The Knockoff

by Lucy Sykes

  “Should I eat this pretzel?”

  “Is that yogurt on it or chocolate?”

  “Chocolate.”

  “Then no.”

  A frizzy-haired woman dropped her water bottle on Imogen’s toe and furiously apologized just as the iPad girl walked over to tell them they were finally allowed to come in. Imogen’s eyes darted immediately to the front row.

  Bridgett was sitting opposite Orly, with Jennifer Lawrence, her number-one client, to her left, and Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley on her right. They were just a few seats away from Jessica Chastain and Olivia Wilde. Across from them the front seats were filled with girls Orly’s age and maybe five years older, all wearing the same funny glasses and balancing laptops on their knees. At the very end of that row was Eve, wearing the same glasses. Eve’s glasses had yellow temples to match her canary cocktail dress. Next to Eve sat Massimo in his wheelchair. He had an appropriately horrified look on his face, which told Imogen exactly what he thought about everything happening in that room.

  “Bloggers and YouTube stars,” she heard a voice say behind her. Imogen turned her head to see Isobel Harris, a longtime buyer for Barneys. She shifted her bag to her other shoulder to be able to lean over in the sea of standing bodies to give her a hug. God, Isobel must be in her fifties by now, but she looked incredible in a black blazer and gray cigarette pants. Imogen had known Issy since before she met her husband, who was now a famous playwright. Back then he was a waiter at Balthazar, and Isobel, ten years his senior, was in marketing at Chanel. She’d turned around to look at his ass when he brought her another glass of champagne. He caught her and that was it for the two of them.

  “We have been usurped, darling. All the designers want those kids in the front row. Look how they did the seating arrangements.” Isobel pointed with a perfectly sculpted but polish-free index finger to the row with Anna, André, Bridgett, Jennifer, Jessica and Olivia. “There on the one side you have anyone worth documenting. And on the other you have the documenters. They’re all live-streaming this show right onto their sites with their Google Glass.”

  “What is a Google Glass?” Imogen abandoned the need to act like she had any idea what was going on.

  “Those ridiculous glasses they’re all wearing. They’re called Google Glass…not glasses, Glass. They’re a smartphone in an eyeglass. They take pictures and videos when you talk to them or tap on their sides. Google gave them to thirty fashion influencers for Fashion Week.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Isobel shrugged. “It was in Women’s Wear Daily pretty much all summer,” she said, before catching herself and remembering how Imogen had spent her summer. “I’m an idiot. I should have asked you the second I saw you. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m wonderful. I really am. I feel great. I do feel a little bit like I am playing catch-up here.” It was the first time Imogen had admitted to anyone outside of her inner circle that she didn’t have a perfectly capable grasp of what was happening in the industry.

  Isobel gave her another hug. The two women were jostled by the other standees, some of whom Imogen recognized as other veteran buyers and fashion journalists, people who would normally have a seat. As the lights blinked, signaling five minutes until showtime, Isobel saw Addison Cao, the wily reporter from the Women’s Wear Daily’s Eye column, beelining for her.

  “Whaaaaaaaaat is Imogen Tate doing in the standing section?” he interrupted, his voice rising a pitch on each word’s final syllable.

  “You’ve lost weight,” Imogen said, playfully reaching out to tickle Addison’s ample midsection. Only a gossip columnist could get away with being so rotund in this industry. No one was judging him or putting pictures of him in the gossip pages.

  “I lost seven pounds on a juice cleanse,” Addison said, allowing “cleanse” to sound like “clanze” as he smoothed his palms down the front of his pressed trousers.

  The two of them proceeded with the stock complaints of Fashion Week that everyone traded at these kinds of things.

  “The schedule is too crowded this year.”

  “Nothing is going to start on time.”

  “After the shows I am absolutely going to the ashram.”

  With the niceties out of the way, Imogen leaned in to whisper in Addison’s ear, inhaling his scent of body odor and hash browns. “Do you want to know why I am really back here?” she purred. Addison had a definite preference for young Asian men, but everyone liked a little sexy talk right into his ear.

  “I do.” He breathed heavily.

