The next evening Imogen pressed her forehead against the cool Plexiglas window in economy class on the plane, looking down at the lights of Manhattan as they curved around the island, twinkling on the dark canvas like jewelry laid out for a fancy party.
Imogen was wearing her layered traveling outfit, perfected over years of shuttling to international shows twice a year – a lightweight long-sleeved gray cashmere T-shirt, black ribbed cardigan, large Hermès gray and black scarf that doubled as a blanket on chilly plane rides and her low-slung Rag & Bone boyfriend jeans. Classic black Ray-Bans pushed her hair off her face. For the past fifteen years plane travel had been a welcome respite from the busyness of life on the ground – a space free of phone calls, text messages, emails and the Internet. She knew all that was changing, but she still clung to the notion of a flight as a few sweet hours of uninterrupted time to indulge in a digital blackout, along with her stash of celebrity trash magazines.
‘Didn’t you bring your laptop?’ Eve asked her right as they reached cruising altitude, snapping her own screen open in a salute.
‘No. We’re only here for a day,’ Imogen said, dipping her hand into her bag for her copy of Us Weekly.
‘The plane has Wi-Fi,’ Eve said incredulously, as though she couldn’t imagine the availability of something as precious as the Internet going unused for a single wasteful second.
‘That is so lovely for the plane,’ Imogen replied, refusing to let a twentysomething antagonize her as she lost herself in a spread of ‘Hollywood Plastic Surgery Secrets.’ She paused for a moment. Now could be a good time to try to reconnect with Eve. What sense did it make to start off on a bad foot? She folded her magazine onto her lap and placed a hand on Eve’s elbow.
Eve pulled out one of her earbuds with great irritation and let it dangle like a loose thread down her neck.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘So, tell me all about business school?’ Eve was startled, but once she got going she was more than pleased to talk about what a transformative experience Harvard had been for her.
‘If I had stayed at Glossy I would be just another lowly associate editor right now,’ she said seriously. ‘Now look what I’m doing. I’m literally transforming this company. I mean, B-school was the best decision of my life.’
With that Eve turned her attention back to her computer, effectively ending the conversation.
Imogen gazed longingly toward business class. If she’d had more notice she would happily have used her own miles to be in those plush seats where they served actual food that didn’t come in rectangular boxes wrapped in plastic.
‘Business class is a little ridiculous for a flight this short, don’t you think?’ Eve snorted with derision as she noticed Imogen’s gaze. ‘I mean, you sit at your desk working for five hours a day. Why can’t you be content sitting in this seat? I did the San Fran route back and forth ten times last year.’
Imogen turned back to her magazine.
Just after they landed, a little past nine, Eve revealed they would be sharing a room at a Days Inn near the convention center.
‘It’s like a slumber party,’ Eve said matter-of-factly in the taxi.
‘How many beds are in the room, Eve?’
‘One king. We’re kind of like a start-up now, Imogen. We need to be on a start-up budget.’
‘And there is some kind of pullout sofa in the room?’ Imogen breathed the words out with false hope.
Eve stopped paying attention to her, focused as she was on taking yet another picture of herself, a copycat of the photographer Ben Watts’s famous ‘Shhhh’ pose that all the models were doing. She sucked in her cheekbones and made the international sign for ‘be quiet’ with the edge of her forefinger pressed to her painted lips. The intensity of Eve’s gaze was as though Ben Watts actually was on the other side of the smartphone camera lens. Imogen had to admit it was working for her.
‘Eve?’
‘You know the perfect selfie is all about the eyes, Imogen. People think it’s about the smile, but it isn’t. It’s about getting the eyes just right,’ Eve said, completely ignoring Imogen’s question.
‘The bed?’ Imogen repeated.
‘No. I don’t think there is another. No pullout.’
Before Imogen could ask anything else their taxi pulled in front of the run-down little motel, a scruffy stray cat scowling into its headlights. Eve hopped out and sashayed into the building and over to the front desk, leaving Imogen to pay the cabbie. The manners of this girl! It was like she was brought up in a barn.
