In ELLE’s Crime of Style collection, we examine whether or not garments make the prison—and discuss with individuals who risked the slammer for a slice of glamour.
5 years in the past, I investigated how society grifter Anna Sorokin, alias Anna Delvey, was getting Saint Laurent in jail. Because it seems, she employed a former style journal editor named Anastasia Walker, who pulled off-the-rack designer seems to be and shipped them to Rikers Island, the holding facility reserved for New York’s most infamous criminals and Sorokin’s dwelling for over a 12 months. Walker advised me that her consumer insisted on “timeless” items, given her trial type would virtually actually turn into tabloid fodder (it did) and have closely in Inventing Anna, the Netflix venture about her life (it was).
However style was about extra than simply legacy. It was additionally a method: By dressing up, possibly she may distract the jury from the truth that her story was dressed up, too.
Whereas at Rikers awaiting a verdict, Sorokin performed different sartorial experiments. “The uniforms they offer you [are] the identical ones they offer to males, the one distinction is sizing,” she advised me just lately. “I needed to make my uniform look a bit higher, so I might put my pants or the shirt inside out and draw contours of my physique.”
With a prison-grade stitching package and primary expertise picked up as a child, she tailor-made the one-size-fits-all set. Guards pressured her to “take [the stitching] out with my fingers after they noticed me within the hallway,” she says, however not earlier than her work caught the eye of fellow inmates. “They’d attempt to rent me to do their uniforms,” she says. “However I used to be like, ‘I don’t work for a jar of peanut butter.’”
Anna Sorokin closed out the SHAO present throughout New York Style Week.
Sorokin had her sights on one thing rather less gritty, however simply as nutty: the world of New York style. On Wednesday, simply shy of two years after being launched on home arrest, she co-produced three Pornhub-sponsored style reveals in Chelsea alongside PR shark Kelly Cutrone, who describes her associate in crime as “a genius efficiency artist” and “good as fuck” on a cellphone name earlier this week.
This wasn’t Sorokin’s first style present, but it surely was the most important, buzziest, and best-attended. Her Dancing With the Stars associate, Ezra Sosa, sat entrance row carrying a bedazzled ankle monitor in solidarity. Legendary style photographer Nigel Barker debuted his new line of pre-mixed espresso martinis backstage. And the group was full of New York influencers and editors.
Sorokin together with her DWTS associate Ezra Sosa.
In additional methods than one, the highlight is again on Sorokin, and the eye has some folks considering the correlation between excessive type and low morals—and whether or not this sort of short-term shock worth has endurance. One editor close to me whispered: “My mother can’t wait to observe her on Dancing With the Stars, however like c’mon, Anna Delvey doing style week? Actually?”
Lots of people have quite a lot of opinions about her return. Whoopi Goldberg actually wasn’t afraid to voice hers earlier this month. “It actually doesn’t matter to me,” Sorokin says firmly. “It’s nice in the event that they don’t like me, as a result of I really feel like they’re silly.”
So, how did we get right here? After years posing as a German heiress, Sorokin was sentenced to jail in 2019 for swindling Manhattan’s elite to the tune of $275,000. She bounced round totally different correctional amenities, earlier than a decide put her on home arrest in late 2022.
Sorokin wore her signature Celine glasses a throughout her trial on the New York State Supreme Court docket in Manhattan in 2019.
It didn’t take lengthy to provide you with a brand new idea capitalizing on her crimes; in 2023, she fashioned a pop-up PR company with Cutrone known as “Outlaw” and invited editors, stylists, influencers, and different style folks to the roof of her Decrease East Facet condo constructing, the place native designer Shao Yang debuted a group. “Fucking Vanessa Friedman [style director and chief style critic for The New York Instances] reviewed it and known as it Off-White-meets-Gaultier,” Cutrone says. “We knew we have been going to get press, however we didn’t suppose we have been going to get that sort of press.”
Possibly it was the success of the present or the truth that her lease was $7,000, however Sorokin utilized for an tackle change and moved into Cutrone’s home upstate 5 months later. They cooked, performed board video games, and hatched new methods to make noise collectively. “We’re in the identical home, so it’s like a married couple who does a model or one thing,” Cutrone says. “It’s not only a nine-to-five factor. It is likely to be a Sunday within the eating room, and [we’ll say] ‘This might be actually enjoyable!’”
Cutrone hugging Sorokin after a court docket listening to this summer time.
All that desk discuss led the unlikely duo to this: closing out NYFW with back-to-back reveals for the manufacturers Personal Coverage, Untitled & Co., and SHAO. The whole lot befell on the identical day, on the similar occasion area in Chelsea. After I arrived early for the SHAO present, the third and closing one, Cutrone was overseeing a last-minute run-through carrying aviator sun shades, leggings, an outsized hoodie, and black flip-flops. “They’re customized!” she chirped.
Backstage, Sorokin was mingling with the fashions, as a result of, nicely, she was one. “I forged myself, in order that’s nice,” she had advised me earlier. Then, the lights dimmed, and he or she walked the runway in a sharply tailor-made blazer and maxi skirt with a facet slit exhibiting off her ankle monitor. The gang erupted in cheers. The garments have been lovely, but it surely’s clear what everybody was there to see.
Sorokin preparing backstage for SHAO.
