Symeon Brown on Influencers, Exploitation and Capitalism

 
 

I was a 14-year-old schoolboy when the rapper 50 Cent released Get Rich or Die Tryin’. The most precocious kids in class declared the debut hip-hop album an instant classic and hailed the rapper’s legend: “He’s been shot nine times, you know?” The failed attempt on 50 Cent’s life was at the centre of his sales pitch as the bulletproof king of gangsta rap. My friends and I were easily sold. His debut was the bestselling album of 2003, selling 12m copies worldwide. Curtis Jackson may have been born black and poor in New York, but as 50 Cent, he was now worth $30m.
 
There are few things we find more compelling than a fable of overcoming the odds and achieving self-made success. Everyone loves an outsider, because deep down most of us believe we are one, and each generation has its own version for inspiration. For me, it was the constant reinvention of the hustler made good in hip-hop that stuck.
 
I grew up in Tottenham, north London, a multiracial area between the city and the Hertfordshire suburbs with a character defined by its then underperforming football club and its Caribbean, Ghanaian and Turkish Cypriot communities. My whole life, this corner of the city has been notorious for the anti-police riots that broke out in the 1980s. A Jamaican-born mother had died after her home was raided by police officers, a policeman was killed in the ensuing revolt, and the tension between the residents and the authorities has festered ever since.
 
By 2003, much of the area could have slipped with ease into the background of a rap video in Queens. My friends and I wore American hip-hop streetwear: baggy Akademiks jeans, Fubu tops and Timberland boots. New-Era baseball caps felt like part of our school uniform. My school had a high intake of students poor enough to qualify for free school meals, but even the poor kids wore luxury streetwear. In the year I completed my GCSEs, 75% of my fellow students failed to get the five A*-C grades necessary to go on to further education. It is unsurprising that the hustler was an inspiration to a student body of underdogs.
 
At the time we started school, the prime minister, Tony Blair, was announcing his plan to create a knowledge-based economy, and his ambition to get 50% of young people through university. “Aspiration” had become the political buzzword. When there were outbreaks of violence in urban communities like mine, the government blamed a lack of drive, and in 2007, it launched the Reach mentoring scheme, with the focus on “raising the aspirations and achievement among black boys and young black men, enabling them to achieve their potential”.
 
The problem, certainly in my neighbourhood, was that it was aspiration itself, rather than the absence of it, that drove young men to desperate measures. In recent decades, aspiration has been heavily wrapped up not in what we aim to do, achieve or create, but in what we can afford to buy. Young adults and teenagers have been under more and more pressure to be successful, with fewer means to do so.
 
Over the past century, political parties and brands have spent vast sums of money on trying to get our attention and influence our decisions. Today, that attention is increasingly in the hands of a new type of hustler. Influencers with thousands or even millions of social media followers can convert their following into an income by making their feeds a living billboard or a peep show you pay to subscribe to. Ten years ago, this pseudo-profession hardly existed, and now the highest-earning influencer, Kylie Jenner, can earn up to $1.2m from a single post on Instagram. Social media introduced a profit motive into our social lives, with a profound impact on the way we behave.
 
Since I left university, the economic promise made to middle-class millennials has turned to dust. In 2008, I was an economics undergraduate learning about how boom and bust had been banished. We all know what happened next: the global economy crashed. Graduate schemes disappeared before my eyes and the next decade did not live up to the promises made in the one before. As wages dropped and employment opportunities fell, our consumer spending got higher and personal debt rocketed. And this was before Covid-19 struck and making money from home became the only game in town.
 
It is in this climate that “influencing” seems a viable career, providing a potentially luxury lifestyle with a low entry threshold. Once you have figured out how to get people’s attention, you can monetise yourself as both product and salesman. Often we do not even think of the most successful influencers as digital workers, since they market themselves as relationship gurus, financial experts and activists. Some influencers even offer teaching on how you can emulate their success. One YouTuber named Patricia Bright, who has more than 2.8 million subscribers, has written a book titled Heart & Hustle, which promises “to show you how to hustle like I do”.
 
The problem is that success in this world is not as attainable as some make it seem, and addiction to accruing followers by any means necessary is warping human behaviour on and offline. For many influencers, deception is lucrative, and becoming increasingly extreme. There are some feigning their wealth, their followers and even their ethnicity while hawking dubious products to their followers. In recent years, influencers have sold laxatives as health drinks, promoted music festivals that never happened and been caught up in serious fraud and multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes. Companies that sell regulated products such as cosmetic surgery procedures and financial services have increasingly turned to influencers to market their goods, away from scrutiny by the authorities.
 
The instore music complements the skimpy clothes that have made Fashion Nova in Los Angeles a market leader in ghetto chic and timeless hoochie wear. You can buy similar styles in the store next door, an unbranded clothes shop called Mode Plus, or in the budget womenswear shop opposite, called Queens (the menswear shop next door is Kings). The same tight party dresses produced for cents and sold for dollars are for sale in all of them, and can be found in any other makeshift store in low-income Latina communities from Los Angeles to London. However, Fashion Nova has come a long way from its humble first store in LA’s Panorama City Mall.
 
The company’s impact could not have been predicted when that store was opened in 2006 by an industrious Iranian American named Richard Saghian. But Saghian knew the world was changing. He wanted his company to target the kind of girls who went to clubs to dance to hip-hop and desired to be on a VIP table – girls who wanted to be famous. Most importantly, they had to be able to turn heads on Instagram.
 
From about 2013, Fashion Nova began recruiting micro-famous brand ambassadors who fitted the vision. Young women with big followings were given free clothes, and those with huge ones were paid a fee to post online. They were told to always tag Fashion Nova to help its followers grow and boost awareness. Some ambassadors were also allowed to earn money from sales of clothes via a discount code that paid them a commission. Where the company achieved major success was in its aggressive penetration of the hip-hop scene. It paid rappers for shoutouts in songs and signed up artists such as the reality TV star turned rapper Cardi B as highly paid brand ambassadors. It even gave the African American and Latinx entertainers who now dominate US pop culture their own Fashion Nova lines. The company had bought a seat at the table. But it also stole scraps from it, too.
 