  Imogen launched into the same bullshit she’d made up at the door when she ran into Eve. She said she wanted to see the show from the consumer’s perspective, not the editor’s. “I’ve spent fifteen years in that front row. It’s gotten dull. Let the Orlys of the world experience it for once in their lives. I want to see what my readers see and my readers are not going to be sitting in the front row.” Imogen borrowed some of the talking points from Eve’s DISRUPTTECH! talk. “Glossy is a multimedia brand that caters directly to the consumer who loves fashion just as much as we do. In this day and age the magazine editor needs to look at things from a different perspective.” She had no idea if she even meant half the words coming out of her mouth, but they kept coming. Addison had no compunction about using a pen and paper. He furiously scribbled away in his reporter’s notebook.

  “I just adore you, Imogen Tate.” He slammed the notepad shut with the efficiency of a vise. “Can we take a selfie together?” Imogen smiled and nodded, wrapping her arm as far as it would go around Addison’s midsection. He reached his arm into the air to take a photo from above.

  “You don’t get a double chin if you do it this way,” he said.

  “Very smart, Addison.”

  Like everyone else in the room, Imogen readied her iPhone as the house lights went down. If someone were to travel forward in time from just ten years earlier, what would they think seeing all these people doing the exact same thing, the bright faces of their phones leveled in front of them as they ignored reality in favor of their screens? It wasn’t too long ago that the unwritten protocol of a fashion show dictated that no cameras were allowed.

  “VIP Standing” could have been worse. It was true that from this vantage point she was actually able to photograph the entire runway and the faces of the A-listers along the front row. She began clicking away at the first look. Tilly had taught her all about hashtags, reminding her that it would be important for her to tag @Glossy, the site’s main Twitter and Instagram feed, and to use the tags #MercedesBenzFashionWeek and the general catchall #Fashion. Tilly also instructed her to be creative.

  “Have fun with a hashtag. Instagram followers love creativity.”

  And so Imogen created the tag #ScenesFromTheBackRow and took upward of thirty pictures, one for each model who came down the runway. She commented on cut and color, using three different filters that complimented the lighting and the distance, giving the white runway a magical aura. Eve must have been looking at her Twitter feed on her laptop, or perhaps somehow she could see it on the Glass contraption out of the corner of her eye. Imogen could see her craning her neck to try to see where Imogen was standing, but the lights were so bright on the runway the rest of the room was bathed in darkness.

  Imogen didn’t wait for the last walk-through, when all the models would come out onto the catwalk together and Senbi would take her bows at the end of the stage. Like Theseus winding through the labyrinth, she found her way through “VIP Standing” into “Mediocre Standing” and then into “Shouldn’t Even Be Allowed in Here to Stand Standing” and began walking toward the back of the stage, slipping quietly behind a curtain. On the other side, a security guard, one of Max’s guys, ran over to examine the breach.

  “Ms. Tate. Why didn’t you just come through the runway entrance?”

  She placed a hand on the small of his back. “Oh, I wanted to avoid the bun fight on the runway. Wanted to t
ry to make it back here first so I could congratulate Senbi.”

  “Of course, Ms. Tate.”

  By the time Eve joined the rest of the crowd walking in from the runway, Imogen was chatting and laughing with Senbi, who seemingly had no idea where Imogen had been forced to perch during the presentation. Imogen marveled at the woman’s beauty each and every time they met. Genes from Vietnam and Egypt had constructed themselves in such a perfect way, making for almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of cocoa flecked through with gold. Eve glared at the two of them as they examined the inseam of a pair of palazzo pants. Behind them hairdressers and makeup artists furiously prepared models for the next show before placing a black bag over their heads, Abu Ghraib–like, so that the models could be dressed without getting makeup all over the clothes. One hairstylist was determined to build a foot-high elaborate updo fashioned around pieces of netting and held in place by what looked to be an entire bottle of hair spray. Imogen watched as another makeup artist intently sought the perfect smoky eye, first adding a shimmery beige MAC eye shadow and then darker and darker lines for contour before applying a black cream liner along the lash line to finish the look.

  Imogen was mid-sentence when she saw Eve elbow one of the bloggers in the ribs to get her to move to the side.

