Inside Anna Delvey’s provocative fashion collaboration with Pornhub

The hottest gossip on the NSFW side of NYFW—plus, an interview with the infamous faux heiress herself

Anna Delvey’s runway debut for Shao New York. Photo by me.

Anna Delvey knows how to put on a show. Notorious for swindling nearly $300,000 from New York’s wealthy elite, the faux heiress parlayed her criminal reputation into global fame (or at least, infamy)—then pivoted to a career in art, fashion, and recently, national television. So when she teamed up with Hills star Kelly Cutrone and adult industry behemoth Pornhub to put on a four-part event series during NYFW, I knew it was going to be a scene.

“I am listening to the worst influencer brain rot,” my friend Katie Rex informs me when I join her in the line for Private Policy, the first of the day’s three runway shows: a Devil Wears Prada-inspired vision of a disgruntled office associate answering a chaotic clamor of calls as models strut back and forth on the catwalk to increasingly upbeat techno. Afterward, me, Katie, and our posse of acquaintances grab drinks at a nearby bar where, according to a report in Elle, the Fyre Fest scammer Billy McFarland was allegedly spotted that same day.

In line for the next show, a photographer I don’t know comes up to me and asks if I’m an influencer. I’m mildly insulted, but with this crowd, it’s hard to blame him: The smell of Instagram is in the air, and everyone I see looks vaguely familiar yet impossible to place—whether because I actually saw them on TikTok, or because they’re sporting the latest micro-trend. At the center of the action is an unlikely duo: Delvey and PR maven Kelly Cutrone, who together run Outlaw, a pop-up agency that harnesses Delvey’s newfound celebrity to spotlight emerging designers—bringing their work to wider audiences, thanks to the SEO-optimized thinkpieces that accompany the ex-con’s every move. The pair met after Delvey mentioned her admiration for Cutrone on Call Her Daddy—which, like my first interview with Delvey, was taped over a jail phone line—and became fast friends. Now, they’re now not only business partners but roommates who share a “bucolic life upstate,” per Vanity Fair. If Delvey’s criminal past bothers her, Cutrone doesn’t let it show: “Frankly, doing time at Rikers is a pretty good experience for how to handle a fashion crowd when they’re arriving,” she told The New York Post.

“Frankly, doing time at Rikers is a pretty good experience for how to handle a fashion crowd when they’re arriving.”

The second show of the day, from Untitled&Co, features a series of roughed-up models with tear streaks and smeared makeup sporting shirts with (ironic?) fast-fashion slogans. Beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, it’s hard to tell where sincerity ends and the spectacle begins—and this suspension of disbelief is pushed to its limits when, halfway through the show, a guy with his head in a paper bag that says “I Am Not Fat” takes the stage, gyrating unpredictably in a brightly colored sweatsuit. He is then forcibly escorted out by security in a flurry of activity, paparazzi following close behind. “Stage crasher or paid actor?” my new friends debate. 

The sight of him, frozen in the flash of countless cameras, unlocks a buried memory from the last Anna Delvey event I attended: her first fine art exhibition, Allegedly, which took the form not of a typical gallery show, but a one-night, invite-only soiree in a swanky room at the Public Hotel. Held while she was still in jail, it featured models in BDSM-inspired masks who strutted through a crowd of coastal elites, holding Delvey’s artworks aloft as Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” blared through the speakers. It was a surreal scene—something Delvey acknowledged in our interview shortly after, stating that while it may have “looked like a fashion show,” it was implicitly political because the drawings, one of which depicts Delvey stunting in designer wares with the caption “Never complain, never explain”—were made in jail.

Attended largely by rabid fans and dubious employees of major media corporations, the show was called the “death of culture” by Rolling Stone, an example of the “Anna Delvey-industrial complex” by Esquire, and “just another scam” by too many people to count. But it was also completely on brand. Like any savvy entrepreneur, Delvey has leveraged the attention (and outrage) economy to her benefit—which is how, after attempting to scam her way into New York’s arts and culture scene, she’s landed right back in the middle of it. And she is, at least theoretically, using her platform to boost the work of emerging designers. But when the final show of the night—a 90s-inspired presentation from Shao New York, which is actually quite good—culminates with Delvey strutting out on the runway, ankle monitor and all, the massive applause shows who people are really there for. 

“It’s harder to move on from bad deeds as a woman, because when a woman does something that’s outside of the norm, she’s seen as, like, a witch.”

It may have been Delvey’s first time on the runway, but it wasn’t her first rodeo. Last summer, when she was on house arrest, she hosted a different runway show for Shao on the rooftop of her East Village walk-up—and even before that, Delvey was making headlines as a fashion icon, having donned plunging necklines, sheer tops, choker necklaces, and Céline frames while on trial. (“It’s not, like, breaking news to anybody that I care about clothes,” she quipped in our 2020 interview.)

At times, Delvey’s humor is so dry it can be hard to tell if she’s joking (“By being in jail, I have avoided years of sun damage to my skin,” she once told me, totally deadpan.) But it also makes her more likable than the average criminal—a quality that’s on full display at her Pornhub-sponsored panel discussion at NeueHouse the next day. There, I run into Ripley and Penelope of Dirty Mag and Petit Mort, along with Mara McKevitt, a filmmaker whose psychosexual erotic thriller, Val, is extremely worth seeing. We are served canapés of salmon and grapefruit cosmos on silver platters, making me feel like the one percent, except that when I try to take a video of the panel later, I’m notified that my iPhone’s out of storage, a problem only peasants have. In a frenzy, I delete 20 apps, but still fail to get footage of Delvey saying, “Pornhub for prison reform!” C’est la vie.

