Lately, dear reader, I’ve been pondering whether to get myself a tattoo.
Not that I ever would, obviously (my mom reads this blog). But an entertaining exercise nonetheless. Specifically, were we to indulge this *purely hypothetical* hypothesizing, my preferences skew towards the eccentric, the intellectually intriguing, the anomalous oddity one wouldn’t quite expect out of an otherwise unassuming, bespectacled Asian boy.
Like, for instance, a Heinz Tomato Ketchup bottle on the arm à la Ed Sheeran (if only I were that big a fan of ketchup). Perhaps I’d consider a “MEOW” inked on the inside of a bottom lip like Kendall Jenner, or a racy red “HOLLYWOOD FOREVER” across the sides of the ring fingers like Lena Dunham, yet I’m unsure if my affinity for either the feline or the film – or, for that matter, fashion – is accurately representative of my lifelong affectations.
“Can you perceive my personality through my accessories?” Dunham pondered in an Interview Magazine interview last year. A tattoo, in that sense, is a forever accessory, an eternal extension of your personality. And unlike a Proenza or Balenciaga, it’s not something you can just change out of.
And this permanence, dear reader, is what scares me; so much so, in fact, that Charli XCX’s lower back tattoo starts to feel like a safer bet. My lower back would, after all, hardly ever stop being my lower back.
All this to say that I wasn’t actually aware tattoos could also be, well, undone.
“Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed?” GQ reported last year, citing, “People aged 35 to 50 tend to live with their tattoos for a decade before regretting them, whereas the younger generation — who never grappled with much stigma in the first place – regret their tattoos more quickly within two to three years.” True to form, one Miss Audrey Peters, 29, set out to duly document her own endeavors in tattoo termination on TikTok.
Ctrl C + Ctrl V
“When times are good, you should advertise; when times are bad, you must advertise.” But when said advertising dollars start to stretch in trying times, nothing quite comes close to the ROI of an influencer. Or so we thought.
Today, nearly 12 million people in the U.S. consider themselves full-time influencers, reports NPR, earning an average of $178,000 a year. “Now, more than ever, the need to be culturally relevant within the social space is crucial for brands, publishers, and creators,” says Mike Hondorp, CMO of influencer marketing agency Whalar. “Relevance comes from connection.”
And few have mastered the craft of connection as well as Audrey Peters. With a dream to be a singer “even though I can’t really sing, ” the New York-based content creator first launched a travel and fashion blog called According to Audrey while in boarding school in the 2010s, documenting her (wealthy and stylish) family’s jetset jaunts between Miami and Manhattan.
Then, during the pandemic, she joined a wave of new-age New York influencers documenting her favorite designer brands, department stores, and brunch spots in the city, before focusing specifically on luxury fashion. And when her “worldwide search for a specific color of Chanel sandals went viral in 2022,” brands came calling. And with that came the cash.
But what also came with that were copycat creators, all banking on those ever-reliable pillars of the aspirational internet algorithm: travel, lifestyle, and the occasional Hermès appointment. “If you want to be a social media star and gain a bunch of followers quickly,” writes Erik Hoel in his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective, “you do it by being addicted to social media and regularly repackaging whatever content wanders into your waving filopodia, particularly whatever has viral potential that hasn’t already gone viral.”
“I used to get 5 million views to be like, ‘Come with me to Chanel!’” Peters reminisces. Now, with those same influencers going on OpenAI chartered yachts and nature retreats, celebrating its latest $500 billion data center deal, and then posting the same ChatGPT swag bag on their socials, Peters herself has become wary of the profession and all the Birkin unboxing that entails.
“Every hoe now has an Hermès,” she tells Vulture, “Thrilled for you, but I actually don’t need to see an Hermès bag anymore.”
The Rage and the Recession
The Four Winds Craft Guild antique shop in Nantucket displays a sign that reads, in no uncertain terms: “No Influencers.”
Ironically enough, what set out as a pursuit against the phone-first lifestyle became its own internet sensation. And Paige Lorenze – a lifestyle influencer herself – who just opened her own (confusingly named) clothing boutique, Dairy Boy, just two blocks down, couldn’t have been more livid about it.
“If you call yourself a feminist but proudly put up a ‘No Influencers’ sign, it’s worth asking who you are attempting to delegitimize, and why,” she commented under a since-deleted photo of the sign on Instagram. “Mocking women when they become powerful in a new industry isn’t new.”
Megs addresses this influencer-fatigue on Substack: “You don’t need to be poor to feel poor. You could be doing well, with a good job, a comfortable home, maybe even savings. But compared to your feed, it feels like nothing. Suddenly, the life you worked hard for feels small. Ordinary. Not enough.”
And how have people like Ms. Peters responded?
“When I really want to rage-bait, I’ll order coffee,” she says in the now-divisive Vulture profile, “It is 10:15 a.m., and my first delivery just arrived, and it is my Starbucks coffee.” The coffee? An almond-milk iced latte with cold foam, two pumps of vanilla, and a pinch of cinnamon. The price-tag? $25.18. The Starbucks itself? A mere three blocks away from Peters’ apartment.
And the reaction? Priceless. “People were calling my manager and being like, ‘Oh my God, so many people are making videos about it, do you care?’ And I’m like, ‘No, this is exactly what I wanted.’” The DoorDash series has since become an easily repeatable rage-bait gimmick she repeats every time she needs more eyeballs on her – favorable or otherwise – “It was completely strategic,” she says. “Your goal is to always hit a new ‘For You’ page.”
“What other influencers are faking storylines?” questions Reddit user b1rd0fparadise in response to the Vulture piece, “Emma Leger getting engaged in less than a year but then dragging out the engagement over 2-3 years makes me wonder if she found a guy willing to pretend to get engaged with the option to break it off over the engagement period?”
It’s certainly one way of navigating the influencer recession.
Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining
The other way of going about it, of course, is to simply give the people what they actually want. But what is it that they do want?
“Teach me something. Educate me. That is what I want,” read a comment under beauty influencer Jaclyn Hill’s Tiktok, “We’re tired of watching influencers rub their wealth in our faces.” In other words, explains Grace Murray Vazquez, executive VP of strategy at influencer marketing firm Fohr, “There’s less of a desire to just watch someone else live out their life.”
Peters, however, is blunt: “You can’t just be showing matcha-Pilates-Alo.”
Brands have caught on, with engagement rate minimums up from 2% to 3%, briefs longer and meaner, and lifestyle influencers dropped willy-nilly from brand-sponsored Coachella trips days before they were due to fly out.
Influencers, in response, have upped the ante… and the tantrums.
“I don’t know what happened to their budget, but it doesn’t exist anymore,” scathes Shana Davis-Ross, the founder of Ponte Firm and the Kris Jenner of the NYC influencer scene, “Respectfully, if they want to elevate, they need girls that maybe wouldn’t wear it.” Amanda Acevedo of G&B Digital Management laments, “Before, if their content was incredible, they would let it slide.”
Suffice to say, they are decidedly NOT letting it slide anymore.
The old internet – inspirational, aspirational, and sometimes insufferable – is over. And with that, so is the Birkin unboxing, euro summer carousel, and Alo Yoga-clad beige-fluencer. “The internet doesn’t need another generic creator trying to talk about everything,” writes the Influencernomics Substack, “It needs people who know something worth sharing and are willing to keep showing up around that expertise.”
And if you happen to be one of those people, as Megs writes, “waiting for permission to start, consider this yours.”