She breathed deep into her belly. The night air was crisp here, refreshing and chillier than back home.
Once inside, she tried to talk to Eve again.
‘So we will be sharing the bed?’ Imogen asked.
‘Of course. Like sisters!’ Eve squeezed Imogen’s upper arm too hard as she stood at the hotel check-in desk smiling her Cheshire grin at the spotty-faced overnight clerk who just wanted to get back to watching his episode of Storage Wars.
Grown-ups who were not engaging in or planning to engage in sexual activity with each other did not share a mattress. Imogen hadn’t shared a bed with anyone except for her husband and her children in more than a decade.
‘We’re not sharing a bed.’
Imogen had no say in the matter. To her amazement the hotel was fully booked, as were most of the nicer places around town. This particular tech conference had grown in popularity, due in no small part to last year’s appearances by several A-list actors, the ones who had forgone the typical celebrity revenue stream of Japanese cosmetics commercials and cheap clothing lines in favor of investing in technology start-ups.
These accommodations were cheap in every sense of the word. The price for the two of them in that one room was a third of the cost of any Union Square hotels like the Fairmont or Le Méridien.
After three swipes of the faded magnetic strip on the key card they finally entered the small room. Imogen needed sleep.
‘Tomorrow is going to be so rad, Imogen,’ Eve said, sitting next to her in bed, as Imogen struggled to find a comfortable position. ‘We are going to kill it at this conference.’ She raised her hand in a high five, and then, thinking better of it, lowered it and stuck out her pinky.
‘Let’s pinky swear on it. That’s how awesome it’s going to be.’ Imogen was at a loss for what to do. She extended her pinky as well, which Eve promptly grasped with her own smallest digit and shook it vigorously up and down.
‘I’m bringing pinky swearing back,’ Eve said, more to the entire shabby room than to Imogen. ‘Ooo, I should tweet that.’ Eve spoke out loud to herself as she tapped the words into her keyboard. ‘Bringin da pinky swear back. Booya!’ With that she rolled over and went to sleep.
Imogen was exhausted and jet-lagged, but her mind just wouldn’t shut down.
Did I really only come back to work the day before yesterday? She was having trouble processing just how much had changed so quickly. She’d barely even had time to discuss it with Alex in the hour they had seen each other before bed the night before. Her lawyerly husband wanted her to talk to an employment attorney right away.
‘You have rights,’ he told her.
A right to what? She hadn’t been fired, hadn’t really even been demoted. The situation had merely changed and the ground had shifted from underneath her. She had gotten to say a quick good-bye to the children that morning after she packed her bag and now here she was in San Francisco. This was where Silicon Valley was, wasn’t it?
She tossed and turned in the bed, desperate to find a comfortable spot on the scratchy sheets. She felt blindsided – felt like a woman whose husband was having an affair right under her nose, who brought his mistress to dinner parties and called her his protégée. How could she not have known all of this was happening to her magazine?
All of this was because of that damned cancer. The surgery hadn’t been easy. Then there were the kids and Alex’s new case. Imogen hadn’t gone out professionally or socially while she was away, preferring to spend most weekends at their cottage in Sag Harbor. A workaholic for so many years, she’d had to let herself heal. This happened so fast. Eve just finished school in June and came back in July. The site would become an app next week.
Before dawn Imogen woke to the sound of an ice machine dropping its cubes insufficiently into something obviously not meant to contain ice. The frozen water plunked out of the chute into what sounded like a plastic bag. Plop, squish, plop, squish. Plop, squish. Eve snored away on the other side of the bed, eyes twitching beneath a purple sequined sleep mask.
Imogen opened one eye and then the other. Light filtered through cheap nylon curtains, revealing a too thick television set bulging off a plywood dresser, a relic of the nineties.
