How I Faked My Way to the Top of Paris Fashion Week [video]
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When I was much, much younger back in the 90s and obsessed with video games, I faked my way into one of the major industry gatherings which I won’t name, simply by pretending to be a “games journalist” and acting the part. A pack of fun looking business cards, a fake web site, and a cheap silk shirt was all it took. It’s incedible what people believe if you don’t break the air of sincerity. This was a harmless prank, but I can see how tempting it is to use this power for evil, and it’s evidenced by the fact that so much fraud continues to be successful.
How, besides education, do we turn off this trust-by-default gene? It’s really an evolutionary dead end.
Of course, we all flout these maxims daily, to varying degrees, from white lies to outright perjury. But viewed as a Tragedy of the Commons, there are people who will advance themselves by deliberately and consistently flouting them, to their own calculated advantage.
If my mum knew about this she'd probably think I'm crazy, being afraid of someone running off with her stuff. But in the end I think "trust-by-default" is a good way of going about life and meeting new people. Also, there's still gut-feeling. Maybe I'm an outlier there but I'm pretty quick in determining if someone is being sincere or just sweet-talking me to get what he/she wants.
Personally, I feel the same way. But it's illogical. What data do you have that you're good at ferreting the genuine from the not?
I think that‘s what most people do. I‘m actually waiting for me to be „completely duped“ one time and deliberately exposing myself to this risk. However, my experience so far has lead me to believe: Most people are really nice and the few that aren‘t shouldn‘t really be tainting your interactions with others that you just happen to not know yet.
That actually reminded me of a really cool poscast episode I listened to this week:
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/long-distance
(A guy trying to get to the bottom of an indian call-center scam, leading to all sorts of pleasant interactions along the way)
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/103-long-distance-part...
Not all societies are the same. Trust by default is a luxury in many parts of the world. Typically the rule of law is just non-existent in these places.
We don't look at a law of the jungle society and say "this is a functioning society" (even if technically it might be true: it does perform some functions).
Every place around the world I've been to has been incredibly hospitable -- and the more besieged by war, or poverty, the more hospitable places tend to be. More so than your average street in the USA.
It's much easier to do business in the US/Europe, you can just put your credit card number in and stuff shows up at your door step, even if it's in the tens of thousands or more in value. Obviously, you can get taken in the modernized countries too, but much less and if you do there are legal avenues.
In poorer countries, you have to be a lot more careful who you deal with and need a lot of references because people have experiences getting burned too often. Any place that openly gives bribes to cops (I know tons, usually they are in poverty) also illustrate low trust. Hospitality doesn't display the deep trust that makes doing business in places like the US/Europe easier.
For personal reasons, I'm not going to be specific. I'm just going to say many parts of Asia; just not Japan. It's not perfect and there are probably better measures, but this map gives you an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
As lotsofpulp has already mentioned, your experience will be drastically different if you're just visiting and if you're not a native. I lived in Asia and I'm also native. My family is still there, and I visit from time to time. If you haven't conducted business or dealt with law enforcement, it's hard to have a full picture; especially if you're just passing by.
It'd also argue that it's a lot harder for the majority of people to convincingly act and lie than you think (especially when they don't feel desperate or have grown up in a safe environment that doesn't force them to learn how to behave contrary to their natural instincts).
I think you are trying to prove a point by making up stories.
Therefore I distrust your conclusions and arguments, not only because I disagree with them, but because I distrust you.
(I'm testing out turning off my trust-by-default gene ;)
I'd suggest that I neither believe nor disbelieve things that are unconfirmed. Instead, I consider that an anonymous person said such things and later correlate it with other observations.
It's not necessary to prematurely declare something (even to yourself) to be true or false.
I don't know... yes, these things happen all the time, but as an individual, 99.9% of your interactions are going to be mostly honest, and there IS a cost to being skeptical about every interaction (anger other people who you doubt, takes time, can lead you to miss opportunities, etc)
Are you so sure that the extra protection you get from being skeptical is worth all those little costs that add up?
Why is trust by default the dead end, and not people lying? Is being unarmed an evolutionary dead end as well, because one armed person can take advantage of an unarmed one?
Wouldn't the ideal world be one where you could trust everyone, rather than one where nobody trusts anyone? Why on earth would the latter be preferable?
Here is just one collection - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Like you said, in many situations if you just act like you know what you're doing no one will question you.
I am genuinely not surprised at all that this guy made it to the top.
Streetwear has become so ironic because the lines have blurred between haute culture/high fashion and bargain basement designs that you genuinely can't tell what is $800 (Balenciaga Triple S https://www.balenciaga.com/us/triple-s-shoes_cod11271302nb.h...) and what is $55 (Nike Air Monarch https://www.nike.com/t/air-monarch-iv-lifestyle-gym-shoe-lPt...) unless you know the brands and styles.
