Over lunch at a British-style tearoom located on Philadelphia’s über-posh Main Line, Jessie, an effervescent twenty-something, recounted the circumstances that led her to launch a fashion and lifestyle blog four years earlier. Jessie had pursued a communications degree at a nearby liberal arts college while building impressive media credentials: experience writing for a local newspaper, where she had been freelancing since the age of 16; on-air radio training; and bylines in the features section of a respected regional magazine. Unfortunately, she graduated in the wake of a global economic recession when many businesses—including storied media publishers—were issuing layoffs. Such a turbulent employment market left newly minted graduates like Jessie hard-pressed, vying for positions that amounted to, in her words, “working a lot for free.” She recalled, “I got out of school, I left my internship at [the magazine] . . . I couldn’t get a job. I was interviewing everywhere, and I couldn’t even get back at my old internship because they were too full now.”
Though she eventually landed a magazine internship, Jessie decided that her time and talent could be put to better use, so she rechanneled her creative energies into her then-nascent blog, Trend Hungry. Conjuring up her early forays into the blogosphere, she noted that her first year “was just a lot of cutting my teeth.” She added, “I made hardly any money off the blog at all, [and] I was pretty much full-time waitressing [to pay my bills].” But that was several years ago, and she had since generated enough income from her digitally created brand to go pro. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the “about me” page on her blog includes the siren song of social media entrepreneurship: “Life is good when you do what you love!” Jessie was similarly upbeat in person; at one point she enthused, “I cannot differentiate work from life because I love what I do so much.” Yet over the course of our lunchtime interview, she pulled back the curtain on some of the less glamorous elements of the pro-blogger work culture: her incessant schedule of planning, styling, writing, and networking was taxing, and she lacked long-term stability. In fact, Jessie considered herself more of a “full-time freelancer,” given that Trend Hungry was only one of her revenue streams:
“I do it all. I do styling, I write for [my blog] . . . I write for the fashion spot on Philly.com, I do TV segments, QVC, I have a weekly syndicated radio segment, and I just started a vintage jewelry business. . . . Being an entrepreneur, nothing is the end-all, be-all; everything is like your launch pad to the next thing.”
At the same time, Jessie felt that many creative aspirants lacked a realistic sense of the time and commitment demanded of professional content producers in the digital age. Career hopefuls, she explained, “idealize [the blogger] life: they think that it’s going to be really glamorous. So they see other bloggers maybe working [for] brands or getting free things, and they only see . . . everything that’s through an Instagram filter that looks so fabulous.”
Jessie’s mention of the “Instagram filter” is a reference to the culture of vigilant self-monitoring on social media, particularly as individuals internalize directives to brand the self with resolve: We un-tag unflattering photos, we build credibility through “friend” and “follower” counts, and we harness our online personae to pithy self-descriptors that function as digital sound bites. For fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and other denizens of the feminine digital media economy, these activities are amplified; however, the work of such personal branding endeavors gets concealed behind a torrent of images and textual referents that ostensibly mask the labor required to earn a living doing what you love. Fashion bloggers and Instagrammers personify effortless glamour.
As Emily Hund and I argued in our analysis of top-ranking female fashion influencers, their carefully curated aesthetics seem to offer an updated version of the post-feminist ideal of “having it all”: Instagram feeds show them cavorting through the vibrant cityscapes of New York and Los Angeles, clinking champagne glasses against Parisian sunsets, and basking on the beaches of Bali and Bora Bora. Even moments of seeming candor do not unsettle the well-crafted social media personae of the Insta-glam. Their shots are often cannily staged to ensure a particular aesthetic—one that cloaks the staging itself.
When digital professionals—including bloggers, vloggers, and designers who have achieved financial success from their self-starter careers—described “going pro,” their accounts sound dissimilar to the romanticized ideal of female entrepreneurship. Christina, founder of LoveBrownSugar, a blog for “savvy, multicultural women,” remarked, “People have seen the success of some of the most notable fashion bloggers, and they want that. And they think, ‘All I have to do is start a blog, show cute outfits, or just write anything, and I’m going to attain what that blogger has attained.’”
One of the reasons the blogger market is awash with creators is, according to Christina, “because people are looking to get that fame and success.” Yet, she added, “they don’t realize that if you’re going to do this, you need to be consistent, you need to be different, and you’re going to have to put in some work before you even attain anything close to what a major blogger or YouTuber has attained.”
Vlogger Rachel W., similarly, held there is a telling disparity between the upper echelons of social media fame and the lower cadres of content producers. In contrast with the popular image, she said, “it’s definitely not this easy route of career that everybody in the media makes it out to be just because they talk about the top 10 people on YouTube.” The reality, she told me, is that only a handful of creators have succeeded in achieving “this super, amazing wealth out of their online careers.”
Meanwhile, fashion brand strategist Sissi suggested that the patterned concealment of labor is endemic to the fashion industry. Glamour is fashion’s way; historically we never see the labor behind the results. Social media hasn’t done much to change this. The instantaneous nature of social media has been widely criticized for misleading followers about the sheer hard work behind Instagram-perfect photos, and rightly so.
Drawing attention to the potential implications of this pervasive misrepresentation, she added, “Social media can perpetuate a culture of supposed instant success and leads to a culture of insecurity, especially amongst young women who compare themselves/their work unfavorably to polished people/products.”
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