Because hope does spring eternal, and I am blessed — or cursed — with a cheery, childish optimism that, apparently, life simply cannot crush, I often enter online raffles for a chance to win a trip to a destination spa or a prize package of cashmere robe and botanically infused gin. In order to enter, you have to agree to join the promotional-email lists of the sponsor companies, and for this reason my Gmail inbox is littered each morning with pitches from ill-conceived startup companies and freshly launched lifestyle brands.
Everyone and their sister is selling their own lifestyle these days, attempting to be an influencer. Everyone thinks their own taste is good taste, and almost everyone is wrong.
This morning’s inbox featured a typical missive — in blog format — from a company named, of course, after the company’s founder, a person with far less style than she thinks. Let’s call her Emma Fleetwood. (That’s not her real name. I just tried out a few other typical-influencer-sounding names, including “Amelia Grace” and “Sophie Fleetwood,” but they turned out to be real lifestyle bloggers.) Emma Fleetwood lives in Savannah, Ga. At the top of this morning’s email is a photo of a pretend moment from a life we are expected to want to emulate: It is Emma Fleetwood’s bed, out of which she has just emerged, and on the rumpled white sheets she has left an open hardcover book, a coffee mug in a weird flesh-tone color, and a pair of tawny faux-fur slippers. Blogger, oh, blogger: Why are your shoes on the bed?
(And not just on the bed, but the presumably dirty soles resting not on the top sheet but on the bottom sheet, right near Emma Fleetwood’s pillow. I don’t care if they’re indoor shoes. Emma Fleetwood, were you raised in a barn? Exactly what sort of lifestyle are we promoting here?)
Three seconds counts as a “view” on Instagram, and views are money. The iPhone is an incredibly powerful photographic tool that casts a professional sheen over everything it captures. Online, our worlds all look glossy and perfectly focused, but when you pause for more than three seconds, you notice that the lives being vlogged and Instagrammed about are usually very bland and mundane. Thousands of American women spend their workdays recording their purchases from Amazon and J.Crew.
One distinctive feature of Emma Fleetwood’s lifestyle is that she is bookish: She has positioned herself as a reader and devoted an entire section of her website to book reviews of corny mass-culture books. Three out of four of these books feature a woman’s face with enormous eyeglasses on the cover. (This big-eyeglasses image is the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” effect: a primal symbol, a glyph, that speaks to the average American woman’s internalized desire to look like Audrey Hepburn.) I’m a jerk, but I actually laughed out loud when — procrastinating over coffee, sipped out of what I consider to be a much more Instagrammable green transferware Spode mug — I went to read these book reviews. Emma Fleetwood isn’t really a reader; she just wants to pose with hardcover books on poolside loungers at luxury resorts in Mexico. (Who can blame her? I want to do that, too.) Most of her reviews begin with a disclaimer: “I’ve been neglecting my reading lately . . . “ and “I’m going to be honest, I had a hard time getting into this book . . .” and, again, “It takes a bit to get into this book and it’s long but I promise, it’s worth it!”
The iPhone enables its owner to do nifty tricks like instant stop-motion animation, so a lifestyle blogger can post Hollywood-spiffy clips of herself magically — poof! — wearing a maxi dress or ankle boots in several different ways. Emma Fleetwood, for instance, has recently posted a quick montage of herself demonstrating “Three ways to wear cargo pants.” Guess what the ways are, reader. Guess, guess! You won’t believe it. You can wear cargo pants with a cardigan, with a blazer, or with a blouse. I KNOW. Right?
Calling someone “basic” (adjective) or worse “a basic” (noun) is really mean. I am a mean columnist. But it’s also super-interesting (to me, anyway) that the idea of being “basic” — that is, being unoriginal in your consumer choices, hashtagging Starbucks on social media, wearing Adidas three-stripe sneakers and a lot of North Face — became a thing in mainstream culture at precisely the time the iPhone debuted and shopping shifted from stores to online. That is, circa 2009. Today, “basic” feels like our entire culture. We’re living post-fashion. We’re living after the end of subculture. We’re living in homogenization. Everything looks more or less good. Basically good.
Everyone thinks everyone else is a narcissist these days. My friend Antonia, who works in family law and deals every day with couples in the throes of divorce, says she can’t remember the last time she had a client who didn’t think his or her ex was a clinical narcissist. At the risk of sounding like an awful hypocrite — I do, after all, write a lengthy column of personal opinions every week — I can help you with that. Here’s a handy-dandy trick for rooting out which of your friends is actually a narcissist: How many photos of himself or herself do they have on their Instagram feed or Facebook page? If their own Insta or Facebook page features more photos of himself or herself than of any other subject, congratulations! You’ve got yourself a narcissist.
Being judgmental and evil-minded — I’m not a veteran of Vogue magazine for nothing — I just took a few minutes to indulge in a perusal of the Insta of this particular lifestyle icon, Emma Fleetwood. And it’s just dozens and dozens of images of herself. Herself posed in a parade of extraordinarily unoriginal outfits: Emma Fleetwood curled up in a flouncy floral frock while awkwardly “reading” a hardcover romance on a couch. Herself eating an ice cream cone in the basic cutoffs and a basic white shirt. Herself on the beach in the expected sailor-stripe shirt with a nautical basket in hand.
One cliché of women’s magazines and style blogs over the last, oh, 25 years or so has been the “What’s in my bag?” feature. The style icon tips out the contents of her purse — and I use the unfashionable word “purse” on purpose, because my life is one long fight against the basic, fight, fight, fight against the dying of the light — so we can see what she carries with her. Emma Fleetwood carries sunglasses from Amazon, Orbit gum, a quilted burgundy Chanel wallet, lip balm, AirPods, Givenchy lipstick, indigestion tablets, and hand cream. Big whoop.
The point of all this is that, if successful, the lifestyle blogger gets paid to mention the names of specific brands and she becomes not just famous but rich. Emma Fleetwood’s hand cream is from a mid-priced brand called We Evolve Together. Emma Fleetwood uses the word “curation,” as in “my curation” of dainty, gold-plated rings and necklaces from a mid-priced brand called Dana Rebecca. (Also worthy of note is the emergence in 2022 of the word “mid” as a derogatory in the slang of teenagers, as in: “How did you like the new season of ‘Derry Girls’ on Netflix, honey?” Answer, with a slight shrug: “Mid.”)
The average startup brand that attempts to lasso new followers and customers with online sweepstakes is named either for the boss herself, as in Dana Rebecca and Emma Fleetwood, or named for the her children, as in Addison Grace or Otis & Olive (again, I just made those two up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those brands exist). I realize I may be sounding really misogynistic, ranting and raving about certain current clichés and embarrassments of businesses run by women, but my intention is to point out the misogyny of a culture in which women’s value is primarily reduced to image. To iPhone images on Instagram alone.
Maybe Emma Fleetwood isn’t a clinical narcissist at all. Maybe she’s just an overachiever, doing what we American women are all supposed to be doing, just with more followers. Emma Fleetwood has 184,000 followers and I have none.