I was on a press trip to Venice. This was in 2019, when press trips were a thing, and not a lavish artefact of pre-lockdown excess. I had the furthest to travel to the airport, so I was the first to arrive, making smalltalk with the PR about the rest of the party. It would be lifestyle journalists, mostly. A representative from the in-flight magazine of a luxury jet firm, which was not a thing I had ever imagined existed. And, said the PR, “an influencer”. An influencer, I thought, with a small thrill of snobbery about what a real-life influencer would turn out to be like.
It is objectively hilarious, as a society, to have invented a whole class of people whose job is to film themselves pretending to be excited as they open boxes of free stuff. Even funnier, there’s a whole other class of people who choose to watch the first class of people opening their boxes of free stuff and pretending to look delighted, and then (this really is the good bit) will go and buy what they saw someone else get for nothing and pretend to be delighted with.
Obviously I’ve done a bit of a disservice to the work of the influencer there. They don’t just open boxes of free stuff. They also go on free holidays, enjoy free meals, show off the free clothes they got in the latest drop from some brand or other — being an influencer is a multidimensional act of self-commodification. If you disdain influencers, and you very probably do, you likely think of them as “people who are paid to post selfies on social media”. Which is a weird thing for influencers to end up being hated for, given that this is pretty much exactly what they’re trying to project.
The word “influencer” suggests a particular kind of person. Reality TV. Taking trips to Dubai under lockdown. Slabs of gym-crafted boy-meat and Fake Bake-coloured arrangements of tits on towering legs. Having your own clothing line of sexy unitards and badly-cut blazers, made in a sweatshop in Leicester. Contouring. Protein supplements. Lip fillers. Misleading filters. Sharing crackpot 5G conspiracies and having to delete them when your brand partners get the fear. Hashtag sponcon.
But the world of influencers is wider than that. You get the beauty bloggers with their immaculately processed pictures on the one hand, and also the real-skin influencers, sharing unfiltered shots of their acne-marked cheeks. The perfectly slim fashion bloggers, and the fat-positive influencers, who are all about normalising that belly roll. Cleaning influencers with their fake nails and neutral walls, and mumfluencers who allow some relatable chaos into their public presence.
All of these have their power as influencers, because all of them — whatever niche they’ve fallen into — represent the same promise. That promise is: I have this life simply because of who I am. To exist is enough.
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