Not saying you can’t get good shoes for $55, just sharing my experience. Someone will come in with the Terry Pratchett quote about boots here any moment, or you can look up the quote for yourself.
There doesn't seem to be a noticeable difference between their $80 and $240 shoes though.
Huh? That's not even remotely accurate. There are tons of Nikes and Adidas way beyond $200, and even more so for "collectible" sneakers, and way more so ($1000 easily) for quality leather shoes.
E.g:
https://www.adidas.com/us/originals-shoes?sort=price-high-to...
https://store.nike.com/us/en_us/pw/mens-shoes/7puZoi3?sortOr...
https://www.colehaan.com/mens-shoes?pmax=351.00&pmin=251.00
https://www.thefryecompany.com/mens/boots?product_list_order...
And I'm not including any high-fashion brands...
Shoes for aesthetics are beyond my scope.
Well, in my here parts, sneakers (which can easily go in the $200+ and even multi-$Ks for pure aesthetics/vintage) still count as "athletic shoes".
For sneakers I’m not convinced that spending $200 is worth it. For hiking boots I’m pretty skeptical of anything I see that’s under $200, or maybe $150 on sale.
Thanks to industrial processes, good shoes also have a maximum manufacturing cost. There are only so many features you can pack in to one footwrap designed to be worn on the surface of Earth. Springs, torsion bars, carbon fiber, pneumatic chambers, pockets, separated toes, non-Newtonian fluid insoles, flame resistance, arc reactor exhaust ports, or whatever. All of those things still cost less than the trademark logo.
You can avoid buying some bad shoes by filtering out those with low prices. You can avoid buying shoes with a bad price/quality ratio by filtering out those with high prices. You still need to carefully examine any that are left, because with shoes, quality influences price, but price has many complex factors and you cannot easily determine what fraction is due to the quality.
Not only the construction matters but also the leather used in the upper. I can differentiate a 200$ shoe from a 500$ one at a glance, a good pair of shoes can be brought back to life even if they have been seriously abused. There are more durable leathers too like cordovan.
In clothing there are many garments where there isn't much of a correlation between price and quality but leather shoes and jackets isn't one.
Here's the thing:
$55-$200 shoe can be had at TJMaxx or Marshalls for $25. Quality sole replacement is claimed to be $15. That's not really correct - it is closer to $40 in sole + labor + you need another pair of shoes while your shoe is being replaced but lets say that it is $20.
So even if there's no wear on the top of the shoe replacement of a sole would cost $20. Objectively, soles in a city would last ~6-10 months based on daily wear. This means that what we are evaluating is:
Shoe 1: $0 NRC + $25 every 6 months
Shoe 2: $800 NRC + $20 every 6 months
Man it will take a long time to break even on shoe 2
You're not buying an 800$ shoe for durability but for aesthetics and comfort. There isn't much difference in durability between a 200$ shoe and an 800$ one. There is a great deal of difference between a 55$ and a 200$ shoe.
I have 200$ shoes with dainite soles that have been worn three or four hundred times over the last 4 years and are completely new.
We can't evaluate how much a sole lasts objectively because we should:
- Specify the sole that is being used.
- The construction of the shoe.
- How the wearer walks.
- How many kms does he walk.
- Where he walks.
- The weather.
- ...
In my experience a dainite sole is perfectly fine after one year of usage. Some of my days have 30-50k steps. I don't wear shoes daily though because it's bad for them and I have 22 pair of shoes.
My reply wasn't stating that an 800$ shoe lasts 14.5 times longer that a 55$ shoe but the notion that a 55$ shoe will last around the same time. A 200$ will last 5 times more easily. An 800$ shoe will look better than a 55$ shoe 30 years later at a cost of a 100$ resole every 5 years. We should take into account the environmental costs of buying new low quality shoes every year instead of having 3 pairs of good value quality shoes (200$) and taking good care of them.
Check those tangents, man. If you've ever used something like illustrator, imagine where the spline controls would be. Then try the same with the Nike. They're different.
I wouldn't pay $800 for those shoes because for me, $800 is a lot of money. If I were megarich and I needed sneakers maybe I'd pick the Balenciaga out of an appreciation for how they're pushing the edges of sneaker space. I'd be more likely to buy nice leather shoes because they'd suit me better.
The reason you can't tell the difference between that and a generic sneaker for middle-aged men is that you're used to the higher fashion brands using a separate set of cultural symbols as their baseline instead of looking at the design itself. We've gone past that. Rich people aren't wearing wingtips to show how rich they are anymore.
