A crisp 100-dollar tip slipped past the medieval concierge desk at the 12 George Hotel, and the jaw-dropping concierge Neve hurried back to the office, shouting the good news to the manager: "There is a rich man who just walked in the door!" And then wrote on the VIP board, Anna De Vere-Neve– the great gold lord who gives me the others. It all starts with money, as happens a lot in New York. The American drama "Fictional Anna" was launched on Netflix, and it rushed to the top of the popular charts in only two days, setting off super high topics around the world. The protagonist, Anna Deville, an ordinary little girl with no prominent background, no college degree, and no rich experience in the industry, relies on empty gloves and white wolves, and has been in the social circle of New York for three years.
Interestingly, the magical story is based on the real events of Anna DeVille Anna Delvey (formerly Anna Sorokin Anna Sorokin) and referenced the then New York magazine feature "How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People."
Art comes from life
In 2018, this special report of the famous New York Times supplement "New York" magazine swept up the American social circle: 25-year-old Russian-German girl Anna dressed as the heir of the German 60 million trust fund, dressed in a low-key and luxurious brand-name dress, playing in the New York art, fashion, real estate, Wall Street financial industry, playing a group of really rich people around, and even almost got a bank loan equivalent to hundreds of millions of yuan.
In the end, Anna was arrested for cheating, theft, fraud and other crimes, and was formally convicted in 2019 and sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison. But even in the face of jail time, she still seemed to be fine, and sold her "legendary" story to Netflix, receiving a reward of up to $320,000 and paying off part of her compensation debt.
In order to highly restore the event, from the starring role to the styling design, Netflix has worked Imaginary Anna.
The main character, Anna, is played by julia Garner, who won the emmy award for best supporting actress twice, and is written by Shonda Rhimes, a series of hit dramas such as "Scandal", "Grey's Anatomy", and "Get Away with It", and the character design is entrusted to Lyn Paolo, the stylist who has created "White House Storm" and "Shameless".
According to stylist Paolo, the team spent two months thoroughly studying Anna's social networks, going around capturing her clothing at the peak of her cheating and trying to truly restore her image of celebrity circles. At the same time, with developed contacts, the team contacted Prada, Valentino, Balenciaga, Gucci, Dior, Versace and other well-known luxury brands to cooperate. In the end, the team created a total of more than 3,000 looks for the characters. Or, with this outfit, Anna tore off the mask of hypocrisy of wall Street elites.
Why do the world's top elites fall so easily? What blinded them?
Seeds of the American Dream
A commoner can be mixed in the rich circles of Manhattan, and his life is not unfathomable.
Born in Russia, Anna immigrated to Germany with her parents at the age of 16. The father became the head of the local transport company, and the mother was devoted to running the family, such a family could not even be considered strictly middle class.
From middle school, Anna became obsessed with fashion magazines. Costumes, models, luxury goods, dazzling pictures intercept and freeze fragments of high society, cross the ocean, and scatter them into the bedroom of this small German girl, weaving a grand and illusory dream. She made up rumors that her father was a gangster, and turned all the local girls in the school into her own little followers. The girls flattered and flattered her while enduring her taunts.
Everything was like a rehearsal before Anna left for New York.
As an adult, Anna went to Central Saint Martins School of Art in London, but dropped out of school shortly after, after which she went on an internship with the Parisian fashion magazine Purple. After attending New York Fashion Week, she applied to transfer to Purple's New York division. But after a period of internship, she was upset with the status quo and decided to quit her job, ambitious to create one of the world's top private art clubs. But with no identity, not even money and connections, she had to face reality.
At this point, Anna's magical realism of "building dreams" began.
Her natural fashion acumen and alertness, coupled with internship experience in fashion magazines and public relations companies, has given her insight into the soul elements, and she is handy in the face of various occasions in high society, rotating different styles of clothing, creating the most appropriate and convincing image when communicating with high-class people of different identities. From her choice of clothing and jewelry and the choice of treats, we can glimpse the uninformed side of high society.
First honor the robes and then respect the people
Fashion is arguably one of Anna's most important weapons.
Val, a veteran of the fashion industry, said bluntly in an interview: "Anna's face is an ordinary face, which proves that she is really rich... In our world, the poor cannot be fooled by this face. A sentence tells the lamentable essence of the industry - wealth and power are benchmarks, and even "bad" must be rewarded by virtue of beauty.
Val is used to judging a person's worth in terms of the details of their dress. Before they knew each other, Val noticed Anna on the runway. Dressed in a champagne-coloured cross-shouldered silk top and a short skirt of the same material from young New York designer Jonathan Simkhai, she wears the eye-catching Oscar de la Renta floral earrings, with a hint of burnout and calm elegance and understatement after full satisfaction of desire.