In February 2019, only a day after Kim Kardashian was photographed in a gown by the exalted French designer Thierry Mugler, Fashion Nova began selling a replica. When Kim’s younger half-sister, the even more influential Kylie Jenner, threw a star-studded 21st birthday party, dresses worn by guests were cloned within hours. Fashion Nova was not just fast fashion, it was the fastest. The process of recycling runway designs is well known and widely practised, says Bimi Fafowora, who worked for Nova for nine months overhauling their marketing and branding. “Celebrities wear these gorgeous gowns, they release it on social media, fast-fashion brands pick up on it, release it to the mass audience,” says Fafowora. “These people wear them for about a day … because on Instagram you can’t wear anything twice.” (Fashion Nova did not respond to a request for comment.)

 As Fafowora and I sat on the roof of the Nomad, a luxury London hotel frequented by holidaying footballers, she remarked, “I think we’re in an age where people aspire to something greater, something higher, more famous, more popular, more loved, and fast fashion has allowed for that. It’s allowed for people to shorten the gap between [them and] unattainable celebrities.”
 
In 2021, Fashion Nova surpassed 20 million Instagram followers. Three years earlier, it had become the internet’s most-Googled fashion brand, and the company posted revenues of $294m. Fashion Nova invites aspiring influencers to buy and model its clothes, then tag their photos @fashionnova and #NovaBabe. More than 10m posts have been made by ordinary young women auditioning to get the brand’s attention. Each is hoping to become a paid “NovaBabe”, an ambassador who receives free clothes, the Instagram equivalent of being on the VIP table.
 
Fashion Nova’s website has a callout for aspiring influencers: “Wannabe a #NovaBabe? Do you have what it takes to be a #NovaBabe? Are you the OOTD [outfit of the day] queen who can literally rock anything?! Do you have your own style that is admired by others?? If that’s you, we want you to join our #NovaSquad!”
 
Many aspiring influencers pay for hauls of Fashion Nova clothes to review and model, viewing it as an investment in what they hope will become a job. In reality, they’re providing the company with free labour as promo girls, giving the brand adverts they did not have to pay for. The small number of women the company actually hand-picks for free clothes tend to have a similar aesthetic. They are young, most of them with narrow waists, wide hips and thick lips. Many have hourglass figures and wear clothing that clings to their skin: an aesthetic known as “Insta baddie”. If these women are black, they looked mixed-race or light-skinned, and if they’re white, they mostly have dark hair and bronzed skin.
 
Today, Fafowora runs a boutique branding firm that recruits models and provides marketing content for new fashion labels trying to replicate Fashion Nova’s success. I ask her how the brands choose their models. “They base it on the look that’s trending right now: the Kardashian look,” she replies. “It’s very curvaceous, mostly racially ambiguous.”
 
A new wave of pop-up talent agencies such as the London-based Above and Beyond Group swipe through social media to scout for models and influencers who match this brief. Their rosters looks diverse, but although most are not white, there is a homogeneity of ambiguous beige and light brown.
 
Fashion Nova may not have created this trend, but it has reinforced it. Fast-fashion companies throw vast amounts of money and products at the young women they pick to wear their clothes, and they have created a new economy that appears to offer easy jobs to the prettiest girls on the internet. Beauty has always been a commodity, but now it is far easier for women to monetise it themselves – if they have the right look. The belief among many young women that being desirable pays has led them to not only surgically change their shape, but in some cases to even fake their ethnicity.
 
At the age of 19, Aga began noticing that the pictures she took of herself and posted online were getting more and more attention. “I didn’t really have an approach. If I went out and I liked how I looked, I would take a picture.” The grid on her Instagram page has an all-too-familiar grammar.
 
 
Aga’s outfit of the day – whether fitted jeans with a crop top, a jumpsuit or a patterned polyester dress – hugs her full hourglass figure. Underneath each image she writes a playful caption such as “A daily dose of your thickums”. Her skin is a light caramel brown and her hair is dark. Most of the selfies are taken in front of her bedroom mirror.
 
Aga, from east London, told me she had no desire to be internet-famous, but popular theme pages celebrating curvaceous women found her pictures and reposted them. One post was viewed over 147,000 times, and soon thousands of men began following her. Aga became a local pinup. “I think nowadays people just love thick [curvy] girls,” she says.
 
In 2018, Aga’s pictures also caught the attention of fast-fashion companies and brands investing heavily in influencer marketing. It was then she started to think, “Let me try to make more out of this.” She was studying accounting, but saw providing promo as a potential side hustle. She turned her Instagram page into a business account that gives users metrics about who is looking at their page, and then began tagging fashion brands including Fashion Nova. Not long after, they started giving her clothes, as did its arch-rival Pretty Little Thing. Aga had the desired aesthetic and the right audience. She also began working as an affiliate for Protein World, a supplements company, which gave her a discount code to promote to her followers. She got paid a commission for everybody who used her code on purchases.
 
When I interviewed Aga in 2019, she had 50,000 followers. Months later she surpassed 250,000. At the time of writing, most of the money she makes online is from ads and affiliate work for local companies. She became one of a dozen ambassadors for a London-based chauffeur company targeting those in the inner city desperate to present themselves as successful. (Cars could be rented by the hour. They didn’t need to go anywhere.) The company regularly recruits attractive young women with significant numbers of followers to act as digital promo girls for their largely male audience. Each ambassador generates an income from the people who use their discount code. The ambassadors have an almost uniform aesthetic – light brown or of mixed heritage and ethnically ambiguous. Aga fitted in.

 
In September 2018, the teenager photographed herself in an outfit composed of items she had been given to promote: clothes, phone case, eyelashes, and even hair, which came courtesy of a small afro hair store based in the east Midlands. In the picture, she is standing in her trademark pose. Her hips are wide and her waist is so narrow it looks like an optical illusion. Her skin is brown, her lips are full and her wavy black hair is in cornrow braids, a popular afro hairstyle. She is the picture of a confident and beautiful young black woman. The only problem is, Aga is not a black woman. She was born in Poland and would become one of the many white influencers accused of “blackfishing”.
 
In November 2018, a young writer named Wanna Thompson fired the first shot with the tweet: “Can we start a thread of all the white girls cosplaying as black women on Instagram?”
 