Like me, Imogen thought with a smirk as she briefly flashed back to her last business trip – four days in Italy for the Milan collections the previous February. Those already seemed like the good old days. Back then a shiny black car would collect her from home and deposit her at the airport. She would be ushered into first class and handed a glass of champagne, a warm towel and a soft blanket. The flight attendants 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 showed emotion, 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 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 for the 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 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.’
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 …’
She glanced at her watch and thought about the sound of the ice machine. What did she have to lose?
‘I could probably join you for an hour or two. What exactly is there to do here?’
‘What isn’t there to do here is the better question! My lady, I am going to give you the full DISRUPTTECH! experience.’ Rashid bent down to one knee. ‘Are you ready for this?’
Imogen shook her head from side to side. ‘I don’t actually think that I am.’ The young man handed her what looked like a milk carton.
‘Here. First have a box of water.’
‘Box?’ She flipped the rectangle over in her hands.
‘Better for the Earth. Entirely made of recyclable biodegradable hemp-based cardboard.’ The writing on the side of the carton simply read: ‘I am not a water bottle.’
Rashid introduced her to two of his colleagues. AJ, his chief technology officer, was the tallest Asian gentleman Imogen had ever seen in real life. He wore a faded T-shirt with two cartoon frames on the front. In the first box a male stick figure was bent over and in the second he was petting a baby bird. Bubbly writing across the top read: ‘How to Pick Up Chicks.’ The chief operating officer of Blast!, Nathan, was a soft-spoken Owen Wilson doppelgänger with tousled hair, tired eyes and a nose that did a jig in the middle that made him look odd and yet handsome.
Over the course of the next three hours they took 3-D selfies at the Netherlands HEARTS Technology tent, where hulking Low Country boys with light hair and light eyes lounged about like attractive furniture. They ate a piece of candy made by the same 3-D printer, though Imogen cowered at actually putting a piece of food in her mouth that was printed right in front of her. It was candy-apple flavored and a little too sweet, but there was something completely delightful about it. They listened to a panel about how the globalization of digital products helped students in war-torn countries use their smartphones to map safe routes to school in the morning. Imogen found it fascinating, even though she needed Rashid to translate half of it. They stood in a long line to take pictures with two famous dwarf cats, one whose tongue lolled lazily out of its mouth and the other who looked perpetually frustrated. They opted against jumping onto the Nest.com moon bounce, but they accepted the free massages in the Cottonelle Toilet Paper of the Future yurt. She grabbed a couple of black and yellow DISRUPTTECH! hoodies for Johnny and Annabel.
‘Where are all the girls? Women?’ Imogen asked as they walked from the Chevrolet-3M-Esurance Ideas Exchange Pavilion to the Pepsi Bioreactive #MediaFuture Plaza, where a pool party was taking place complete with an open bar, live DJ and a pool full of blow-up orcas. Who wanted to go to a pool party when they were working?
Rashid’s topknot bounced up and down as he waved to a guy riding a Segway while wearing a helmet with a video camera attached. ‘These things can get so bro-tastic. There are some awesome women in tech, but the ratio at these conferences is so skewed, dude.’
‘And why do I feel like everyone is staring at me? Because I am old enough to be their mum?’
‘I actually think it’s because they aren’t used to seeing a beautiful woman here.’ He blushed, his cocoa-colored skin turning a dusty rose. ‘You aren’t the oldest person here. This conference is young though. You go to TED and you’ll see the billionaire version of DISRUPTTECH!, where Sandra Day O’Connor shares a crème brûlée with Nathan Myhrvold while chatting about archaeology, barbecue and the legality of digital permanence.’
Imogen considered that for a minute. ‘Right now I am a beautiful woman who is starving. I wonder if we can get a reservation anywhere in Union Square at the last minute.’
‘No need.’ Rashid smiled. ‘We can go to the Samsung-Blast! Food Truck Court.’ Before Imogen could protest, Rashid took off around the corner to dart into a vast parking lot resembling a trailer park. Upon closer inspection, Imogen realized it contained rows and rows of food trucks.
