The Knockoff (8 page)

He kept going: “Are you coming to the Awesomest Party Ever tonight?”

“Which party would that be?” Imogen asked, flattered to be invited to a party.

“The Awesomest Party Ever.”

“Right, but which party?”

Rashid laughed at her ignorance and their twenty-first-century version of “Who’s on First?” “The big party at DISRUPTTECH! that is happening tonight is actually called the Awesomest Party Ever.” Eve would have made her feel foolish for her mistake but Rashid seemed to find her lack of understanding about this whole tech conference thing quite charming.

“I don’t know if I have been invited.”

“You can get in with your conference badge.”

“Well, then I’ll definitely try to make it. How could I come here and not attend the Awesomest Party Ever?”

“Isn’t that just a little bit fun to say?” Rashid smiled, flashing two rows of expensive white teeth.

Imogen had to admit that, though silly, it was sort of fun to say.

Just as she was about to ask a follow-up, Eve reappeared at her side, making it evident she had been eavesdropping. “Making friends, Im! Cute.” She flicked her hair and wobbled her breasts. “I don’t sleep at all,” she boasted to Rashid, as if disrespect for rest somehow lent her a certain distinction. Imogen passed her card back to Rashid and mouthed, “Call me,” realizing too late she should have said, “email me,” or maybe “tweet me,” even though she wasn’t sure that was something people ever said.

Eve, naturally, didn’t let the moment pass without comment.

“How adorable are you with the business cards? I didn’t know anyone used those anymore.” She plucked it from Rashid’s hand and made a show of examining it like it was an artifact before letting it fall to the floor.

Imogen and Eve’s presentation was part of the Start-up Battlefield. They were technically part of a larger corporation, the Robert Mannering media empire, but because Mannering was in the process of spinning off several less profitable assets (mostly magazines) in order to bolster their other businesses (mostly video streaming in China)
Glossy
was allowed to raise money and operate as if it were a start-up.

Start-up Battlefield included thirty companies chosen from hundreds of applicants. After the demonstrations, pitches and tough rounds of questions, the judges—venture capitalists, seasoned entrepreneurs and some tech press—would award the winner a $50,000 check and something called the Disrupt Cup, a trophy made of melted floppy disks.

When Eve explained this aspect to Imogen, she had to stop herself from asking what exactly had happened to the floppy disk. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen one and yet she didn’t understand exactly what had replaced it or when. The floppy disk was something she could wrap her head around. It was a tangible thing you could touch and smell, just like the pages of a magazine. The Internet and the tiny computers they worked on these days made less sense to her. You couldn’t touch the new Glossy.com—the app or digital magazine or whatever they decided to call it.

Glossy
was the fourth presenter in the Battlefield and their talk wasn’t allowed to be more than seven minutes long. As the third presenters finished their speech Imogen closed her eyes and took in a few deep breaths through her nose. When she arrived at the podium she felt confident and sure of herself for the first time that morning. This was something she could do. This was where she shined. She had spent years wooing advertisers from the biggest fashion houses in the world. She had hosted cocktail dinners for billionaires and visiting heads of state.

She started off with one of her favorite quotations from Oscar
Wilde—“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months”—and then made one of her stock jokes: “Mr. Wilde would have to rethink his words knowing that I am allowed to reinvent it every single month.”

She usually got a few chuckles from that. Now there were only blank stares. Briefly frazzled, she looked down at her notecards and launched into her explanation of the history of
Glossy
, racking her brain for a way to win this crowd. What did she have in common with them? Who did they care about? Reading rooms was something she typically excelled at.

“I met Steve Jobs a couple of years after he released the first prototype of the iPhone,” Imogen started winging it. “He told me that it would change my life. As a late adopter of the technology I wish I had a chance to tell Mr. Jobs that it truly has. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be so talented at flinging angry birds at feral pigs.” It worked. The crowd laughed, all thanks to Alex. He had ad-libbed the joke the night before when she bemoaned having to get onstage at a tech conference: “When in doubt tell them an Angry Birds joke. They love Angry Birds.” Thank god she’d married a man who spent time defending millennial repeat offenders.