In addition to this, there are Azzedine Alaia, Balenciaga, Dior... They are all expensive big-name clothing, but there is no big-name logo that can be recognized at a glance; it is simple and understated, while showing excellent tailoring and high-end texture.
From the details of various appearances, Val determined that Anna was "flawless" and that "people like her are born with taste... It does not mean fashion taste, but taste in the true sense. Dealing with high society, he first respects luo yi and then respects people, understands that here follows the "Fashion pays in style, not in hundreds", they hate the display of the brand Logo leaning over, disdainful, a little eye-catching are desperately trying to pull away from new money (upstart), and form a hidden chain of fashion discrimination.
Anna was cold, inaccessible, and had no interest in anything other than herself. This is exactly what characterizes the top rich in Val's eyes. For them, the acquisition and accumulation of money has exceeded the highest threshold that can excite them. The track is already worse than bad, and they don't care to do only money games, such as difficult to imitate, copy or extremely rare custom designs to make their eyes light up, highlighting their self-esteemed status.
Val confesses that he is extremely eager to befriend Anna.
Craving the energy field
At the art exhibition, Anna meets Talia, the real name of the Global Empire Group. Talia admires that Anna doesn't try to impress, isn't afraid or cares, and has a good taste for art.
On that day, Anna's dark sequin long dress was selected from the German designer brand Talbot Runhof, which only makes evening wear, although the cut is not outstanding, but it still looks gorgeous. Here, she questions the aesthetics of Talia's bidding goals and offers an insight into the gallery's humble photographic work as valuable— the moment when the female photographer walks into her own frame, a moment that means she begins to look at herself and thinks she has value, which is a great moment.
At first, Talia teased Anna as the narrator of the photographic author, but Anna's comfortable and blurted out "I don't need to make money, my father raised me" and "Do you make me believe in the people who want to buy this painting", which made Talia surprise Anna's bold and blunt negative face, and finally bought another work.
As a Manhattanite woman, Talia laughs at herself as a poor who hides in a pile of money and weeps, and many times money inadvertently deprives her of the mortal growth she needs, such as fried eggs. We can see her yearning and admiration for independent, capable women, and when she finds that Anna, who is similar to her origin, shines with this trait, it instantly inspires infinite good feelings.
Through the social circle of Talia, whom she met at the art exhibition, Anna and her boyfriend attended a luxury yacht party under the pretext of "coincidentally" vacationing in the same place, intending to win over the celebrities in the investment circle who were on vacation.
Anna debuted in a red dress with Alexander McQueen, paired with Dior's Early Spring 2021 limited edition hibiscus floral tote bag, sunglasses from the same brand and a fluttering silk scarf customized by stylists, and successfully became the most high-profile protagonist in the party. At the party, the ladies who met for the first time praised her, and they all believed that Anna was a rich family who enjoyed the sun and sand all day long.
And Anna's fierce negotiations on the ship are the real shock to the audience, making Talia even more impressed with her.
Boyfriend was evaluated for her eagerly recommended projects to get financing, Anna was resentful, and middle-aged men with a negative attitude towards investment in the technology industry chased after them, penetrating human nature, speaking sharply, and getting to the point - where is the so-called young boundary? When people reach middle age, are they afraid of death? Where did the passion and courage go?
A fresh calf's vigor, coupled with the unwarranted rich father's "rollover", made senior middle-aged investors greatly impacted, changed conservative, and pressed the button for investing in the guise project for Anna's boyfriend on the spot. Afterwards, Talia said in an interview that she felt the powerful energy of Anna's explosion, and at that moment, she saw her bloom.
The stylish arsenal has been upgraded again
If the famous lady Talia is young and inexperienced, then Nora, a career woman with a lot of capital accumulation and rich connections, will not be easily deceived. But the answer is no.
However, at first, because of her boyfriend, Anna was "abused" in front of Nora.
Nora dislikes Anna's doll taste, and is also seeking investment in her new concept, she has never looked at Anna squarely, and has always regarded her as an accessory to Chase - a long impatient, who wants to climb the ladder and seek fame and fortune through her boyfriend. Nora took Chase to economic forums and introduced him to major connections; took Anna to a sister foundation that was also an elite in various fields, and only sent her to bring tea and water.
In the face of differential treatment, Anna is not willing, while revealing to Nora the guise of her boyfriend Chase's entrepreneurship, while imitating Nora's taste, wearing professional suits with high frequency, from hard suits to neat shirts and skirts, constantly highlighting her own "capable", "independent entrepreneurship", "independent women" label color. For example, when Nora finally changed her attitude toward Anna and introduced her, she wore an oil-print Dolce & Gabbana suit, and the calm atmosphere was full of youthful vitality -- Anna's fashion arsenal was upgraded by imitating Nora.
