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.