“Thank you, Imogen,” Eve said, walking in front of her, eager to replace her applause. “If Oscar Wilde were alive today he would recognize that we need to reinvent fashion about every six minutes online.”

The crowd loved that. More claps followed by hoots and hollers.

Eve pulled out the weighty September issue of
Glossy
, all 768 pages of it.

“This is a lot of paper. A lot of trees,” said Eve, who had never once expressed any kind of interest in the environment, with faux earnestness. Imogen saw former vice president Al Gore’s head nod in agreement from an offstage Skype feed apparently piped in from Antarctica.

“Reinventing fashion every six minutes is exactly what we intend to do. And we will do it in an entirely eco-friendly way.”

With a grand flourish, Eve tossed the magazine into the air behind her, barely missing Imogen’s face with its erect spine.

“Next month
Glossy
will be the very first traditional fashion monthly to go completely digital. Stories will update in real time. Want amazing coverage of the Academy Awards’ red carpet? We’re streaming it, as it happens. Want to see what Kate Middleton wore to the prince’s birthday party? We’ve got you. You have exactly fifty milliseconds to capture someone’s attention online. Our content is so good we can get someone in half that. But that isn’t what we came here to tell you. That’s not exciting. That doesn’t disrupt anything. Blogs have been doing that for years.”

At the word “disrupt,” someone shouted, “Hell yeah!”

Even though Imogen had heard Eve practice this spiel last night, it all still sounded foreign.
Glossy
’s new business model and Eve’s brainchild was a grand mission to create a perfect marriage of fashion and beauty editorial plus e-commerce. The site would essentially mirror the pages of the magazine, except all editorial would now be packed with product placement and branded content. As someone lost themselves in the arresting photographs, they were also just one click away from buying the full look.

Some of the content would still be beautifully packaged photo shoots straight from the pages of a magazine. But there were new elements. Lists, lists, lists. The whimsy-loving eighteen- to thirty-year-old demographic devoured them. The site BuzzFeed had first capitalized on that fact, and now everyone was just copying it: 11 FASHION MISTAKES YOU DID NOT KNOW YOU WERE MAKING, 17 JADE SWEATERS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, 13 SHOES WITH CATS ON THEM THAT WILL MAKE HIM PURR!

Millennials, the new target demographic, lived in a tough world. They came of age in the shadow of 9/11. The job market was dismal when they graduated from college and even worse when they came out of grad school. They wanted to consume content that was funny and optimistic and demanded a maximum investment of two minutes. They didn’t languidly browse through magazines for hours. They swiped, they liked, they tapped, they shared. Most important, they didn’t care if content was branded as long as it made them LOL or ROFL.

The new app would optimize the consumer magazine experience
with a fully integrated shopping platform, allowing the magazine to reap the revenues from an industry it long helped to build and sustain with no real return. Oh sure, fashion brands had always paid money to advertise in the magazine’s pages. But that was nothing compared to what they stood to earn from Eve’s new plan for one-tap shopping off every item pictured.

The technology had been developed by a friend of Eve’s from Harvard Business School. Together they had figured out how to layer fashion editorial over shopping cart code.

Eve asked everyone in the audience to pull out their tablets, an unnecessary overture since most were already on their owners’ laps. She asked them to log on to Glossy.beta.test with their last name and the password Cygnus.

“One hundred sixty-seven million people shopped online today. In the next year they will spend one hundred billion more online than they did last year. That’s one hundred billion dollars just out there, up for grabs. If you make it super hard for people to shop for your product, you make it super hard for people to buy your product.” Imogen was amazed at how many times Eve could use the word “super” in a single breath. “We make it super easy to shop and buy. After you checked into the conference this morning, our engineers created an account for each of you. We deposited a hundred dollars into each account. Now play around with the site.”

Glossy.com’s new content populated the screen behind Eve.

