from a portable purple speaker in the shape of a heart.

  This new version of Eve, the one who was no longer her assistant, didn’t provide much context. She assumed everyone already knew what she was thinking at any given moment, and so Imogen didn’t bother to ask what “dress ‘nerd’ ” even meant. The “nerdiest” she could glean from her limited traveling wardrobe on short notice was a crisp black blazer thrown over a pair of gently distressed faded black boy jeans she had planned to wear on the plane ride back, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, less a function of dressing nerd and more of needing reading glasses. In the scuffed-up bathroom mirror, Imogen thought she was channeling Jenna Lyons as she pulled her wheat-blond hair into a sleek ponytail and added a swipe of Vaseline to her lips. This was the classic “you’ll never guess how expensive it costs to look like I am wearing no makeup” look perfected by industry women of a certain age. Imogen had gained a few lines in the places where she showed emotion, but that was what happened unless you were very willing to cut your face open on an increasingly regular basis. Instead, she relied on a trick told to her by her friend Donna Karan years ago at a cocktail party.

  “A tight ponytail is an instant facelift,” the designer had recommended.

  Imogen made it her signature style.

  —

  DISRUPTTECH! was sprawled all over the city, but that morning they traveled to an industrial warehouse space just south of Market Street. Inside, concrete walls were interrupted only by bold signage, fluorescent lights and droopy-faced boys with eyes glued to tablets the size of their sweaty palms. Imogen had never been the oldest person in the room before, and now she felt bad about feeling bad that she was without a doubt the only person as far as the eye could see who remembered the fall of communism. It was a room Imogen felt excluded from the second she walked through the doors. She attempted an internal pep talk. Why did she care that everyone here was so young? Everything—including people, she believed—got better with age. So why did this room of fresh energy make the muscles in her shoulder blades involuntarily tense toward her ears?

  Glossy’s purpose in coming out here, Eve had explained the night before, was to present the new Glossy app to thousands of DISRUPTTECH! participants. Today Eve would unveil the new product and Imogen would introduce her, which inspired in Imogen a feeling not unlike leaping out of an airplane with a knowingly faulty parachute. This situation was completely out of her control, but she played along and pretended that she, too, wanted to be a disruptor of things, just like everyone else in this brightly lit cell block celebrating technology and the future. Imogen remembered the good old days (not too long ago, mind you) when being disruptive was a bad thing—something toddlers did on planes. When did it become the buzz word for entrepreneurs and newly minted billionaires?

  Until the launch of the Glossy app, the project was supposed to be spoken about in secret code words. Eve called it Cygnus, named for the swan constellation, implying that the metamorphosis of a magazine into an app or a website was like turning an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Imogen’s job during their demonstration was to represent the “ugly duckling,” the “old guard” of Glossy. Her role was to tell the audience Glossy’s creation narrative and forward-thinking history. Glossy had launched in the 1950s, but it was in the sixties that it really began to shake things up by breaking fashion traditions. It was the first magazine to put a miniskirt on the cover during the mod sixties youth quake, then Dick Avedon shot Veruschka in a bikini in a Paris hammam in the seventies. Glossy launched the careers of the eighties supermodels—Linda, Kate, Naomi and Christy.

  Now it would be the first fashion magazine to embrace an entirely digital future. Imogen didn’t understand half of what would come out of Eve’s mouth during the second portion of the presentation, titled:

  FASHION 3.0: REAL-TIME RELEVANCE IN FASHION MEDIA

  Entrepreneur and editorial director Eve Morton will analyze the major technology trends in the fashion industry before unveiling her disruptive new consumer-commerce interface for Glossy. Her goal is to foster innovation by challenging the status quo of the traditional magazine advertising model. Eve began her career at Glossy before receiving an MBA from Harvard. Joining her will be Imogen Tate, current Glossy editor in chief.

  Imogen was an afterthought.

  Eve was more distracted than usual that morning and hadn’t taken her own advice to “dress ‘nerd.’ ” She wore a skintight black and cream Hervé Léger dress. She was all legs and breasts. Her lavender eye shadow matched her shellacked nail polish perfectly.