A post was shared thousands of times with the before-and-after pictures of young white women between the ages of 17 and 21 who had transformed themselves from having pale skin, straight hair and narrow features into having brown skin, full lips and wavy hair with the help of dark makeup, contouring and wigs. There are even YouTube videos showing you how to do it. Emma Hallberg, a Fashion Nova ambassador with the appearance of dark brown skin, had built up a loyal base of over 300,000 followers, many of whom believed she was of mixed heritage and who followed her for beauty tips.
 
When she was included in the list, her stunned followers messaged her to ask if it was true. Could she really be white? Hallberg replied that she had never claimed to be anything else. Some of her followers tweeted that they felt deceived.
 
For Aga, the controversy led to a huge increase in activity on her Instagram page. She was accused of pretending to be black, of racism, and even minstrelsy, referring to the old performance where white entertainers darkened their skin to mimic and mock black people.
 
“I did understand where people were coming from,” said Aga. “I’m a millennial. I am on social media. I see the trends and stuff like that, it’s not like I looked at my picture and thought they’re making up things from thin air, but what can I do about that?”
 
Aga is part of a generation that has only known a world in which the internet is supreme and the dominant aesthetic in youth culture is hip-hop. The genre’s music and fashion dictate not only what and who is desirable, but also the part you can play in its billion-dollar industries and the clothing companies attaching themselves to it for clout. To be shapeless and pale with narrow European features has little currency in the part of the internet where a Fashion Nova ambassador gig makes you a VIP. Today, many young white women in their teens and early 20s are conforming to this standard by contouring, and their racial transformation has an economic incentive, too: this cosplay actually pays. The ethics and politics of beauty trends are rarely discussed in a world where influencers happily sell their following to the highest bidder.
 
Fashion Nova has a simple model: it buys cheaply manufactured clothes and manages to glamourise them enough to sell them for a substantial profit. It would almost certainly not be the juggernaut success it is without the stardust of influencers. The brand captures all the contradictions of California, where its clothes are presented on the bodies of Los Angeles’s finest, but many of them are manufactured in the city’s hidden sweatshops.
 
Scattered across downtown LA, according to advocacy group the Garment Worker Center, an estimated 3,000 small factories employ Latina migrants to fill orders for brands like Fashion Nova. Demand is high, and yet, in the UK alone, more than 300,000 tonnes of the clothes produced end up in household bins each year, with less than 1% recycled. Aside from the environmental concerns, the industry also has a record of labour exploitation. From Leicester to LA, poorly paid workers are turning around the must-have celebrity dress of the day before tomorrow’s new flavour arrives. Influencers dress up to market these clothes under the banner of self-expression, but for the most part, the workers manufacturing them have little voice.

 
According to Marisa Nuncio, the director of the Garment Worker Center, 85% of factories in the industry are paying under the minimum wage. “Through our casework we’ve seen an average of $5.50 an hour,” said Nuncio. The minimum wage in California is $13.25 an hour. Undocumented workers are easy to exploit, not just because they are willing to work for less, but because they are too scared to mount wage disputes for fear of reprisals that could get them deported.
 
The Garment Worker Center soon noticed one company popping up again and again in complaints by factory workers: Fashion Nova. Overnight, it had become the company that sweatshops were fighting to win contracts with, and as they competed for work, their fees went down. Although numerous companies who supply garments for Fashion Nova have been found (in an investigation by the US Department of Labor) to have withheld and underpaid wages, Fashion Nova says it is not responsible for the practices of their suppliers. After they had been contacted by the labour department, in a statement to the New York Times, Fashion Nova said it had an “ongoing commitment to ensuring that all workers involved with the Fashion Nova brand are appropriately compensated for the work they do”.
 
Fashion Nova did not invent the fast-fashion model, but it appears to be better than any of its competitors at driving the demand for clothes manufactured to be worn just once, by turning a generation of young women into mass marketers without a care for what it is they are selling.
 
“Their model is built on creating the demand,” said Nuncio. “I feel like it is not even that someone like Fashion Nova is lying about who they are. They are actually creating [an] environment [where] people don’t care.”
 
In Fashion Nova’s flagship store in Panorama City Mall, the clothes on sale profit from messages of female empowerment. The brand promises that women can be as successful as NovaBabes like Cardi B. The rapper’s own fashion line sold out within hours. In the store, colourful tops proudly sport slogans such as “Equality” and “Independent Woman”, and yet Fashion Nova is a company owned and run by a man accused by garment workers’ representatives of profiting from clothes kept cheap by the exploitation of vulnerable women in his supply chain.
 
The customer service could be so poor that some fashion bloggers have accused the company of being scammers. Last April, Fashion Nova was fined $9.3m to settle charges that the company failed to refund buyers whose orders failed to arrive on time, or were never dispatched at all. In January this year, Fashion Nova reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it had suppressed negative reviews, and was ordered to pay $4.2m. (The company continues to deny it had manipulated reviews.) However, none of this has stopped its boom in sales, or the queues of young women desperate for a Fashion Nova brand deal, or even just some free clothes. When it comes down to it, the company’s greatest success is as a dealer in hype.
 
This is an edited extract from Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy by Symeon Brown, published by Atlantic books on 3 March
 
 
Hustle and hype: the truth about the influencer economy. By Symeon Brown. The Guardian, February 24, 20212.

A clip of Rihanna being interviewed has been doing the rounds recently. Asked, “What do you do on those days you don’t feel confident?” she replies, “Uhh, pretend? I mean why not, it’s either that or cry myself to sleep, who wants to do that?” This idea of pretence – of faking it until you make it – is at the heart of a new cutting exposé by Symeon Brown, Get Rich Or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy.

 
Unlike Rihanna, though, who has unquestionably made it, the book examines the fallout of influencing and the murkier side of an industry built on an inconvenient truth of scamming, vanity, and unattainable lifestyles. It’s a book “which is led by stories about the people in this economic system who aren’t the winners,” according to Brown, who zooms in on the world of pyramid schemes, botched plastic surgery, Twitch swatting, dropshipping, and fast fashion. It’s VidCon, OnlyFans, Forex, Deliveroo, and Khloe Kardashian, and explores how, in an attempt to hustle our way up the economic chain and secure the bag, it can bite us in the (surgically-enhanced) bum.
 
