Publisher: Doubleday
Pages: 352
Rating: ★★★
Synopsis
An outrageously stylish, wickedly funny novel of fashion in the digital age, The Knockoff is the story of Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy magazine, who finds her twentysomething former assistant Eve Morton plotting to knock Imogen off her pedestal, take over her job, and reduce the magazine, famous for its lavish 768-page September issue, into an app.
When Imogen returns to work at Glossy after six months away, she can barely recognize her own magazine. Eve, fresh out of Harvard Business School, has fired “the gray hairs,” put the managing editor in a supply closet, stopped using the landlines, and hired a bevy of manicured and questionably attired underlings who text and tweet their way through meetings. Imogen, darling of the fashion world, may have Alexander Wang and Diane von Furstenberg on speed dial, but she can’t tell Facebook from Foursquare and once got her iPhone stuck in Japanese for two days. Under Eve’s reign, Glossy is rapidly becoming a digital sweatshop—hackathons rage all night, girls who sleep get fired, and “fun” means mandatory, company-wide coordinated dances to Beyoncé. Wildly out of her depth, Imogen faces a choice—pack up her Smythson notebooks and quit, or channel her inner geek and take on Eve to save both the magazine and her career. A glittering, uproarious, sharply drawn story filled with thinly veiled fashion personalities, The Knockoff is an insider’s look at the ever-changing world of fashion and a fabulous romp for our Internet-addicted age.
My Thoughts
So this book started off a little bit slow and took me a while to get into it, but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it!
The authors take the time in the beginning of the book to really emphasize the lack of technology that Imogen is accustomed to which became a little over the top and a little unbelievable. Imogen is only in her early forty's and I found it very hard to believe that she couldn't even check her email. Regardless, this ensured the tech gap to between Eve and Imogen to be large enough for the story to work.
What I really was interested in was the dynamic between the Millennial workers and the Generation X's. It was easy to relate to the younger characters in the book and also feel so disgusted at the behavior that my generation is known for.
Take Devil Wears Prada and add a tech spin to it and you would pretty easily have The Knockoff.
My Favorite Line
Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren't letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram?
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