  “Is your phone broken?” Eve barked at Imogen.

  “Not that I know of, darling.” Imogen glanced at her iPhone for the first time in seven minutes. She had six texts from Eve.

  >>>>Are you going backstage?<<<<

  >>>>I’m going backstage.<<<<

  >>>>Should we meet backstage?<<<<

  >>>>Are you already backstage?<<<<

  >>>>Where the hell are you?<<<<

  >>>>How do I get backstage?<<<<

  It was as though Eve thought that the texts went directly from her hand into Imogen’s brain. She chose to ignore it for the time being.

  “Eve, I am not sure if you have had the pleasure, but I would love to introduce you to my dear friend Senbi.” “Friend” wasn’t a stretch. Senbi and her partner had adopted their first child around the time Johnny was born, and then the two women took water babies classes together.

  “Senbi, I am so happy to finally meet you,” Eve said. “You’re so awesome!” Senbi looked Eve over coolly.

  “Your voice is so familiar.”

  “Eve used to answer my phones,” Imogen said, smiling sweetly at Eve.

  “I’m the editorial director of Glossy-dot-com now.” Eve tried to recover. “Awesome! We would love to have you involved in the new Glossy platform. It’s a multimedia applica—” The designer cut her off.

  “Imogen told me all about it. If she’s in charge, then I’m in.” The designer triple-kissed Imogen’s cheeks. “I have to go pay homage to the peanut gallery.”

  Imogen noticed Orly inching her way toward her, that blue helmet of hair bobbing up and down as she walked.

  “I loved the hashtag ScenesFromTheBackRow. Genius idea. I regrammed you and linked to your feed from FashGrrrl. That’s exactly what I felt like at my first fashion show. You really get it.” Orly was suddenly swarmed by other bloggers and Imogen was worried that when their Glasses all got too close to one another a circuit would short and the entire backstage would go up in flames like the prom scene in Carrie.

  For the rest of the day, no matter her seating assignment (it varied each time from VIP Standing to front row), Imogen found her way into the standing section. Addison kept winking at her. She saw Orly tapping on her temple, live-streaming her live Instagramming. Eve sulked from the front row. Bridgett texted her:

  >>>>You are one savvy and sexy bitch<<<<

  Imogen wrote back.

  >>>>Today I am. Let’s see about tomorrow.<<<<

  Leaving the tents after the final show, Imogen found herself once again in the company of Addison Cao.

  “Imogen, I have a question for you. A friend was whispering in my ear and I am trying to wrap my head around an item for tomorrow. What do you know about Andrew Maxwell and Eve Morton?”

  Hearing his name spoken out loud was jarring. Until a year earlier Imogen genuinely thought Andrew Maxwell had disappeared from the face of the Earth and she was content in letting herself believe that was true. Andrew was quite possibly the worst dating decision she had ever made. If only she had been as good at spotting narcissists in her twenties as she was now in her forties, but back then she had merely been dazzled by his confidence, his charm and his habit of dating the most eligible girls in Manhattan. One of those superpreppies, he wore a pink shirt so often that Massimo and Bridgett took to calling him simply “Pink Shirt.” Andrew—always Andrew, never Andy—resembled a young Robert Redford with floppy blond hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His parents were newly rich from mortgage investments in the eighties and their Madison Avenue penthouse was filled with painfully expensive but not especially tasteful art. Their money meant he didn’t actually need to do anything and so he didn’t, except for excessive amounts of cocaine and Imogen for two years. The things young girls will abide by to have an attractive man on their arms are disgusting and Imogen abided by a lot in those days. His broad smile and easy charisma hid his uncertainty about what kind of man he wanted to be when he finally grew up.

  She had just moved into a teensy studio of her own on West Fourth Street, a third-floor walk-up with barely enough room for a bed, but spacious French windows that looked down on the tree-lined West Village street.