  “I’m playing my part,” she said defensively, crossing and uncrossing her arms over freckled cleavage. “I am the new guard of fashion tech. You’re the old guard of the fashion media. We need to play that up when we get onstage.” Imogen smiled politely. She pulled her iPhone out of her bag to make a not
e and show initiative. She kept the notepad buried deep in the recesses of her Birkin, and wouldn’t dare be seen using a pen at this kind of event. It would be the equivalent of rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. She’d only abandoned her trusty BlackBerry right before she got sick and the adjustment felt the same as the switch from a word processor to a PC. No one could fire off an email faster than Imogen could on her BlackBerry’s keyboard but she fumbled on the iPhone, and couldn’t switch the keyboard from Japanese for two days. The device made urgent sounds, none of them exactly a beep or ring, but more a series of twerps, pings, buzzes and maybe a bark. Being on the West Coast was no help. It was barely light out and she was still hours behind everyone in the office in New York. There were 207 unread emails.

  “How do I look in this dress?” Eve asked. This new version of Eve needed a consistent stream of compliments. She kept asking if Imogen liked her dress or her shoes. Her extreme confidence was mixed with an intense insecurity.

  “It’s nice, Eve.”

  “Don’t you mean hot?”

  Imogen yawned. She needed much more than the three hours of sleep she’d gotten the night before.

  It was early, but everyone at DISRUPTTECH! looked more exhausted than the hour warranted, maybe more exhausted than Imogen.

  “There was a hackathon last night. They’ve all been awake for twenty-four hours,” Eve explained with a roll of her eyes. Imogen didn’t want to ask what exactly a hackathon consisted of, but Eve, unprompted, explained.

  “There are two types of hackathons. You can come with a preset team, or you can be matched up with people when you arrive. Then there is a prompt. ‘You have X number of hours to build something.’ Most times it’s a twenty-four-hour period, sometimes it’s less. The idea is for developers to riff on projects and put out an MVP, a minimum viable product.”

  Imogen tried to sound interested even though confusion was causing her irritation to swell. “They design a product? They construct something throughout the evening? Is there an exhibit?”

  Eve laughed her wide-mouthed cackle that revealed cavities in her back molars and was meant to embarrass Imogen for her ignorance. With every word and gesture, Eve knew how to make Imogen feel like a fool.

  “They make an app, or a website, or a new feature on an existing app or website. They build in code. They sit in front of computers all night.”

  So that was why the room was filled with near-zombies, pulling guarana-based energy drinks out of fridges in the conference’s pop-up café. She was dying for a macchiato, but Imogen didn’t see a single person drinking coffee. Were they all living post-coffee lives? Was coffee so over?

  “Those are just the devs. Most of the biz folks didn’t stay up all night. The devs love it, though. It’s geek prom. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros played for them last night and Bobby Flay came in to barbecue a whole pig at midnight.” Eve took pleasure in referring to her fellow techies as nerds, geeks and dweebs. She talked the talk, but even Imogen could see that she didn’t walk the walk. Eve was the only one in the room wearing five-inch heels. Eve truly was something all her own. Imogen had opted for understated Reed Krakoff loafers.

  At the conference check-in desk Imogen cleared her throat and announced herself with what she hoped was an air of authority. “Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy.” When no one looked up at her she realized they all had small white earbuds plugged into their laptops, where they watched a video of a moose jumping into a swimming pool with a baby.

  After a full minute a doe-eyed girl with straight black hair and severe bangs noticed them standing there.

  “Sorry. Badge pickup was yesterday.”

  Eve interjected, “I called before we took off yesterday to explain to your boss that we would be getting here late. The name is Eve Morton. Check again. You have our badges here.” The girl rolled her eyes up to her bangs and rummaged through boxes under the table.

  “Oh. Here they are,” she said in a flat monotone. “Will you be registering for the Ping-Pong tournament?”

  Eve shook her head. “We won’t be here long enough. Maybe next year.”

  “That’s a shame. It’s going to be really competitive this year,” the girl said with a small spark of excitement.

  “Ping-Pong tournament?” Imogen whispered under her breath.

  “Every company here has two people competing in the DISRUPT Ping-Pong tourney. Shame we will miss it,” Eve replied as she looked down at the end of the table, where there were stacks of sticky name labels, the kind you peeled off a slick piece of paper, stacked high. They were blank except for an @ symbol. Imogen tried not to look confused, but bewilderment must have registered on her face. She could feel Eve’s impatience.

  “It’s for your Twitter handle,” Eve said, rolling her eyes and elbowing past Imogen as she wrote @GlossyEvie with a bold red Sharpie.

  Imogen blinked. “Oh, I’m not on the Twitter just yet. Not all of us have been seduced by the technological revolution.” She laughed and received only blank stares. That was the wrong thing to say. “I know I should join, but it still seems a little silly to me,” she tried again over the little voice in her head screaming, “Yes! Twitter is ridiculous! I am right!” The boys behind the check-in desk were now paying attention to the scene. They cocked their heads to one side as if listening to a foreign tongue.

