“Hellooooo!” Anna Delvey belts as she opens the front door of Kelly Cutrone’s Hudson Valley home, her court-ordered ankle monitor visible as she walks into a living room full of mismatched furniture and a quartz altar surrounded by more than a dozen crystals. Above the mantle of the maroon-floral wallpapered fireplace, decorated with various sculptures, hangs a photograph of Indian yogi and philosopher Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa, a spiritual guru known as “The Mother.”
In the kitchen, Cutrone, 58, is making couscous in a black jumpsuit, her signature long jet-black hair hanging down her back. Next to the stove sits a glass of white wine on a counter cluttered with spices, utensils, and ingredients as Adele’s “Someone Like You” plays on small speakers nestled among the mess. Here, Cutrone welcomes me with a hug, the opposite of the curt greeting she gave Lauren Conrad ahead of a 2006 fashion show in the debut season of MTV’s The Hills.
The homey scene is striking considering Cutrone and Delvey, 33, only met months prior.
At the time, Cutrone, whose stints on The Hills and The City made her out to be “the boss from hell” (Kell on Earth was the name of her own short-lived show), was debuting a young designer during New York Fashion Week and needed a way to make headlines. So it made sense to team up with Delvey—who was under house arrest in her immigration case after being convicted in 2019 on eight charges, including grand larceny, for duping friends and financial institutions while posing as an heiress—to host a rogue fashion show on the tar rooftop of her East Village apartment.
What Cutrone could not have anticipated, however, was that her idea to collaborate with Delvey (born Sorokin) on a pop-up fashion PR company they named the Outlaw Agency would spur a deep friendship. And she definitely didn’t envision that, for the last seven months, Delvey would also become her housemate. Now, the duo is producing three NYFW shows in partnership with Pornhub, and with the added pressure to kick-start Delvey’s reentry into a world she literally committed crimes to be a part of, the stakes have never been higher.
“We were like frontline soldiers together. We’re bonded now in trauma and dreams and redemption,” Cutrone tells me during dinner at her eight-acre property near the Hudson Highlands. “We became like Ab Fab meets Thelma & Louise meets Batman and Robin.”
About five months after the pair pulled off their show for that young designer, Shao Yang, Delvey filed for an address change in her immigration case and moved into one of Cutrone’s spare bedrooms in Cold Spring, a two-hour drive north of New York City.
Since then, the duo has used Delvey’s Manhattan federal court hearings as guerilla fashion hits—all while quietly becoming the picture of domestic bliss inside the confines of Cutrone’s home.
At home, they cook meals together, hatch new business ideas, and feed the 13 goats Cutrone shares with a neighbor. (“Some people compost, we feed goats,” Cutrone says.) After Delvey “destroyed” her at Scrabble, Cutrone pivoted to Words of Wonders, an online puzzle she plays daily under the alias “Mommawolf,” and in which she was ranked second in the world at the time of my visit.
My afternoon with the pair coincided with Delvey’s first full day back on social media in 22 months amid her ongoing fight against deportation to Germany. It was just weeks before their three Outlaw Agency x Pornhub shows—which Cutrone describes as a fashion “turducken”—at the Altman Building. (Cutrone is the publicist for Pornhub.)
“Anna looked up to Kelly as the person she wanted to be when she came to New York, and as soon as Kelly met Anna, she basically fell in love with her,” Yang tells me over the phone days after my visit. “I think having them two together is, like, literally a powerhouse.”
And the fashion industry seems to be taking notice. “I think what they’re doing is interesting and admirable,” Fern Mallis, the creator of New York Fashion Week says. “They’re a match made in heaven for the moment.”
In August, about 10 days before I arrived at Cutrone’s home, a judge reinstated Delvey’s access to social media and revised her house arrest to a 75-mile radius. Nine days after that, Delvey posted a 10-photo Instagram carousel with images of herself sitting next to hydrangeas, a sculpture, and inside an old Jeep. The caption: “Stockholm syndrome.”
Cutrone’s home could make anyone forget about the outside world. Behind the house, a large creek rushes among trees and blooming hydrangeas. Inside, it’s clear that Cutrone has carefully curated the artwork, crystals, and furniture. In the kitchen sits another altar that I later learn is dedicated to all the spiritual mothers and features a mason jar with ex-husband (and Andy Warhol protégé) Ronnie Cutrone’s ashes and two corn husk dolls that she and Delvey made one night while babysitting a reporter’s kid.