Clothing: From the second generation of the rich to the strong woman of business
In the final step of Anna's dream, the selection of the club's base, she encountered the biggest obstacle — a group of senior executives working in the most conservative institutions in New York City.
Ambitious, she took a fancy to the church mission at 281 Park Avenue, which required borrowing $40 million in start-up capital from Wall Street banks. At first, she was furious, dressed as a standard East Side celebrity with a Saks Potts green fur collar leather jacket and a black Celine smiley face bag. But Wall Street doesn't buy Anna's account.
How rich and expensive it looks, as an investor in the industry for twenty or thirty years or even more, Allen does not care at all. In their world, speak with data. Without data support, without relevant experience, the proposal is empty, it is worthless. Not surprisingly, Anna soon hit a wall.
But ambitions like her, even if they are stalked, will not give up easily.
Knowing that the rich second generation who first appeared in the mixed field dressed up to give this group of old-fashioned low scores in their hearts, Anna dyed her original light blond hair into a more "German", wearing Celine black-rimmed glasses to increase the bookish atmosphere, and most of her clothes were changed into dark suits - transforming into a strong woman in the business world. She visits the office of a gold-medal lawyer every day; when she learned that the other party also has a daughter of her age, she burst into tears, crying that the elite of the financial industry "judge people by their appearance" and the doubling of difficulties and barriers to starting a business as a young woman: "No one will consider my business advice, just because of my appearance... If I were a man with an authentic accent and a well-dressed dress, it wouldn't be like this, would it? ”
Alan was moved, thinking of her daughter who had just videotaped herself not long ago to reveal that she had suffered unfair treatment because of gender, so she gave Anna another opportunity to talk about the project. In the end, she almost helped Anna get a loan from the bank.
For Anna's appearance, no one cares about her true origins, and the "old financial foxes" only rely on their sense of smell to grasp the most exciting message - multi-millionaires. Getting acquainted with her, spending money and contributing for her, you can realize the circulation of money, it is involuntary, it is willing, it is a business that makes money every minute and every second. They believe that in the future, Anna will bring them super-profit rewards and leaps in power.
In one scene, Anna leads her friends to stand in front of her "dream hall" to look forward to the future at hand, and a dark red floral pattern and black outer suit are unforgettable.
Perhaps, with a little more effort, Anna could one day become president of the United States.
But after all, the sky-high lies still have to face reality. During an expensive trip to Morocco with her friends over the cost of paying, Anna was eventually sued by the court and put bells in jail.
What makes people cry and laugh is that she took advantage of the public's high attention to "celebrities", "elites" and "high society", grasped the hot spots of self-exposure, used the courtroom as a show, invited a special styling team to design her own costumes, hairstyles, lighting, and even arranged special camera slots for each court appearance, and opened an account on social platforms to announce.
Looking back, Anna's scam was not out of the ordinary, and a careful investigation can quickly find loopholes. But why did the upper elite around her seem to be driven by magic, losing their senses and the ability to think?
Perhaps all that remains is the "aura" - competing to get acquainted with the heir to Germany's tens of millions of assets, wanting to go to the center of the upper class fringe figures to give a lot of hospitality, Wall Street financial elite hot-headed investment in her... It seems that before Anna could explain, they had already found a "reliable" reason for her.
From London, to Paris, to New York. Three of the world's top fashion hubs. The "Illustrious Family" is the official designated ticket to the Dream Journey. Compared with the other two old capitalist empires that regard "birth and descent" as the only one, the fierceness and ingenuity of unscrupulous means for money and status are more suitable for the soul of New York.
As the play says, this is New York, everyone here is playing their own calculations, everyone here wants to win, they are busy, they all want profits, money, power, face, love. The materialistic city of New York is already full of scammers. Decent and noble high society is no different from other places, and the same desires are mixed, the only difference is that they can be whitewashed with big-name clothing as a fig leaf, no longer naked.
These upper-class figures associated with Anna, like prisms, refract different aspects of Anna, but also reflect themselves, piecing together a ukiyo-e of the American upper class.
So, Anna fell in love with it. She peeked into the soul of New York, using a dazzling aura, a lot of money, and symbols of wealth to attract people's attention, who could barely see anything else. In this way, so simply, it blinded the so-called elite upper class of reason and pierced the ceiling of the class.
Perhaps, on the opposite side of the coin, Anna the Lady is a moral story. A small middle-class woman, with clothing as a bullet, taste and vision as a scope, opens fire on the top 1% of those who occupy absolute resources, uncovering the naked desires hidden by their costumes. Perhaps, as Anna's defense lawyer in the play said: she is Robin Hood, she is a folk hero!
Fashion Guangzhou Zhao Fan/Wen
Global vision, Lingnan fashion
iTrendsgz
Fashion Guangzhou New Media