  Eve’s mortification played out only in her eyes. “Just put @Glossy—for the site,” she said evenly. Then Eve wrote out the tag for Imogen herself as if she were dealing with a small and slightly annoying child.

  An excited scrum gathered in the corner of the room around a gentleman in his twenties wearing a zip-up hoodie over a pair of overalls. On his feet he wore dirty Converse sneakers. He had a beaklike nose, acne-scarred cheeks and a single eyebrow that ran in a continuous line across his pronounced forehead.

  “That’s Reed Baxter, the founder of Buzz,” Eve explained. “They treat him like Justin Timberlake here. Rumor has it that he can sleep standing up, knows thirteen languages and lets his hipster fiancée—her name’s Meadow Flowers—come and just hang out in the office topless every day, meditating and trying to obtain a higher consciousness while his staff works twenty-four/seven. They’re planning a wedding based on Game of Thrones. He’s awesome.”

  Eve’s exuberance over proximity to emerging power was palpable. “Buzz is the next generation of social messaging. It combines the hundred forty characters of Twitter, the video of Vine, the filtered photos of Instagram and the temporality of Snapchat. Reed made billions off his first company, a tap-based consumer payment platform. We should try to get some face time with him before we get out of here. I would love to get him involved with Glossy.com.”

  Reed Baxter wore a perpetually smug expression on his practically pubescent face. Two striking women, the only people in the room besides Eve who were showing any skin, flanked him on each side. When he stood, they stood. When he sat, they sat.

  Imogen had never seen anyone quite like Reed, but she understood him better than Eve did. She knew from experience that all men, no matter their age or IQ, pretty much wanted the same things once they got money and power—sex and attention.

  Eve continued to map the room the way a college tour guide would explain to a group of overeager sixteen-year-olds why launching themselves into adulthood should ideally cost them and their parents $100,000 a year.

  Some DISRUPTTECH! attendees didn’t even look like they were out of college, much less ready for the job market. The crowd was overwhelmingly male, perhaps one woman for every five guys. Jeans and a sweatshirt were the norm. Imogen wasn’t the only one in horn-rimmed glasses. It had been a long time since she had been in a room this badly dressed and even in her own jeans she felt wildly out of place. Her iPhone growled. A text from Alex:

  >>>> Hang in there. I love you. Try not to commit any acts of violence, real or digital.<<<<

  >>>>California is friendlier to first-time offenders, especially 42
-year-old mothers of two.<<<<

  Imogen fumbled, trying to add a winky face, which accidentally turned into a frowny face before she could hit send.

  The room where they were holding panels was still practically a raw space. An LED screen behind the stage glowed green like the monitor of an old computer and blared DISRUPT! Five hundred hard-backed plastic chairs were set up in rows. As the audience shuffled in, many in what looked like pajamas, two young men situated next to her cracked dirty jokes about something called dongles. She watched as one of them clawed at a scab on his right cheek before promptly ushering it into his mouth.

  Eve set off in search of a diet Red Bull while Imogen settled into one of the ergonomically unpleasant seats. As Imogen yawned she felt a tap on her shoulder. When she turned she saw the most startling young man. Correction. He wouldn’t have been at all startling below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, but at DISRUPTTECH! he was a complete anomaly. His long black hair was pulled into a topknot and a unique half-mustache kissed his nose like a baby caterpillar. Imogen wondered if the knot meant he was a practicing Sikh, but then noticed that the sides of his head had quotation marks shaved into them, so probably not. He wore an electric-blue shirt buttoned to his chin and a chubby little tie with a very small button at its tip, its own tiny exclamation point. She looked down and saw his flowing yellow silk pants, which stopped just above his ankles to show off a no-sock look above perfectly handcrafted two-tone Italian white leather brogues. Imogen loved him immediately.

  “So sorry for yawning in your face. You must think that I am terribly rude. I’m a little worn out. We arrived late last night.” She raised her voice to try to counter the electronic dance music being pumped into the room at a level just above comfortable.

  The young man’s almond-shaped eyes grew wide as he slapped one hand on his knee in delight. His other hand held a half-eaten breakfast taco. “You live in London?”

  He meant her accent. “No, no, New York. I have lived there forever now, more than twenty years. I’m Ameri-lish now…Brit-i-can.” She made that nationality joke too often because it made people laugh, but only politely.