Are we in an influencer recession?

I don’t think so. But it might look like it for a while…

I just finished Rebecca Jennings’ piece on the influencer recession for New York Magazine. Fascinating read on the evolution of influencer culture.

The new trend is people publicly labeling themselves “former influencers,” (while still living life online), which also coincides with the former darlings of the Trad Wife life publicly distancing themselves from the title. See Lee Tilghman and Nara Smith as examples of both.

Meanwhile, mainstream culture increasingly rejects influencing as a lifestyle, flat out. I, too, was swept up in Yesteryear fever. (As an aside, I loved it and can’t stop thinking about it.)

It might appear that influencing is OVER!!! But we’ve been through this before.

I’m writing a book on the history of branding and how we arrived at this moment where the only thing left to commodify is ourselves. The age of the personal brand. No, this phenomenon is nothing new. Yes, it will keep happening.

Influencing is a modern form of conspicuous consumption, which was first written about in The Theory of the Leisure Class…in 1899!!!!

Wearing our buying habits on our sleeve is part of what reinforces class divides in a consumer-driven economy. But once the mainstream gets ahold of an elite status symbol, it becomes tacky and gauche. Then the elites must foist status onto another form of consumption. It then gains mainstream traction and just as soon as it does, loses all value. ‘Round and ‘round we go.(This is how baking sourdough bread barefoot in your kitchen became a status symbol and now has already lost its performative currency.)

The point is…

Influencing is as old as American capitalism.

It will die with the empire, not Ballerina Farm. What happens when the conspicuous consumption of yesteryear becomes strategically inconspicuous and therefore harder to detect? Stay tuned for what’s next in late stage capitalism / the age of the personal brand. 😅😭😱