Social media is the most exploitative frontier of late-stage capitalism, Brown says, and he outlines a shift where the ruthless values of Wall Street have filtered down into a young market desperate for financial success and freedom. Brown is a news reporter for Channel 4, and the book finds him travelling to LA to meet a Twitch streamer pandering to alt-right viewers for money, and migrants working in Fashion Nova’s filthy downtown districts. The US, after all, is a nation of salesmen, and the shadow of Trump, who Brown describes as “effectively an influencer” looms large – when you have the ultimate scammer in the White House, what does that tell the rest of the world?
 
With the internet now the primary mode of wealth creation, the book also references the slightly galling stat that more than one-fifth of children now name ‘influencing’ as their dream job. While it examines well-known pyramid schemes (‘multi-level marketing’ companies) like LuLaRoe and Avon, the emerging markets of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, which are bolstered by hype, can often be scams packaged as get-rich-quick schemes. Below, we spoke to Brown about “cloutrage”, the Californication of the world, and whether or not the influencing bubble will finally burst.
 
Where did the idea for the book stem from? How and why did you begin looking into influencer culture?
 
Symeon Brown:
 
 I studied economics at university, and have always been interested in how people live. Growing up in Tottenham, which at the time was a multiracial but socially disadvantaged area, a few years ago I started to notice all these young people from the ends – Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, from the estates – suddenly shifted their aesthetics and personas. They went from wearing hoodies to three-piece suits, they were driving sports cars and would carry themselves like hedge fund managers. I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ I found out that they were part of a shadow economy that signed up young people to bet on super dubious platforms – what in real terms were no-win betting products. These people were building huge followers off the back of the identity of traders, sometimes they even managed to dupe journalists. That led to me looking at the world of Instagram, people mimicking the Wolf of Wall Street and the meme culture surrounding it.
 
How did that bring you to the wider – global – scope of the digital influencer economy?
 
Symeon Brown:
 
 It brought me to how working-class people had consumed the idea of wanting to participate in capitalism. [I also noticed] a renaissance in pyramid schemes online. The way they present is often very gendered, or racialised. Many target women, sometimes young women who’ve just had children, promising they can work from home, multi-level marketing companies like LuLaRoe. Young people have never been able to see so much wealth around them. It’s so accessible – they feel like they should be wealthy and if they’re not, then that’s a character flaw. At the same time, there’s precarity and a squeeze on real wages. I feel like a lot of stories about influencer culture are told by people who have won; a blue-chip YouTuber, a Love Island contestant. But if you really want to understand the system, you have to look at the people who are losing.
 
Why do you think ambition can turn so quickly into deceit, and why are so many people willing to mislead their audience or followers?
 
Symeon Brown:
 
 A lot of the time these platforms reward and incentivise lies. Adverts have always done that, but obviously it’s far easier to regulate a TV or billboard advert than millions and millions of individuals. The issue now is that if a platform, like Twitter, incentivises you to be angry, and if you tweet something that’s going to get other people angry, that could generate attention. If you can monetise that, or you’re rewarded for anger or dishonesty, then people will just reproduce that.
On social media it feels like the US’s culture is increasingly seeping into ours, and that’s something you tap into in the book. Do you think American ideals are to some extent powering this new economy?
 
Symeon Brown:
 
One of the ideas in my book is the Californisation of youth culture. In America, there’s widespread inequality, but there’s no class, because they believe anyone can make it. The American dream is ubiquitous, even though it’s flawed and we know it to be mythology. But to some extent there’s more porosity to the possibilities. With globalisation and the post-Thatcherite world, it’s really about conceding political, economic, and social-cultural power to America: whether we like it or not, those American ideas are here and they’re here in great force. When I interviewed people for the book, some were major TikTok influencers, and were like, ‘Your followers wanna see you in LA, this is where all the big influencers are’. Hollywood’s there, celebrities are there, the glamour is there. People want to consume an aspirational product. But then the money behind the attention economy, people reaping the rewards as investors, engineers, the creatives, are predominantly in Silicon Valley, San Francisco. So you have this very small part of the world literally dictating our culture, everywhere.
 
 

Your book also touches on influencers wearing activists’ clothing, mentioning people like Chidera Eggerue and Florence Given.
 
Symeon Brown:
 
What happens in that world is you have what’s called ‘cloutrage’, generating clout from outrage. Important, valid social movements can become appropriated by influencers who don’t always entirely get the issues. They become the loudest people in the room and then, suddenly, you’re misrepresenting important discourses. It enables alternative narratives to arise, which undermines the validity of important movements. I spoke a little bit about what I saw taking place in Black Lives Matter, where an important civil rights movement was creating content that was removed from real action or understanding, leading to misrepresentation and blowback, because that was what the algorithm demands.
 
This went down after your book was finished, but the discourse around Molly-Mae’s ‘we all have the same 24 hours in a day’ comments feels important to bring up.
 
 
Symeon Brown:
 
 I imagine Molly-Mae would have been surprised at the backlash because this is the dominant orthodoxy of our time: you have to hustle. It’s up to you as an individual. It was that idea that was at the heart of all the stories my book is telling: the age of individualism. I think the critical reception she got was useful in terms of, let’s look at this idea: a lot of people believe it, so let’s talk about that. Because we do know that that is not the truth. Everyone knows how [Molly-Mae] made it, and there was a lot of good fortune involved. Being self-made is a complete illusion, nobody is self-made. But there’s a belief that you can be, and that was what I was keen to really investigate.
 
 
Where do we go from here? Do you see the influencer bubble bursting any time soon?
 
Symeon Brown:
 
 I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak. COVID was a huge engine of digital migration, but we still mostly consume things offline, and increasingly spend more of our social life online. If you have a social account – I mean, my final chapter’s called “We Are All Influencers”, right? Affiliate links are going to be something that more people do. Even the kind of language we use now, everything becomes a monetary function. People misunderstand the idea of ‘emotional labour’, which is where if you’re a service worker, you have to be nice to your guests. Emotional labour is not your friend saying, ‘I feel down’, and you being like, ‘I’m gonna have to bill you to listen to you’. It’s this idea that suddenly everything has to be monetised and commodified. You can’t do hobbies if they don’t make you money; people constantly pandering to brands: all these things are an extension of that. It’s the result of a generation born in a media age. We’re all inadvertently becoming media workers in some form.
 
