The Knockoff by Lucy Skyes and Jo Piazza- 352 pages
Book Blurb:
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 Review: 3 stars
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The Knockoff was a fashion themed book about the tenuous relationship between a “dinosaur” working woman who doesn’t know the difference between a tweet from a twig, and an up and coming millennial woman who thrives on technology.
I’m raising two millennial children myself and I couldn’t imagine either of them taking “selfies” with their bosses or “instagramming” at the work place. With that being said, there was a lot of techno-babble in this book that was so over the top that it became ridiculous, and that’s when the light bulb moment happened. I switched gears and began reading it as a satire. I mean really, an employee naming her toy dinosaur her boss’s name wouldn’t actually happen, would it?
In a nutshell, it’s a war of the roses for two strong, very different, independent women and how the Internet is changing our lives. The uses of technology are presented as sales tools, money makers, love finders, invasions of privacy, bullying as well as many more applications.
Quotes I liked:
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? Did they decide to read a story just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we’ve stopped enjoying our lives?”
-“If she was friends with them on Twitter that was equal to being besties in real life.”
-“Everything looks better on Instagram, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what all that is for for…the version of ourselves we wish we felt like all the time. I have to say, your’s looks evern more perfect. I look at your Instagram and I think you must be the most put –together woman in the world.”