In fact, "formal" clothing and couture has long been a way to show you're on the way up, not that you're there. Old money doesn't try to keep up with fashion.
Rich people want to wear sneakers, t-shirts, jeans, hoodies, and all the other normal sportswear that everybody else now wears but they want it to be interesting instead of generic. That's a valid role for a fashion designer. Not addressing that market would be idiotic.
The reason it's easy to fake your way to the top of fashion week is actually that 90% of everything is shit, in every field and at every level, so there's no way to look at a given person's stuff and say definitively "nope, I can clearly tell you aren't successful by the way your clothing designs look". You might kick Michael Kors out by accident.
in regulated/safety-critical industries such as automotive, aerospace & defense, medical, etc. where people's lives are at stake, 99% of end-user facing products are fantastic and you generally get what you pay for, with some minimum level of quality and manufacturer warranty
in high fashion, the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. and it has stirred emotions here because nobody likes to feel left out, and that's basically the point of high fashion, to appoint a select group of people as "cool" because they "get it" and can afford hot labels
I wouldn't say that this extends all through the art world - good design is key to a lot of functional and utility aspects of engineering or creating anything new. but nobody is going to be playing pick up basketball in their $800 balenciaga, or expecting any level of functionality/comfort from them besides fitting on their feet
I don't know that I agree. I'm not familiar with with aerospace software, but I see a lot of the user-facing bits of both automotive and medical devices/software. While the bits that are safety-critical may be rock solid (I've yet to see it fail in person), the UI design, maintenance, and UX in general leaves a lot to be desired.
For example, in my car, if the audio system is being driven from the bluetooth connection, you can't load the navigation screen. It will just spin forever. Switch to AM or FM radio, switch back to navigation, everything loads fine. How is that fantastic?
As another example, one of my doctors' office recently switched to using this big heavy cart thing for taking vitals measurements. The device is expensive, so they don't have nearly as many as they might have patients at one time, so I had to wait until one was free. The UI was slow and clunky (at best). To beat it all, the last time I was there all of the machines were shut down at the same time for scheduled updates (which was required to be done at a certain time, while the office was open), so it was back to the thermometer and blood pressure cuffs for me.
As someone who used to work on the United States' most widely-used electronic health record, let me tell you that a lot of our end users would not be so rosy in their assessment.
It's my job to deal with lots and lots of tremendously wealthy people (mostly billionaires). They usually wear formal or semi-formal clothes, or occasionally polos, etc. They do not wear Balenciaga, any of them, ever when I see them, in business environments or casual ones. On average they are older, but even the younger ones I know don't. In NYC the people I see in Balenciaga, Rick Owens, etc., work in fashion, or are European tourists.
Are you actually referring to formal
- formal (=full dress, ie morning dress/Cutaway (day) and white tie/tailcoat/Frack (eve)) and
- semi-formal (=half dress, ie stroller/Stresemann (day) and black tie/tux/Smoking (eve)) attire,
or informal formal (ie suits)?
If an office policy is semi formal, do people turn up in a black tie?
Why are black tie parties "black tie" parties and not "semi formal" parties?
IMO you've listed "opera" followed by "black tie."
"Formal" would be "a tie and jacket," "semi formal" would be a jacket without a tie, or (shudder) a tie without a jacket, and then business casual is where the polos come in.
All pants are black: All shirts are black or darkish grey. I'm also female, and find fashion rules confusing.
Looks like it would make a decent snowshoe though. Not a great one, but with such a large surface area for the sole it would be sufficient for walking around. I'd still rather spend the $800 on several pairs of real snowshoes and/or some x-country skiis.
I was under the impression that haute couture still is its own weird world, far distanced from anything reasonable. Just look at some of the shows:
Relatively wearable Armani: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpgaJD5hISc
Random Givenchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQGbOOKpTd0
Bona fide art pieces from Guo Pei: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1ew-tsk8KA
(and those were just some random sampling from youtube search for haute couture)
Nobody is going to mix those up with some random cheap street vendor clothes.
> Most fraudsters are trying to manipulate rankings of real restaurants. It doesn't reflect the real world as the restaurant itself was fake
The video was very cool though.
Isn't that what you expect/hope for?
What do you mean?
He got to a conference and partied with some other attendees ? You could do this with any other field; including tech.
My favorite episode is the best buy tv episode.
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.
Have a good trip :)
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...
Your list of favourited comments is at the bottom of your profile page.
We sure can do some cool things when we all delude in the same direction, though.
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.
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.
The he tracks down the closest thing to the real Georgio Peviani.
I am still sad that the superball walk in with a ladder was fake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Separation_(fil...