How influencers became the scam artists of the digital age. By Felicity Martin. Dazed, February 9, 2022.

How far would you go to get famous and escape poverty? Ash Sarkar is joined by Symeon Brown, Channel 4 News reporter and author of ‘Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy’, to discuss how the democratic promise of the internet has reinvented the pyramid scheme. From cryptocurrencies to botched Brazilian butt lifts, they look at how the new clout economy has created a digital lumpenproletariat.

 Influencers, Exploitation and Capitalism | Ash Sarkar Meets Symeon Brown.  Novara Media, January 26, 2022

Atlantic Books

Michaela Stark : Intimate, Sensual, Grotesque

 

Michaela Stark,  the 27-year-old Brisbane-born, London-based artist and designer has captivated international media with her innovative take on lingerie, which she handcrafts and sells to private clients. Using hand-dyed silk taffeta, silk organza, silk chiffon and invisible tulle, Stark offers delicate brassieres with peekaboo panels, pearl-encrusted thongs, body-sculpting corsets, and panties and bloomers trimmed with distressed cotton muslin or reams of silk ribbon.
 
But it’s the way Stark presents her work — mostly on herself — that has the knickers of the social media censors in a knot. Through self-portraits and collaborations with established photographers, Stark deploys extreme styling and body-morphing techniques to create mesmerising abstract human sculptures that, in her words, explore the issues of body dysmorphia, beauty standards, sexuality and fetish. Breasts, hips and stomach bulge out of peepholes and corsetry. Arms, legs and midriffs are tightly trussed up with nylon fishing line, evocative of a human roast.
 
 “Does it hurt?” is one of the most common questions Stark receives from her Instagram fans, who now number more than 100,000. “It doesn’t hurt — that often,” comes the answer down the line from London in late November, as she is prepping for her international exhibition debut, Stark Naked. It’s a series of images taken by Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø, on show at Dover Street Market’s 3537 cultural and creative centre in Paris.
 
Stark and Sundsbø also collaborated in September in what Stark has described as her most extreme body-morphing work to date. “I kind of have a bit of a fetish for the pain, I think sometimes,” she says, adding that she felt like she was about to “throw up or pass out” at one point during the most recent shoot, with her sister on hand with water and a fan.
 
“Now that I’m in it, I want to push my body further and see how far I can go because I also love creating the imagery,” she adds. “I don’t want to Photoshop [the images]; I want it to be how it is, and I want to pull it to extremes, and so I am going tighter and tighter every time. Sometimes I get caught up in the art of it all.”
 
The art world may be loving it, but the social media gatekeepers are not. Citing violations of community standards, Instagram has repeatedly removed Stark’s posts and made threats to take down the account entirely, prompting Stark to launch a precautionary backup account.
 
Even Google issues an “explicit content” prompt in some search results. “I’ve had photos taken down that had nothing showing,” says Stark. “And I have friends on the [Instagram] moderators [team] who say sometimes it doesn’t even matter if nothing is showing: if they deem it as sexual, they deem it as sexual, and that’s it.
 
They’ll still take the image down, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is so scary because I’ve found myself in a group in London of artists who do create provocative work, so all of us are constantly having our careers and livelihoods threatened by Instagram.”
 
 
Stark’s art is essentially a defiant middle finger to the fashion world, from which she says she felt excluded while growing up in Brisbane. At the time, she explains, she wore a 32/34FF bra size and felt “uncomfortable all the time” because she was bigger than her friends and struggled to find clothes and lingerie that fit properly.

 
After completing a bachelor of design (fashion) at the Queensland University of Technology — during which she spent a year on exchange with the Politecnico di Milano, a university in Milan that specialises in engineering, architecture and design — one of Stark’s teachers hooked her up with a three-month internship at the Paris showroom of veteran fashion agent Florence Deschamps. “It was my first ever taste of European fashion and how the fashion industry ran in Paris and in Europe,” she says. “I was sneaking into the Vivienne Westwood afterparty and just doing all these different things, and it was like, Oh my god! I was just so excited the whole time.”
 
When she came back to Brisbane, she was determined to save enough money to return to Europe as quickly as possible, so she worked two jobs while simultaneously completing her honours certificate. Her graduate collection, titled Fashion as Grotesque Spectacle, featured lingerie alongside ruched and quilted ready-to-wear pieces in flesh-coloured satin, with names such as the Saggy Skin dress and the Fatroll Jumpsuit.
 
In 2017, within a week of arriving in London, Stark landed an internship with the young multidisciplinary artist Claire Barrow. For the next six months, she moved between the studios of several emerging London fashion talents, including Ashley Williams. And then Queen Bey came calling.
 
Through a friend, Stark connected with an associate of Beyoncé’s personal stylist, Zerina Akers, who was looking for a tailor for the singer’s 2018 Apeshit video with Jay-Z. The next thing Stark knew, she was in Beyoncé’s Paris hotel room piecing together garments from the Versace home range to create a robe for the singer to wear on camera. All up, Stark spent about a year working with Beyoncé as a costume designer, personal tailor and assistant to Akers. She toured Europe and Africa, and worked on the 2020 film Black is King.
 
Stark has also worked with Marine Serre, Christian Louboutin and Cartier, all the while working on her own lingerie line behind the scenes. “Basically, I’m born to be in couture,” she says. “I love to just make clothes really, really slowly, do as much handwork on them as possible.”
 
She developed the photographic side of her art separately. It was during a late 2016 road trip along Australia’s east coast with her photographer mate Domino Aurora that Stark started learning the basics of photography and shooting Aurora in clothes from one of her graduate collections.
 
Later in her bedrooms in Paris and London, she started photographing herself in her lingerie pieces and creating content for Instagram. “I was just sewing and sewing and sewing and developing, and that’s when my practice sort of got really strong,” she says. “I’d already had a year, maybe a year and a half, of me playing around with it, and then in 2019, I just sort of went for it and started taking photos of myself, uploading all the time, and that’s when the photography met the body- morphing, and it became this whole package.”
 
