Then again this is the world of fashion where reality doesn't matter, it's all about perception, brand and connections. His restaurant prank is even better. It would be impossible to keep up these feats for a length of time , but nevertheless it is impressive how he pulls them off.
My hypothesis is that everybody fakes their way into Fashion Week. It's all one giant LARP event that somehow spun out of control, and now nobody knows how it manages to keep going all by itself without any GMs, or how to stop it, if there were somehow an emergency that required it to not take place.
Now go re-read the Verge article or watch the video, presuming that everybody is faking, and see if the hypothesis can be falsified at any point.
The part where he gets the badge? That's just some person with a badge printer, playing the part of the registrar.
That part where he's trying to convince Italians that he's Italian? They're not Italian either. "Oh, of course I'll speak English to you, another completely genuine Italian person, for the sake of your photographer, obviously."
It's sort of surreal, actually. Because then you can expand the hypothesis outside of Fashion Week, and it never stops.
He was just a guest, so yeah, he can fake his way in... He didn't have a 'show' at fashion week.
The awful truth I learned is that everyone pays their way into fashion weeks. Every event is run by a production company, and their customers are the designers, who pay for the show. Pay more, get a better event, a better slot in the line-up.
My wife is a fashion designer ( high-end couture, lilymarotto.com ) and we've done 3 fashion weeks now, twice in NY, once in LA.. You (usually) get great photography, videography, and the cachet of saying you were at fashion week, you build a portfolio and use it to get your stuff in boutiques and attract customers... Best case, you get a really favorable writeup in some magazine, or are contacted by someone interested in working together. Difficult, expensive lottery tickets, in a sense.
It resonates though. I suppose many of us sometimes feel that we aren't the professionals we seem, that we're just faking and role-playing to the best of our ability, and somehow things turn out ok. Then there's a view that this applies to most adults, from janitors to leaders of nations, and the whole world is just one big fake fest...
I'd be inclined to agree. Granted, these people aren't fashion industry insiders...probably afficionados and possibly trying to break into fashion, but it certainly shows how fashion attracts the fake it til you make it persona. Whoever says whatever they say in the most confident and convincing way can be taken as an authority figure.
