The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes, Jo Piazza

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 showedemotion, 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