Stark’s work has attracted not only a legion of online fans, but also its fair share of negative social media commentary, some of which she has archived on an Instagram Stories highlight. Some have slammed her work as “bondage pornwear” and “disfiguring”, while accusing Stark of self-hatred. Then there’s the old chestnut that is invariably trotted in any discussion about size-inclusive fashion — that it is “normalising obesity”.
 
“I do know that it’s quite extreme. It’s not only an extreme shape to put your body in physically; it’s also a way of seeing your body and exposing yourself in a way that not really anyone has done,” says Stark, of the flak she receives.“But I get messages from other people saying it helped them see their body shape in a different way and see their curves and their fat as something that could be beautiful, which I think is crazy and amazing because it did start as just a project for me, for myself, alone in my bedroom in Paris or my studio in London.

 
“I want [my clients] to feel the same way that I do in my pieces,” she continues, “which is to feel that they love it, that they feel sexy, that they feel amazing and confident. Then at the end of the day, the hate online or the negative comments don’t phase us because we know how great we feel and we know how great we look, and for every bad comment, there are 100 good comments.”
 
Michaela Stark: Couture lingerie designer and body-morphing artist. By  Patty Huntington. Harper’s Bazaar Australia, Jan/Febr, 2022.

In Michaela Stark’s collections, beauty is distorted. Her sculpted lingerie blurs the boundaries of the sensual and the grotesque, creating extreme shapes and eye-watering contortions. Fat bulges, flesh is compressed, and limbs are strung up like joints of meat. On the skin itself, pain can be seen everywhere: through welts, scars, and in purpling, blood-starved complexions. But for the artist and couturier, these images are about much more than provocation. In fact, they are a vivid, mocking exploration of the lengths we go to in the name of conventional beauty norms, and the discomfort – sometimes agony – we endure to make our bodies seem desirable.
 
Australia-born Stark began her career as a seamstress. Despite finding success – and working with Beyoncé repeatedly, on music videos and her Black Is King tour – she began focusing on her own more conceptual lingerie projects in 2018. Using herself as model, Stark would squeeze herself into increasingly constrictive corsetry, creating bulbous, sensuous shapes with her own body. Part performance, part “fashion experiment”, these designs were part of a lifelong fascination with the way we perceive our own bodies.
 

Stark’s latest project, Stark Naked, is a continuation of this work. Currently on show at Dover Street Market’s 3537 in Paris, the exhibition sees the artist collaborate with photographer Sølve Sundsbø for a series of lavish, if unsettling, imagery. “This collection was very much about me creating couture lingerie for different bodies, not just myself,” Stark tells AnOther. Instead, she worked with models Jade ‘O’ Belle and Dodo Potato for six months, creating couture lingerie that was tailored to their curves, and inspired by their personal relationships with their bodies.
 
The resulting pieces – made from invisible tulle, silk chiffon and grosgrain ribbon – are hand-dyed to look like skin, giving an effect of engorged flesh and mysterious bodily growths. “We treated the [fabrics] to look like skin, and then added pleats and embroidery on top to reference the way that the skin wrinkles under the corset, like saggy, wrinkly skin,” Stark explains. The aim, she adds, was to create a veil of uncanny ambiguity. “It’s all very non-descript, so I think I could see something in it but then someone else looks at it and see something different.”

 
For such an intimate project, it was vital to find the right photographer. “I’ve had a hard time working with photographers in the past, because I feel like my work is so much about having control over your body and the image you’re projecting,” Stark says. “That’s why my work is so powerful, I think – because it’s not just putting models in underwear. It’s allowing them to have control over what their body looks like.” After meeting Norwegian photographer Sundsbø on a shoot, the pair instantly connected: Stark felt comfortable being vulnerable around him, and found him to be sensitive, diligent and considerate when it came to her overall vision.
 
Sundsbø is equally positive about his experience with Stark. “Michaela is very focused and knows exactly what she wants to say. That’s very special,” he tells AnOther. “Even in 2021 there are taboos and norms to be questioned and broken. She does that in such a brave, interesting and beautiful way ... What makes her work unique for me is how much she offers of herself in such a fearless way. She makes these ephemeral beautiful pieces of clothing and brings in a hyper-real world of flesh and brutal honesty. Her own flesh and her own truth about her body.”

 
For Stark, these experiments with couture lingerie have helped her rebuild a more loving, accepting relationship with herself. After experiencing body dysmorphia as a teenager, she became obsessive about the flaws of her body. It was only after she decided to embrace them – even boldly accentuate them – for her art, that she began to change her view. “I’ve come to appreciate different parts of my body,” she says, “not just the fat, but the hair, the pimples, the stretch marks, and any sort of imperfection. [My work] has helped me see them in a completely different way: I’ve stopped obsessing over the surface things, and started thinking about my body more deeply, and getting inspired by it more deeply.”
 
Stark Naked is running at DSM’s 3537 in Paris until December 19.
 
Stark Naked: Intimate Images of Michaela Stark’s Sensual, Grotesque Designs. By  Dominique Sisley. Another Magazine, December 13, 2021. 

Few have made a name for sensuous, body-positive lingerie quite like Michaela Stark. With her latest collection — titled Stark Naked and on show at the Dover Street Market-affiliated 3537 Gallery in Paris until 19 December — the couture artist pushes her practice to its furthest point yet, creating pieces that contort the body into shapes so otherworldly that they’re almost unrecognisable. In the Marais space, these chiffon, tulle and organza garments hang like sculptures; their transformative potential demonstrated in a new series of images created in collaboration with photographer Sølve Sundsbø and makeup artist Kevin Cordo. This is also where, on Tuesday night, Michaela staged a performance, taking a pair of scissors to an iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone corset (with l’enfant terrible’s support, of course!) live on stage, before wearing the reworked piece in her signature body morphing style.

