This fact reveals our culture’s fatuities about the self-made as sentimental treacle. Her story is equally illuminating about our society’s attitude toward inherited wealth: we glorify the self-made and mock those with “trust funds,” but Sorokin would have had so many more opportunities had she been born into millions and millions of dollars, as she claimed. In the modern world, birth isn’t supposed to determine our access to opportunities and money, yet it certainly does. That’s just what Anna Sorokin was hoping to be. The culture industry normally peddles narratives of hard work, of massive success by little people who come from nothing. People follow Delvey’s courtroom outfits on Instagram and wear “Fake German Heiress” T-shirts because Delvey exposed the hollow mythologies around wealth in the capitalist system. Who deserves wealth? No one does and yet we all do, and that’s why we love Anna Delvey. But by focusing on conventional lessons and individual dramas, Inventing Anna mutes the most irresistible dimension of Delvey’s story - namely, the moral ambiguity at its heart. At one point the reporter character - Vivian Kent, based on Jessica Pressler - says Anna’s story is about “identity under capitalism or something,” which is funny, and the one moment in which the series commendably mocks its own attempted depth. These contrived narratives miss the point. And let’s not forget the other fake bit of profundity: Who is authentic anyway in this Era of Social Media? Everyone’s hustling (lots of tedious moral hand-wringing about how the lawyer and the journalist are using Anna to advance their own careers, clichés about how everyone in New York is on the make). It’s tough for young women to break into finance. Even more misguidedly, however, the series tries on multiple boring insights. Normal professionals with normal problems in normal apartments just can’t compete for our interest with Delvey’s adventures in attempted financial fraud, Balenciaga, Morocco, or Ibiza. Unfortunately, Inventing Anna focuses too much on the struggles of a boring New York City–based female journalist (sorry, my people are hardly a riveting or underexposed demographic). The Fyre Festival scammer, Billy McFarland, really was her roommate for a while. She did party with Martin Shkreli, the depraved pharma bro. She really did come close to getting these big loans. While the series is lightly fictionalized - a few characters are composites, some incidents made up - all the best and least believable parts are true. She used a voice distortion app and a burner phone to impersonate her “family banker,” an apparently fictitious German. Best of all, Delvey came close to convincing major hedge funds and banks to invest millions of dollars in her start-up, an exclusive international art space and social club (think Soho House plus art and culture, or Fotografiska without the proles). As Anna Delvey, she successfully created a moneyed vibe. Real finance capitalists thought they’d make money off her (and some thought they’d become even richer by marrying her). Rich people liked her because she seemed to have social capital. ![]() ![]() As Pressler noted in her New York magazine article, Anna Sorokin wasn’t unusually pretty, charming, or even nice. ![]() She had a sense of entitlement without the title. She stays in some of New York’s fanciest hotels without paying. ![]() She uses a real heiress’s yacht without permission. The even bigger source of delight here, however, is Anna Delvey’s chutzpah. Inventing Anna features some of the best clothes ever seen in a TV series, better even than Sex and the City. She was even taken seriously as a client by major banks and hedge funds, including a fund called Fortress. Inventing Anna, a lightly fictionalized TV series based on Jessica Pressler’s long New York magazine cover story, chronicles the rise and fall of Anna Delvey, née Anna Sorokin, a young middle-class, Russian-born woman who pretended to be a German heiress and lived large for about four years, hobnobbing with Manhattan’s rich and famous. The moment captures instantly the amusement and admiration behind the public response to this real-life story. In the Netflix series Inventing Anna, just after a magazine publishes the dramatic story of Anna Sorokin’s impressive fraud, a woman walks out of a store wearing a T-shirt that says “Fake German Heiress.” Because who wouldn’t want to be a fake German heiress?
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