  When he was wooing her, after a late-night encounter at Moomba, Andrew sent ten bouquets a day to the apartment. The two of them flew all over the world on his parents’ private jet. He couldn’t stand to be apart from her and soon she let him move into her tiny flat. Only a few months into their cohabitation Andrew got fat, grotesquely fat. He had nothing to do during the day, and so while Imogen would go off to work every day as an associate editor, he slept away his hangovers and ordered takeaway from the dodgy Chinese joint down the street with stray cats milling about the cash register. Sometimes she would come home in the middle of the afternoon after a particularly grueling early morning shoot only to find him downstairs watching soap operas with the old Armenian woman in the studio below Imogen.

  “You know, you should get to know your neighbors,” he slurred at her as he leaned his weight against her, walking back up the stairs. “You’re such a snob.”

  One day Imogen opened the telephone bill to find $1,300 in charges to a 1-900 phone sex line. His parents were these billionaires and here she was living in a tiny flat she could barely afford and he rang up a phone bill more than double her rent. He stumbled in late that night with two black eyes and denied everything. Then he went into the bathroom for twenty minutes, finished up the bag of cocaine in his pocket and confessed to it all. His mother, dripping in jewelry and smelling of bourbon and desperation, picked him up in the morning to ship him off to a fancy rehab out in the Nevada desert. Three months later Imogen met Alex. She answered the door early on a Sunday morning, wearing one of Andrew’s old custom-made pink button-down shirts, boxer shorts and stolen white hotel slippers, still licking her battle scars from her bad relationship and nursing a French 75 hangover. What time is it? she wondered, first considering the time in New York and then switching to consider the time it was wherever Andrew had been scuttled off to.

  A gorgeous man stood there holding out a sheaf of papers. His black hair was a mess of curls just long enough to brush the top of his pugilist’s jaw. She was staring too hard, which she realized when a smile touched his slightly chapped but full lips.

  “I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just told me?” she asked the handsome stranger. He was there to serve Andrew with court documents. Some bugger Andrew picked a fight with in a bar must have realized he had deep pockets and was suing him for assault and battery.

  “He doesn’t live here anymore. He’s off drying out in the desert.”

  Alex couldn’t leave until he got the documents into Andrew’
s hands or got a new address where he could be served in person. Imogen invited him in for tea and ran to the bathroom to pull her disheveled bed-head hair into a tight pony, dab on some under-eye concealer, smudge some gloss over her lips and spray mint into her mouth. She couldn’t help but smirk as she emerged to find him making himself barely comfortable on her tiny chintz armchair, before she rang Andrew’s deranged mother for his forwarding address. In the hour it took for her to return Imogen’s call, she learned that this young lawyer was the first child in his family to go to college, and he had followed it up with Yale Law School. He didn’t give a shit about clothes and he didn’t need to since he kept his six-foot-three-inch physique trim from boxing in his dad’s gym on the Lower East Side. Style is much more than a designer name on your back, Imogen observed. He was different from anyone she had dated. Smart as a whip, he believed in equality and democracy, values that drove him to work long nights advocating for the rights of those who couldn’t advocate for themselves. He had ambitions to enter politics, but for the time being he was happy where he was, grateful even. He seemed particularly grateful to find himself in Imogen’s apartment.

  After Imogen located the elusive Andrew and Alex dispatched a courier to the western part of the country, the young lawyer professionally excused himself. Imogen was distraught that he waited nine days to call her for dinner. On that first date they shut down Piadina on West Tenth Street, giggling for hours at a tiny wooden table in the cramped basement filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of roasted garlic and Dean Martin crooning from a speaker hidden behind a bookshelf in the corner. The wax on the candlestick centerpiece burned all the way to the rim of the Chianti bottle it perched in before their night was over.

  She noticed he sipped his wine slowly, inhaled just a whiff as he raised his glass and then sloshed it around a little in his mouth so that he could truly enjoy it, so different from Andrew, who drank in large swallows, more interested in the intoxication it produced than the taste. He looked at her while they ate, really stared, his eyes hungry, all over her body, not even hiding the fact that he enjoyed taking in her milky white décolletage, which was maybe too obvious in a low-cut cashmere sweater. For the first time since she’d started dating boys back home as a teenager, her stomach didn’t do nervous somersaults. Instead she felt an intense sense of calm with this man. Here you are, she thought to herself. It was that simple. Here you are.