It’s 2008, and I’m in a sumptuous, chauffeur-driven Mercedes chatting with a Versace scion. London Fashion Week is in full swing, and, happily lubricated on free Moët, my New Best Friend – who I’ve just met at a fashion party – and I are heading to the west London home of a renowned art collector. He knows everyone, you see, this dashing Italian who’s just back from Auntie Donatella’s Lake Como villa, so a car is conjured and gilded doors swing open with liquid ease as we head into the glitzy London night.
Except, it later transpires, he’s as connected to the Versace clan as I am to the Vanderbilts. A savvy PR intern (it’s always an intern) with an Italian accent, good suit and access to the right intel on where and when the parties were, he’d aced his way across town by virtue of the fact his surname was, in fact, Versace. He was as much a familial blood relative to the catwalk dynasty as I am to Peter Doig. You have to hand it to him really.
This vignette came back to me on hearing of the enthralling tale of Anna Delvey – or rather, Anna Sorokin – the Russian-born, German raised fraudster par excellence who seduced the glossy Manhattan elite into funding her make-believe ventures and a magical lifestyle before going to prison.
A new Netflix series, Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner, airs this week and charts how this daughter of a trucker conned the great and the good of high society into falling for her story.
Delvey’s story starts out like my own: we both studied at Central Saint Martins, albeit years apart, and both landed internships on fashion magazines. From there, we diverge. As an intern on cult Parisian fashion magazine Purple, she landed in New York, changed her name and reinvented her backstory. She told socialites she was a German heiress and soon became part of an international social set that flitted between Morocco and the Venice Biennale, staying at a constellation of five-star New York hotels.