 
Michaela’s work has always been about highlighting perceived imperfections, with the body becoming as much a part of the final look as the lingerie itself. For this exhibition, however, she decided to show the garments separate from their worn context, so as not to distract from the hours’ worth of intricate handcraft invested in each piece. Body positivity remains an important message, but rather than accept the body as it is naturally, this is a collection created with the intention of transforming it beyond familiar perception. It’s an attempt to present human bodies as alien lifeforms, altered and exaggerated to extremity through humble cloth.
 
The exhibition also marks the first time that Michaela has taken her work offline. While she has always struggled against Instagram censorship, the platform has long been the primary way for her to showcase her work. Until now. Indeed, this collection is a testament to Michaela’s versatility as an artist and designer, and her ability to create work that feels as at home in a formal gallery setting as it does on an iPhone screen.
 
How would you introduce your latest collection, Stark Naked?
 
 
 
MS :
It's a collection of couture lingerie that has been designed for specific models — me, Jade 'O' Belle and Dodo Potato. At the start of the year, I completed my Second Skin collection, which was all about me. I wanted to expand that. I started working with Jade 'O' Belle really slowly to develop this couture look on her then the exhibition came and that's when I brought in Dodo. We have been working on the shapes for months, making them so that they morph the body so extremely that you almost can't recognise it anymore. It's been designed to highlight the imperfections of our bodies; the things that we have been previously taught to hide.
 
For this collection, I found a lot of inspiration in the skin and the flesh. I used silk organza, silk chiffon, and tulle that had all been dyed to either match the models' skin or to replicate aging or decaying skin. I've included embroidery that is reminiscent of wrinkles, stretch marks or veins. It's about referencing the body in a nondescript way, and allowing the pieces to stand as artworks on their own. In the images, Kevin Cordo did the body makeup, highlighting the red marks and all the lines that would be left from wearing a corset. That really exaggerated the shape.
 
This exaggeration through makeup gives the images this otherworldly quality. Is that the direction your work is going in?
 
MS :
Yeah. A lot of people put my work into the category of body positivity. It is, for sure, but a lot of the time body positivity is about celebrating the body as it is naturally. My work rarely shows the natural body. It's about accentuating the body into such a deformed shape that it's not natural anymore; it’s quite otherworldly, in fact. I've always loved this idea of fantasy. Fashion is fantasy, couture especially. I would love to create new worlds that you can experience in real life. Step by step, I'm bringing my work into the real world and I think it's going to become more fantastical — it's quite shocking to see the body morphed in real life, as opposed to on Instagram where we are already so used to seeing bodies manipulated with tools like FaceTune.

 
 
Do you have a favourite way of presenting your work?
 
MS :
I'm starting to get really into the idea of performance. I started off by showing my work on Instagram and doing it from the privacy of my bedroom. I didn’t have to actually show anyone in real life and I was fully in control. Now I'm slowly starting to let go of control a little bit so that I can perform in real life and show my work in this whole new perspective. I think that's only going to evolve. I'm testing the limits of how I can show my work in real life.
 
Your work is very much about how garments interact with the body, but in this exhibition the garments are presented more like sculptures and separate from the body. How do you think the context changes the way your work is perceived?
 
MS :
My pieces are designed so intrinsically with the body, but what I find is that sometimes when I show my pieces this way then the beauty of the piece gets lost. I focus on the tiniest, tiniest details in my garments, because I think they’re what add beauty to something. Sometimes when you put the corsets on, they get swallowed by the body and the real impact lies in how the body has been manipulated and is being shown. That's why I wanted to show my pieces off the body here. But they still refer to it so strongly that they almost look like living things. There’s a real sense of movement to them — there’s always something human and fleshy.
 
What do you want people to feel when they see this collection?
 
MS :
 
I want them to feel something. Someone commented on my Instagram the other day saying: "This is disgusting. I feel nothing". I get so many mixed reactions to my work, but I just want people to feel something — whether it's hate or love is up to them. I love that people have strong reactions to my work. If you're not pissing some people off, then I feel like you're not making progress.
 
Stark Naked at 35-37 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75004 Paris until 19 December.
 
Michaela Stark’s new designs morph the body to alien extremes. By Sophie Wilson.  i-D, December 10, 2021.

Historically, when it comes to picking out lingerie, most of us have been conditioned to look for the most flattering options, with garments that lift and support, highlight our ‘best bits’, and definitely don’t dig into our flesh all high on the agenda. It goes without saying that these outdated ideals of perfection, imposed on us by our patriarchal overlords and the mainstream media, are complete and utter bullshit – our lumps, bumps, and rolls are not the ‘imperfections’ we have been led to believe they are, but a completely normal side effect of being a human with a body, and even something to be celebrated.
 
Doing just that is rising Australia-born, Paris-based designer Michaela Stark, whose unconventional, couture-level lingerie accentuates and highlights the fleshy form and folds of the body. Crafted from delicate lace, silk, and chiffon, her corsets and bustiers are detailed with criss-crossing ribbons, straps, and seams that cut into their wearers’ breasts, torsos, and bums, with the soft, distorted mounds they create often feeling somewhere in the realm of sculpture.
 
With Stark’s namesake label born from her frustrations at not being able to find decent bras in her hometown (“an outlet store called ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry (Anymore)’ was the only place in my whole city that sold my size, but despite the name of the store, I cried literally every time I went there”), the designer started out making simple silk knickers and bloomers. Over time, her work evolved into the body-morphing styles currently making waves on Instagram.
 
Inspiration, she explains, comes from her own body hang-ups. “I’m inspired by all the parts of my body I feel insecure about. For me, that’s my stomach, my ‘love handles’, my ‘hip dips’, my boobs, the cellulite on my thighs, my butt and… I also want to say the tops of my arms, but this is a relatively recent thing,” she says, adding that working through her feelings of insecurity is a major part of her design process. “It can be an emotional process, as some days I just want to avoid my reflection altogether.”
 
Counting Beyoncé as a fan, after she created looks for 2018 video “Apeshit” and upcoming visual album Black is King, later this year Stark is also set to open her first exhibition. Here, we get to know her a little better.
 
 

 
Hey Michaela! Could you tell me a little about the themes of your work and what it’s all about? 
 
