In ELLE’s Crime of Fashion series, we investigate whether clothes make the criminal—and talk with people who risked the slammer for a slice of glamour.
Five years ago, I investigated how society grifter Anna Sorokin, alias Anna Delvey, was getting Saint Laurent in jail. As it turns out, she employed a former fashion magazine editor named Anastasia Walker, who pulled off-the-rack designer looks and shipped them to Rikers Island, the holding facility reserved for New York’s most notorious criminals and Sorokin’s home for over a year. Walker told me that her client insisted on “timeless” pieces, given her trial style would almost certainly become tabloid fodder (it did) and feature heavily in Inventing Anna, the Netflix project about her life (it was). But fashion was about more than just legacy. It was also a strategy: By dressing up, maybe she could distract the jury from the fact that her story was dressed up, too.
While at Rikers awaiting a verdict, Sorokin conducted other sartorial experiments. “The uniforms they give you [are] the same ones they give to men, the only difference is sizing,” she told me recently. “I wanted to make my uniform look a bit better, so I would put my pants or the shirt inside out and draw contours of my body.” With a prison-grade sewing kit and basic skills picked up as a kid, she tailored the one-size-fits-all set. Guards forced her to “take [the stitching] out with my hands when they saw me in the hallway,” she says, but not before her work caught the attention of fellow inmates. “They would try to hire me to do their uniforms,” she says. “But I was like, ‘I don’t work for a jar of peanut butter.’”
Sorokin had her sights on something a little less gritty, but just as nutty: the world of New York fashion. On Wednesday, just shy of two years after being released on house arrest, she co-produced three Pornhub-sponsored fashion shows in Chelsea alongside PR shark Kelly Cutrone, who describes her partner in crime as “a genius performance artist” and “smart as fuck” on a phone call earlier this week. This wasn’t Sorokin’s first fashion show, but it was the biggest, buzziest, and best-attended. Her Dancing With the Stars partner, Ezra Sosa, sat front row wearing a bedazzled ankle monitor in solidarity. Legendary fashion photographer Nigel Barker debuted his new line of pre-mixed espresso martinis backstage. And the crowd was packed with New York influencers and editors. In more ways than one, the spotlight is back on Sorokin, and the attention has some people contemplating the correlation between high style and low morals—and whether this kind of short-term shock value has staying power.
A lot of people have a lot of opinions about her return. Whoopi Goldberg certainly wasn’t afraid to voice hers earlier this month. “It really doesn’t matter to me,” Sorokin says firmly. “It’s great if they don’t like me, because I feel like they’re stupid.” So, how did we get 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 around different correctional facilities, before a judge put her on house arrest in late 2022. It didn’t take long to come up with a new concept capitalizing on her crimes; in 2023, she formed a pop-up PR agency with Cutrone called “Outlaw” and invited editors, stylists, influencers, and other fashion people to the roof of her Lower East Side apartment building, where local designer Shao Yang debuted a collection. “Fucking Vanessa Friedman [fashion director and chief fashion critic for The New York Times] reviewed it and called it Off-White-meets-Gaultier,” Cutrone says. “We knew we were going to get press, but we didn’t think we were going to get that kind of press.”
Whether you think she’s a criminal mastermind or, like Cutrone believes, a marketing maven, Sorokin certainly understands how clothing can be a tool for manipulation. When I ask about her future in fashion though, she is cautious. “I’m working on something, I’ve been so busy, and I don’t really talk about it publicly until I have everything figured out,” she reveals. “It sounds preposterous, considering the past events, but I’m happiest when I have a company to run.”
What she can say is that the business, which is separate from Outlaw, will be fashion-oriented. “I was offered [to do] The Masked Singer for a lot of money, I was offered a dating show while being on house arrest… but I don’t think I want to do much in entertainment at all. It’s just something that I don’t have the personality for,” she says. “I never wanted to be famous, [although] people love to say that. If you look at my old Instagrams, it’s just boring pictures of art, pretty much. There was no ostentatious display of wealth or whatever.” Fashion, she says, is and will remain her top priority. “It’s the corniest thing you can say, it’s so trite, but I think it just comes naturally to me,” she explains. However, several industry insiders I spoke with were skeptical about her ability to parlay a criminal record into whatever it is she’s plotting next.
“I did my time and paid my restitution,” Sorokin insists. “So it’s like, what else would you like me to do, kill myself?” Cutrone says “there aren’t enough fashion people that could possibly hate Anna to keep her from not being successful.” And Fern Mallis, the creator of New York Fashion Week, adds that “Anna did her time, and should be allowed to do whatever she wants to do.”
One of the twistiest plot lines in Inventing Anna follows former Vanity Fair photo editor Rachel DeLoache Williams, who was forced to front a $62,000 hotel bill while on vacation with Sorokin in Marrakesh... A quick Google search revealed that he, too, was back in the spotlight. Earlier this week, McFarland appeared on the TODAY show to tout tickets ranging in price from $1,400 to $1.1 million for Fyre Festival II, taking place next April on a private island off the coast of Mexico. One thing about a scammer, they’re not afraid of a comeback.