‘They come from all over the country for this,’ Rashid said proudly. ‘One of my team members came up with the idea.’
While standing in line for kimchi fries they were jostled by a large round man wearing an acid-washed denim vest over a turquoise zip-up hoodie, black jeans and pointy black ostrich-skin boots.
Imogen flashed a winning smile at him.
Finally ready to order, Rashid asked her what style of kimchi fry would suit her palate.
‘I am afraid to confess this, but I haven’t been a fry girl in quite some time,’ Imogen admitted sheepishly.
‘I figured,’ Rashid began as he looked over the menu to catcalls from the peanut gallery urging him to hurry up. ‘But come on, YOLO with me a little.’
‘YOLO?’
‘You only live once.’
‘YOLO.’ Imogen let the foreign word roll off her tongue. ‘Okay. I’ll take the most straightforward and honest fries they have.’
‘Good decision. You get too many toppings and things get weird.’ He turned his attention to the boy behind the counter. ‘Two regular kimchi fries.’ Then he tapped a gunmetal-gray plastic bracelet to the side of the cart.
‘Do you need cash?’ Imogen fumbled for her wallet and pulled out a few bills.
Rashid laughed. ‘No, we’re cool. I just paid.’
‘You did?’
‘Yeah.’ He held his wrist aloft. ‘Cashless currency. There is a chip in my wristband that connects to my credit card that pays for everything I do here at the conference.’
‘Can you use it anywhere in the real world?’ Imogen marveled at the simplicity of its smooth surface.
‘Not yet. It’s in beta. They’re testing it here and at a couple of other festivals around the country this year.’
By the end of the night, even though she’d had way more fun than she expected, Imogen was happy to return to an empty hotel room, even one as depressing as theirs.
She put in a quick call to Ashley to check in, and though it had to be close to midnight on the East Coast, the girl said she was still in the office.
‘Are you having fun at DISRUPT?’ Ashley asked. ‘I am having the worst FOMO looking at Eve’s Instagram. Were you with her in the pool with those big inflatable whales?’
‘I wasn’t, but I saw those. What did you have? YOLO?’ Imogen tried out her new word.
Ashley giggled. ‘YOLO!’ she sang. ‘No, no, I had FOMO, Fear. Of. Missing. Out. It’s like you’re looking at all these pictures of your friends and people you know being awesome and doing awesome things on, like, Facebook and Instagram and you get all tense and freak out and you get FOMO because you are not there doing something as awesome as they are. I get it all the time!!’
‘That can’t be healthy,’ Imogen said, to which Ashley just sighed.
‘Don’t I know it.’
Sometime, many hours later, hands drumming on Imogen’s feet at the bottom of the bed jolted her awake.
‘“Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panda moms, Brando, The King and I and The Catcher in the Rye … House on FIRE good-bye! We didn’t start the fire, It was always burning/Since the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire.” … Sing with me, Imogen!’
Imogen sat up and rubbed her eyes, still blurry with sleep, to see Eve whipping her hair back and forth, hunching her shoulders to a beat that lived in her head of a bastardized version of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’
‘What’s going on, Eve?’
‘We took the Karaoke RV back from the Buzz party and Reed Baxter paid an extra thousand dollars to have him drive to Marin and back so we could sing …’
‘Eve, we have a six a.m. flight. What time is it?’
‘Three. Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland … come on, Imogen … it’s an old song. You have to know it.’
She did know it, had actually sung along to it once at the Piano Man’s beach house in Sagaponack.
‘Ugh. I would like to get an extra half hour of sleep.’ Trying to focus on Eve’s pupils, she couldn’t tell if the girl had taken something or was high on herself.
‘You’re no fun, Imogen.’ Eve pouted as Imogen rolled over and pulled the thin pillow over her head to drown out her former assistant.
‘You’re right. I’m no fun, Eve.’