The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes, Jo Piazza Page A

here was so young? Everything—including people, she believed—got better with age. So why did this room of fresh energy make the muscles in her shoulder blades involuntarily tense toward her ears?
    Glossy
’s purpose in coming out here, Eve had explained the night before, was to present the new
Glossy
app to thousands of DISRUPTTECH! participants. Today Eve would unveil the new product and Imogen would introduce her, which inspired in Imogen a feeling not unlike leaping out of an airplane with a knowingly faulty parachute. This situation was completely out of her control, but she played along and pretended that she, too, wanted to be a disruptor of things, just like everyone else in this brightly lit cell block celebrating technology and the future. Imogen remembered the good old days (not too long ago, mind you) when being disruptive was a bad thing—something toddlers did on planes. When did it become the buzz word for entrepreneurs and newly minted billionaires?
    Until the launch of the
Glossy
app, the project was supposed to be spoken about in secret code words. Eve called it Cygnus, named forthe swan constellation, implying that the metamorphosis of a magazine into an app or a website was like turning an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Imogen’s job during their demonstration was to represent the “ugly duckling,” the “old guard” of
Glossy
. Her role was to tell the audience
Glossy
’s creation narrative and forward-thinking history.
Glossy
had launched in the 1950s, but it was in the sixties that it really began to shake things up by breaking fashion traditions. It was the first magazine to put a miniskirt on the cover during the mod sixties youth quake, then Dick Avedon shot Veruschka in a bikini in a Paris
hammam
in the seventies.
Glossy
launched the careers of the eighties supermodels—Linda, Kate, Naomi and Christy.
    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 thenotepad 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.