The Knockoff (7 page)

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 note 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.

He nodded his head as if he couldn’t comprehend moving anywhere twenty years earlier and seemed only mildly disappointed that she didn’t currently live in England. Who didn’t love a real London accent?

“I
actually
tapped you because I saw you yawn. I have a solution to all your sleep woes,” he said. “Are you ready for this?” Imogen nodded her head hard, indicating that she was indeed ready, stifling yet another yawn. This was the kind of person Imogen always delighted in meeting in odd corners of the world. She collected them nearly everywhere she went and kept them in her Filofax and on her dinner party invitation list for years, sometimes decades.

“I’ve got myself on the eight, eight, eight. I break the day into eight-hour blocks.” The young man’s head moved left and right to an inaudible beat as he explained himself. “Well, actually seven-hour blocks with a flexible three hours. I typically wake up at eleven a.m. I go to the office and have meetings for seven hours straight. Then I transit one hour and use the second hour for socializing or dinner with friends and then I do emails and complete my action items for the next seven hours. I go to sleep at three a.m. and it starts all over again. On weekends I keep to the same schedule but instead of the emails at night I go to clubs. It’s highly efficient.”

He remembered his social graces only after his explanation. “I’m Rashid, founder of Blast! I’m presenting later.” His eyes took in her sleek ponytail, her simple but expensive shoes and her too perfect posture. He gave an almost imperceptible nod that showed he approved of her appearance.

Imogen had to admit that his dedication to this schedule was impressive, even remarkable for a boy who looked no older than twenty. He pronounced Blast! as though she must know exactly what he was talking about, in the way people would say, “I work at Sony” or “Bank of America.”

“I’ll have to give that a shot.” She smiled charmingly, adding: “I love Blast!”
What the hell was Blast!?
It could be anything at all—an app, a website, a company, a foam pillow that warmed your neck at night in accordance with the rising and falling of your body temperature and then recorded your dreams.

“Do you know what Blast! is?”

She
could
fake it, but decided there wasn’t really a point. “I have absolutely no clue!”

Rashid rubbed his hands together. “We turn dreams into tech realities. I can build you an app, a website or an entire company from scratch. We’re consultants. I like to think of us as the McKinsey of tech…in fact, we took a bunch of bros from McKinsey in the past couple of years.”