New York Style Week has all the time been filled with novelties. This 12 months, Susan Alexandra featured canine fashions, Wiederhoeft marched 26 brides in matching corsets down the runway, and Space’s present went full troll. It’s not sufficient to only debut collections anymore; staging viral present moments is as integral to the method as making the garments. For some rising and impartial designers, inflicting a scene is among the finest methods to be seen.
That’s the place Cutrone thinks Outlaw can carve out a distinct segment. “Who’s going to assist these [young designers]? How can we open up the doorways for them to thrive and provides them a strategy to shine?” Cutrone says. “Anna and I’ve quite a lot of expertise between us. I imply she’s completed jail time.”
Former Cosmopolitan.com web site director Amy Odell, creator of the Anna Wintour biography Anna: The Biography, thinks the trade has lengthy fetishized folks and developments which might be “deeply flawed.” Utilizing Sorokin to promote garments “looks as if par for the course,” she provides, no less than for now. “It’s seemingly when this ends quite a lot of us received’t even keep in mind it in a 12 months,” she says. “I believe saying it signifies something for the way forward for New York Style Week could be giving it an excessive amount of credit score.”
For Carrie Crecca Maitoza, the model marketing consultant behind fashionable style PR meme account @miss_pr_piggy, the virality of this second reminds her of Lindsay Lohan’s very temporary, very controversial stint as creative advisor to the home of Emanuel Ungaro again in 2009. “That’s what that is giving to me, however for the PR world,” she says. “And I’m not saying it’s a foul factor.”
Whether or not you suppose she’s a prison mastermind or, like Cutrone believes, a advertising and marketing maven, Sorokin actually understands how clothes could be a instrument for manipulation. After I ask about her future in style although, she is cautious. “I’m engaged on one thing, I’ve been so busy, and I don’t actually discuss it publicly till I’ve all the things discovered,” she reveals. “It sounds preposterous, contemplating the previous occasions, however I’m happiest when I’ve an organization to run.”
What she will say is that the enterprise, which is separate from Outlaw, might be fashion-oriented. “I used to be provided [to do] The Masked Singer for some huge cash, I used to be provided a relationship present whereas being on home arrest… however I don’t suppose I need to do a lot in leisure in any respect. It’s simply one thing that I don’t have the character for,” she says. “I by no means needed to be well-known, [although] folks like to say that. In case you have a look at my previous Instagrams, it’s simply boring footage of artwork, just about. There was no ostentatious show of wealth or no matter.”
Earlier than the Personal Coverage present, Sorokin posed for images and took selfies with attendees.
Style, she says, is and can stay her prime precedence. “It’s the corniest factor you’ll be able to say, it’s so trite, however I believe it simply comes naturally to me,” she explains. Nonetheless a number of trade insiders I spoke with have been skeptical about her capacity to parlay a prison report into no matter it’s she’s plotting subsequent. “I did my time and paid my restitution,” Sorokin insists. “So it’s like, what else would you want me to do, kill myself?”
Cutrone says “there aren’t sufficient style folks that would presumably hate Anna to maintain her from not being profitable.” And Fern Mallis, the creator of New York Style Week, provides that “Anna did her time, and ought to be allowed to do no matter she desires to do.”
Sorokin arriving to a court docket listening to in Could.
One of many twistiest plot traces in Inventing Anna follows former Vainness Honest picture editor Rachel DeLoache Williams, who was pressured to entrance a $62,000 lodge invoice whereas on trip with Sorokin in Marrakesh. A couple of years again, I requested DeLoache Williams throughout an interview whether or not she’d seen the viral Instagram account celebrating Sorokin’s courtroom seems to be.
“Sure, it’s like a giant ‘Watch the birdie,’ that previous magician’s trick,” she advised me on the time. “Like, you’re being attentive to this, so that you don’t see what I’ve really completed right here.”
“But it surely didn’t work,” I posited. In spite of everything, Sorokin was discovered responsible and served jail time.
“No, it did work,” DeLoache Williams stated. “Take a look at the best way she was applauded within the court docket of public opinion, like that Instagram account. It’s irritating, as a result of I perceive her enchantment, and I actually don’t blame anyone for locating it amusing. I in all probability would have too, had I not been taken benefit of by her, and had I not seen her for who she is, a despicable narcissist.”
After leaving the SHAO present, I walked by Motel Morris, a cute bistro throughout the road with out of doors seating. I seen a person with quick brown hair ingesting wine with a lady carrying an Aimé Leon Dore sweatshirt. He hadn’t been on the present, however he appeared acquainted. It wasn’t till I obtained dwelling that I noticed it was Billy McFarland, the notorious Fyre Pageant founder as soon as dubbed “the poster boy for millennial scamming.”
A fast Google search revealed that he, too, was again within the highlight. Earlier this week, McFarland appeared on the TODAY present to tout tickets ranging in value from $1,400 to $1.1 million for Fyre Pageant II, going down subsequent April on a personal island off the coast of Mexico. One factor a couple of scammer, they’re not afraid of a comeback.
Rose is the Senior Editor of Options & Particular Tasks at ELLE.com overseeing options and tasks about girls’s points. She is an completed and compassionate storyteller and editor who excels in acquiring unique interviews and unearthing compelling options.