Everyone clicked on the shoes with cats. Black Chuck Taylors with cat faces, purple boots with tiny cat tails attached to the heels. Hovering over each piece of content was a bright starburst that screamed BUY IT NOW.

Eve grinned.

“BUY IT NOW!” she yelled.

And with one click, two hundred audience members made a purchase.

“Your information is already in the system. We conveyed it to the individual retailer. We know
where
you want it shipped. We know
how
you want it shipped. No need to go off the page. Your receipt will
be emailed to you. You can continue reading now, with the knowledge that your product will be on its way to you within the next eighteen hours.”

The crowd was delighted, but Eve really got them with what came next. This is what had investors salivating.

Eve showed chart upon chart of numbers on the giant screen. The real cash cow would come after year one of the application’s launch, when they could harness data on when, where, why and how their customers shopped. The collection, storage, and sorting of that data would be worth billions to brands.

Eve received a standing ovation. Even Imogen couldn’t help but be impressed by the girl’s performance and charisma.

She was excited and terrified all at once. With Eve at the helm of Cygnus and Cygnus ready to launch into Glossy.com, she didn’t understand what the company needed from her or why they were even keeping her on board.

Imogen felt small next to Eve, her former assistant who was now a big bright shining star in this room full of young people who had no fears about their own futures. Eve was a tech darling.

Imogen kept clapping and smiling. God, she felt so uncomfortable. Wasn’t it time to leave already?

“Teeny Tiny Video, Great Big Impact,” “Life’s a Breach, Don’t Burn Your Brand” and “Orgasm: The Broadband of Human Connection.” Eve read out the names of the panels she wanted to attend later that day, scratching her fingernail along the conference schedule on her tablet. She tapped on a few of the links to read who would be speaking.

“Blergh! This guy’s a douche. That guy is really a douche. Ugh, who gave him a panel here? Why didn’t anyone give me a panel here over that guy?” she grumbled.

The lanyard attached to Imogen’s badge stuck in her hair as she tried to pull it over her head.

“Keep your badge,” Eve snapped, looking up. Her tone was enough
to push Imogen over the edge. Rude just didn’t work with her. She had been through the terrible twos twice and was not about to go through it a third time.

“The badge was just for today, and I am heading back to the hotel,” Imogen said, weary of this constant micromanagement.

“Who cares?…The more badges you have on here, the more important you look.” Imogen noticed Eve now had a plethora of brightly colored plastic rectangles hanging from her neck in addition to plastic bracelets parading up and down her forearm. She had accumulated them visiting various booths and suites within the conference hub.

“Eve, I’m tired.”

“That’s lame. You should make the most of being here.”

Did she just say “lame”?
“I’m exhausted and this isn’t really my crowd.”

The lack of women at the event was startling. Imogen had never been somewhere so laden with testosterone or with people who looked like they would prefer to be alone in a cool, dark room.

Eve narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips, ready to explain yet again the gravity of being at such an important tech conference. Then she turned her head, distracted. “Oh! There’s Jordan Brathman from FashionBomb. We’ve been emailing about doing a content partnership. I’m going to catch up.” With that, Eve gravitated in the direction of someone more important, shoving the double doors back open with both palms, not bothering with a good-bye.

As the doors closed, Imogen breathed a sigh of relief and again tried to tackle the task of removing all badges and name tags from her person.

“Imogen?” She turned to see who could possibly be asking for her. His bright blue shirt was even more dazzling in the sunlight.

“I’m Rashid. We met earlier.”

Imogen was surprised by how happy she was to see a familiar face here. “Of course. Hi. Lovely to see you again.”

“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” He clasped his hands behind his back and smiled expectantly at her.

“I am trying to figure out where to get a taxi so I can head back to our hotel. We have an early flight in the morning.” Even as the words came out of her mouth, the idea of going back to that dingy hotel room grew less and less appealing, even if it did mean a few blissful hours free of Eve.

“That’s a shame. I was hoping you would stick around. Have a bit of fun? There is always the Awesomest Party Ever….”