Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 191

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Knockoff," by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza.




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.

“Your parents still pay for your loft in Williamsburg. Why would we get our own apartments when we get everything we need at our parents’ places? They have all the right food. There is laundry service. Besides. Who can afford to live in Manhattan on our salaries?” 

The jumbo, matching Chanel 2.55 bags the girls all slung over their shoulders made sense now. Imogen herself had survived on $35,000 a year when she first came to the city, living with two young women in a railroad apartment on the Upper East Side she’d found in the back-page listings of The Village Voice. The walls had been painted a prominent purple and the stairs always smelled vaguely of illicit sex. The place was so small that if someone took a hot shower in the narrow bathroom, the window in the kitchen on the apartment’s far side would fog up with steam. “We wouldn’t be able to afford anything with a doorman,” Perry said. “And who wants to have to walk up stairs?” 

Imogen found their conversation fascinating. They were not unlike the Spaniards she had met one summer in Madrid who flocked to public parks and crowded subways to make out and sometimes more because they lived with their parents until marriage. She also felt sad for them. These women would never know the joys of sharing a tiny space with two other girls, all in the same boat, all trying to make ends meet over Pringles and bits snuck home from a fancy store opening. One time her roommate Bridgett snuck an entire bottle of Dom Pérignon down the front of her Calvin Klein shift dress. They bought strawberries on the street and melted a Hershey’s bar over their always-present yellow Bic lighters to make chocolate-covered treats as they sipped the golden liquid with the most delicate bubbles that had ever touched their tongues. Then they stayed up that night talking until dawn about the women they wanted to be when they were finished being the girls who stole champagne and smoked a pack of Marlboros in a day. It was during that conversation that Imogen first declared she wanted to be the editor in chief of a women’s fashion magazine. No one laughed. All of them had equally serious and lofty ambitions, most of which had now come to fruition in their forties. 

Their fridge in those days was filled with beauty products and the kitchen shelves were laden with vintage sweaters. Rails and rails of clothing racks on wheels lined the walls. It was little more than a one-bedroom closet with small nooks carved out for sleeping. 

Had it not been for that apartment and that sense of ambition that can only be born out of struggle, she wouldn’t be who she was today.

Before Imogen could write the new breed of Glossy girls off as flighty nitwits, they revealed their own elaborate business plans, each one more violently ambitious than the next. In her spare time one created a website that allowed women all over the world to shop from one another’s closets, borrowing items for short or long amounts of time, based on a barter system. Another was determined to build a social network that expressly focused on shoe-shopping. They didn’t speak about positions like editor in chief or even CEO. They spoke in terms of equity, customer acquisition and fund-raising rounds. They spoke about billions of dollars. 

“Success to me is doing something you’re passionate about. It’s kind of my goal one day to have my own company, to be part of something that is going to do something meaningful and make the world a better place. That’s why I’m in tech,” Mandi said. 

Was tech the industry they worked in now? They seemed so innocent. They still lived at home and yet they juggled all these projects at once. They were hardworking. She felt a certain energy, but couldn’t explain what it was. Imogen had no idea how her magazine could exist only online. She could tell that these girls couldn’t imagine a future in which it existed anywhere but.

By the end of the night, three glasses of wine nipping the neurons in her brain, Imogen felt threatened again. The way the girls lived might be childish, but their ideas were adult. They were personally stunted but brilliant with business acumen. Their technological prowess and self-awareness were intimidating. One thing she was learning about this generation was how secure they were in the knowledge that they were all very special snowflakes.