Michaela Stark: My work is about celebrating the parts of the body that society usually makes us feel insecure about, through lingerie that accentuates the ‘imperfections’ of the body – the fat rolls, bulges, cellulite, uneven breasts, body hair etc. My aim is to counteract all the prescribed beauty norms that have been force fed to us through the fashion and beauty industries.
 
How did you get your start in fashion? 
 
Michaela Stark: I started out as a seamstress in London, working in-house for several young British fashion labels. It was really exciting for me at the time, as I was so young and had just graduated from fashion school in Australia. Being thrown into the London scene like this really opened my eyes up to the opportunities of the industry and the endless possibilities within  it. 
 
Eventually, I started working with celebrity stylists as a personal tailor and costume designer, which gave me so many majorly exciting opportunities, like going on tour with Beyoncé and Jay Z, and working with big fashion brands to design and tailor garments seen on a world scale. I think mostly though, it gave the skills to be able to sew intricate and very technical garments for an array of body types – not just fashion models. 
 
Why did you make the move from clothing into lingerie?
 
Michaela Stark: I’ve always loved lingerie – it makes me feel sexy and just gives me a lot of confidence. When I’m wearing it, I feel like I’m playing out a fantasy, almost tapping into an alter-ego. Being a plus-size girl, whose 32FF breasts came pretty much right on puberty, I’d always felt a bit left out of the lingerie game. From the age of 14-19 I had to shop at an outlet story called ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry (Anymore)’ because it was the only place in the city that sold my size. As I’m sure you can imagine, stores like this don’t stock the beautiful, delicate lingerie that I so desperately desired, and every experience going there was totally mortifying.
 
 
Can you tell me a little about how you create your lingerie? What is the process behind it?
 
Michaela Stark: Each piece is completely one-of-a-kind and can take up to a month to make because they’re so intricate. I guess you could say I’m working as a ‘counter-couturier’ of sorts. Couturiers engineer their garments to solely focus on hiding and enhancing the body. My work is not so much the hiding – it’s more enhancing, enhancing, enhancing! I use the same techniques couturiers use to make the parts we usually don’t want others to see bigger and more prominent. I want to celebrate the body, not hide it away.
 
In terms of aesthetics, I would say my lingerie is unapologetically feminine. The pieces are soft, romantic, and colourful, and I love to use delicate silks and very feminine, sensual silhouettes. It’s really important to me that each piece is specifically designed to perfectly fit and complement the body of the person who is going to wear it, whether that’s myself or a client.

 
Where do you find inspiration?
 
Michaela Stark: I mostly use myself as a model and I’m inspired by all the parts of my body that I feel insecure about – working through my feelings is a major part of my design process. I always start with my own body and a loosely fitting garment, which I drape over myself while looking in the mirror, although some days I just want to avoid my reflection altogether. When I’ve draped the garment over myself, I try to sculpt it to accentuate the part I feel most insecure about in that moment. I’ll continue to manipulate my body until I feel I’ve made my ‘imperfections’ look beautiful. When I feel happy with my cellulite or fat rolls or whatever, then I know I have my final shape and can move on to the pattern cutting part. 
 
You talk about feeling insecure about your body, but your pictures evoke a huge amount of confidence. How do you channel this energy when you’re being photographed?
 
Michaela Stark: Wearing lingerie is kind of like wearing armour for me. It makes me feel confident and allows me to channel this fantasy alter-ego version of myself. My photographs, which are usually self-portraits, are as much a part of my art as the lingerie is. By the time I’ve reached this stage, I’ve already been through all the emotional labour. I’ve tackled my insecurities and created a garment that allows me to feel beautiful in my own skin, so in the photos I emanate a sense of confidence because I really am feeling confident. It also helps that I’m taking the photo – it means I’m in control of the image and of how my body and sexuality is going to be portrayed. It’s important I feel confident in the photos, because the whole point is to help others who see my work to feel safe about their own insecurities and imperfections. I hope my confidence rubs off on them!

 
 
What about when you collaborate with a photographer?
 
Michaela Stark: Oh there’s a huge difference, and you can really see it in the images. My work is already quite vulnerable and it can have a lot of sexual connotations, so when someone else photographs me, I feel like it’s very easy for me to become an object of desire. I am modelling, almost naked, for someone else, and they’re pushing their vision of beauty on me – I’m no longer in control of how my body and sexuality is going to be portrayed. But it’s nice to give up this control sometimes, and I love seeing myself through someone else’s lens. It just has to be the right team, and a photographer who’s willing to understand my perspective and hear my creative input.
 
The way you present your lingerie and images feels incredibly sculptural to me. Is this something intentional?
 
Michaela Stark: I’m actually working on an exhibition where I’ll be hanging and selling my lingerie as sculptures, so you’re spot on the money. Inside Me will be shown through Gillian Jason Gallery in London at the end of the year, in collaboration with Alina Zamanova, a painter and sculptor from Kiev. After I’ve worn an item I’ve made, and photographed myself in it, I don’t consider it an item of clothing, but a sculpture that reveals a certain part of my body and my mind. I feel that, even without a body inside, they can stand as beautiful art works that are as intimate as a nude photograph. 
 
Given social media’s censorship rules, it must be hard to present the kind of work you make. How do you navigate this?
 
Michaela Stark: It’s insanely difficult! I think this a big challenge for most artists trying to liberate the female body. At this stage, Instagram removes pretty much any photo I upload, even if there is no nudity. They have absolute power to police my body however they like. The sad truth of the matter is that women, and plus-size women particularly, are being censored more than anyone else. It’s sad because I think the fact that they have this power means artists are forced to comply by their rules.
 
When it comes to your clients, who is the person you’re designing for?
 
Michaela Stark: I love the challenge of designing for other people. It’s not something that I do regularly at the moment, but definitely something I’m working towards. It’s quite intimate to think about what someone else is going to want to wear, and what will make them feel beautiful. Beyoncé has been pretty much the only client to date I’ve had since launching my own brand! Now, I want to throw myself into it, and start learning about other people’s flaws and insecurities. If I could regularly design for other people like I do for myself, it would add a whole new dimension to my work.
 
Michaela Stark’s lingerie accentuates body parts we’re conditioned to hide. By Emma Elizabeth Davidson. Dazed, July 30, 2020. 

Michaela Stark website

Michaela Stark Instagram