For a brief moment in 2017, Bow Wow spent a day as one of the internetâs supporting characters. From an airport in Georgia, the rapper shared an Instagram photo of a private jet. âTravel Day,â the caption read. âLets gooo.â Minutes later, a seatmate posted a photo of him in economy on a regular flight. The jet picture, it turned out, had been a stock image stolen from a Ft. Lauderdale private limousine company. Twitter filled with photos of the #BowWowChallengeâtrappings of luxury, but obviously faked. âGotta spoil myself now and then,â one user wrote, alongside a clunky Rolex drawn on construction paper.
The #BowWowChallenge got something close to a reboot recently, when word broke that Los Angeles photo studios rent out fake private jets. âNahhhhh I just found out LA ig girlies are using studio sets that look like private jets for their Instagram pics,â @maisonmelissa wrote on Twitter. When blogs got wind, they collected photos of culprits posing by the same white leather seats, mahogany paneling, and small, round windows. âTikTok & Instagram influencers exposed for renting fake private jet set,â the Dexerto headline read. Even Lil Nas Xânotorious ex-Tweet deckerâweighed in, photoshopping himself onto the familiar white upholstery. âItâs crazy that anything youâre looking at could be fake,â @maisonmelissa said. âThe setting, the clothes, the body⌠idk it just kinda of shakes my reality a bit lol.â
But like the photos, the story wasnât exactly what it seemed. For one, the searches turned up only a few images, just a fraction of which came from actual influencer accounts. For another, they hadnât come from a range of studios, but from a single venue in Los Angeles called FD Photo Studio, which bills its fake jet as the first and only of its kind in the city. For a third, only a small portion of their clientele come from personal shoots. Most customers use the set for the same reasons they use any other in Los Angeles: the entertainment industry. âHip-hop music videos are our bread and butter,â an FD Photo Studio employee said. That bears outâcheck out the jet in the music video for Famous Dexâs âWhat I Like.â
FD Photo Studio is owned by a middle-aged blond man named Sergey Kostikov, who immigrated to California from Russia in the 2000s. At the time, Kostikov moonlit as a professional photographer, but had trouble finding places to shoot. âEverything I saw you had to pay $500 for the whole day minimum,â he said, âand that was before the equipment and insurance and lights.â In 2012, he rented a small, well-lit space in L.A.âs Fashion Districtâhence the initials, FDâand made simple sets by hand: a black wall, a white wall, a brick backdrop. He let friends book the place to cover rent. Mostly, he said, it was his hobby.
It was only in 2017 that the studios became a business and they remained very low-budget. Kostikov made most of the sets from scrap parts, enlisting the help of a single contractor for the more complicated stages. Dubbed âOlympic 4â for extremely straightforward reasonsâit was the fourth set at the studioâs Olympic Boulevard locationâthe fake jet rents for just $64 an hour. If Kostikov had been able to recover a broken jet hull, it might have been cheaper. âThe problem with airplane graveyards is that they only sell parts that can be used,â Kostikov said. âIf they can be used, theyâre expensive.â He and the contractor built it from wood.
The set itself is pretty spareâjust a short, white tunnel lined with gray, airport carpeting. There are two chairs, a table, and a couch, though Kostikov plans to add more accessories. One side of the tunnel ends on a wood paneled wall; the other side opens up into the cluttered warehouse where itâs stored. Elsewhere on the property, thereâs an all-white room with a rotating floor for cars, a hollowed-out industrial garage, an LED tunnel, a boxing ring, and a black room with a rig for fake rain.
Americans love few things more than finding out someone has less money than they claimâthat Trumpâs taxes donât square with his ostentatious dealmaking, that Kylie Jenner isnât a billionaire. Itâs a normal response to a culture that places such high premiums on wealth, that lets those who have it move largely unchecked. Thereâs a satisfaction in pulling back the curtain, reveling in how littleâs going on back there.
Uncovering illusions in social media offers a similar schadenfreude. But the surprise of online deception has been stale for a while. There is an ingrained suspicion now in any online experience that all, most, or some aspect or another has been artificially inflated or tweaked. A New York magazine piece titled âHow Much of the Internet is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actuallyââpublished nearly two years agoâdescribed the âfakenessâ of the present internet as âless a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experienceâthe uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not ârealâ but is also undeniably not âfake,â and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.â What Iâm saying is, there are a lot of fake jets out there. At least this one's carbon neutral.