The panel—a collaboration between Delvey and Terms of Service, a Pornhub podcast hosted by performer Asa Akira and the brand’s head of community, Alex Kekesi—was supposed to feature Delvey in conversation with Stormy Daniels, the sex worker known for her efforts to put another high-profile criminal behind bars. But at the last minute, she has to drop out due to a security threat. So instead, the organizer enlists a mix of sex workers, journalists, and influencers to discuss the politics of free speech on the internet, which Delvey is positioned to speak on because she is, apparently, the first-ever person to have been banned from social media by a judge for immigration-related offenses—a sentence that was later repealed. “I never used my social media for any malicious purposes, I never committed any crimes,” she says during the panel, noting that people on social media have argued that because she’s not a U.S. citizen, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. She vehemently disagrees: “The Constitution applies to everyone—so that’s like saying I could murder anybody I want because I’m not a citizen.” “I don’t know,” chimes in influencer Nimay Ndolo. “I think some people deserve to be silenced!”

After the show, Delvey introduces me to a man she calls her partner. For a split second, I think she means boyfriend, when what she really means is he’s the guy tasked with teaching her to cha-cha on national television. His name is Ezra Sosa, and he was also present at her fashion show, sporting a matching bedazzled ankle monitor in solidarity. He has a cheerful, preternaturally nice demeanor—“golden retriever energy,” as clinically diagnosed by the TikTok comments section—and tells me that before being cast on Dancing With the Stars, he didn’t know anything about Anna, but now, they’re thick as thieves (pun intended). On the way home, I scroll through the comments on one of Delvey’s latest videos: “Slaaaaay!” “Anna Delvey ur my role model.” “She needs to run for president…” “She’s the modern Robin Hood!!” “She’s what this country needs.” “Why are we glamorizing a convicted criminal?” “She’s an icon, she’s a legend, and she IS the moment.”

“Saying someone is a sociopath is like saying you’re an artist. It doesn’t really mean anything.”

This fashion week, themes of national identity surfaced across collections. As my friend Biz Sherbet reported in an article for AnOther, Willy Chavarria paid tribute to the cultural and economic history of immigrants with reimagined, workwear-inspired uniforms; Ella Emhoff walked for Coach, and in the Hamptons, Ralph Lauren rubbed shoulders with First Lady Jill Biden, presenting a show Biz describes as “an almost hyperreal dream of America—like a TikTok filter that emulates the grain of the film in the Kennedys’ home movies.” Then there’s Elena Velez, whose OnlyFans-sponsored runway show “La Pucelle,” named after Joan of Arc, explored dissident female archetypes “who represented countries in times of acute transformation.” In her collection, Velez looked to folkloric female figures of the past—but she finds their modern-day equivalent in Delvey: a modern-day antihero whose presence at the heart of American culture serves as an apt commentary on our present political moment.

In interviews, Delvey makes it clear that she never meant to become an icon or a role model, positioning herself not as criminal mastermind, but as an ambitious young woman who girlbossed a little too close to the sun. And in one sense, I believe her: scammers tend to get away with their crimes due to a combination of luck and privilege, not unprecedented genius. And while it’s become a national pastime to dissect their actions as a series of machiavellian chess moves, what differentiates people like Delvey from you and me is a quality simpler and harder to place: audacity.

She was bold, ambitious, and unashamed of her desire for wealth and power—but while some might celebrate Delvey as a modern-day Robin Hood, her goal wasn’t to strike back at an unfair system. She only ever stole from the rich to give to herself—and in her telling, the discourse that followed says more about us than it does about her. In modern-day America, everyone’s looking for a recipe for success, and “scamming is just another way of selling the American dream,” as Delvey told me in a 2022 interview. Only instead of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, “you’re selling the dream of getting back at the system,” and everyone else is living vicariously. 

In an interview after fashion week, I ask how Delvey is adjusting to life post-house arrest, and she tells me her newfound freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “I’m working all the time,” she says of her role on Dancing with the Stars, which has since ended following her elimination in the second week. Not that she was particularly invested: “I didn’t really want to do the show, but then they kind of convinced me to do it. I’m like, What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll get a little bit of workout, right?” But, as it turns out, “it’s caused this huge discourse about glorifying crime.” That’s because being on national television has radically increased her exposure—bringing her story to everyday people in middle America, many of whom are encountering this information for the first time.

Since paying her restitution, Delvey has said she she wants to move on with her life—but “it’s harder to move on from bad deeds as a woman, because when a woman does something that’s outside of the norm, she’s seen as, like, a witch or I don’t know, a sociopath.” (A word which is, as she points out, overused: “Saying someone is a sociopath is like saying you’re an artist. It doesn’t really mean anything.”)

For her part, Delvey never set out to be a modern-day folk hero, but she also doesn’t agree with being called a con artist. She is, as Dancing with the Stars controversially described her, “a fashionista and an entrepreneur.” And while her success might cause outrage, her career in fashion isn’t going to stop any time soon—because whether you think she’s a hero or a villain, she’s served her time, and now she’s here to serve.

This is the first installment of a two-part series on the fashion shows brought to you by porn platforms this season. You can read the second installment, on Elena Velez’s collaboration with OnlyFans, here.