FYP for the people? Plot twist: influencers don't suck.
P.S. You care about NY Fashion Week '22 now.
Trend Roundup
Mommin’ ain’t easy. This trend shows off mamas in full glory B.C. (before child).
For when you totally don’t get it but have to pretend you know what’s going on.
Realizations happen when we read between the lines.
Our Viral Moment
The 2022 World Cup schedule just dropped. If you’re watching – whether as a fan or as someone who markets to fans…we’ve got you covered.
We’ll be curating a live report that tracks all the data around World Cup UGC in real time – all season long. Make sure to let us know you’re tuning in by sending us an email at: hello@viralmoment.com!
Trendsetter Spotlight
You can’t sit with us.
Earlier this month, New York Fashion Week (NYFW henceforward) went viral.
I’m not talking about brand drops or press hype or absurd celeb sightings – those are a given. The part of NYFW that went viral wasn’t just the coverage of the lucrative events, but the access to them: in the weeks leading up to NYFW, information about how to get into invite-only shows and parties was widely disseminated amongst hopeful wannabe attendees, effectively subverting the precise exclusivity that makes NYFW as we know it.
In short, 1) contact info for powerful industry people was leaked. 2) Publicist inboxes were bombarded. 3) Events were crashed by uninvited hoards. 4) People who were actually invited were inconvenienced. 5) Pop culture media outlets were shocked.
TikTok, of course, was the primary engine behind it all – therein lies the power of user-generated content.
In sharing the crux of their woes, Vanity Fair put it best:
“The size of TikTok’s audience and the mysterious whims of its algorithm imbue any viral video with the overall potential effect of dropping hundreds, if not thousands, of viewers possibly literally at your door.”
And, in a sense, they were rightfully shocked – while it’s always expected that information about a pop culture event of this size will be shared, this was the first time (at least of this scale) we saw the result of what happens when it’s exactly the right information – shared with the right audience at the right time.
In an article titled “TikTok Helped People Scam Their Way Into Fashion Week,” a writer for The Cut expressed that the sheer amount of event awareness caused ‘mayhem’ – and that influencers were to blame for sharing private intel that ultimately was detrimental to folks in the fashion industry. She interviewed a publicist who said their inbox was bombarded to the point that they felt “doxxed”. Another PR exec said that they believe that fashion is “something that’s for everyone, but there’s a time and a place for that.”
It seemed like the writer of this article too felt inconvenienced. After finding that the $99 she spent on a TikTok influencer’s “Guide to Fashion Week” didn’t provide enough specificity for getting into an event without a wait, she shared:
“I was personally far too tired to deal with being pushed, as one often is when a large number of people are attempting to get into any sort of door, so I turned around and went home.”
But according to influencer Tiff Baira in the interview with Vanity Fair, there wasn’t any ‘scam’. All the information she shared was already listed throughout (now removed) pages of the NYFW website – it just wasn’t organized in a way that lend itself to being user-friendly:
“My intention is to never share any information that isn’t public…I don’t believe in gatekeeping.”
The more I read, the more I started to feel like I had another case of Big Trendsetters versus Little Trendsetters on my hands, and that (most of) the influencers’ collective motives in the case of NYFW had actually been benevolent.
Stir The Pot
FYP for the people.
If you’re still reading, I owe you a confession: I knew who Tiff was before I read both the VF and The Cut articles.
Back when I was living in New York, Tiff Baira was one of the few NYC influencers whose advice I’d actually heed to. When her videos would hit my FYP last summer, the view count hovered in that sweet spot of around 18,000-25,000 – just niche enough.
So when her name popped up in a Vanity Fair article as the driving force behind TikTok’s Fashion Week democratization, I wasn’t surprised. Contrarily, I felt a little bit…proud? Am I watching one of my favorite micro-influencers go viral in real-time?!
Baira’s recs were always just the right amount under the radar to be hip – she’d catch places and trends right at their zeitgeist before they ballooned into peak virality and inevitably dissipated into the mainstream, only to be written off by anyone whose personal brand centered around any kind of uniqueness.
As a TikTok micro-influencer, Baira had nailed the value proposition for her niche – young New Yorkers aiming to be trendy amongst the trendsetters, but not necessarily out to social climb into the ranks of peak popularity. Admittedly, I was her ideal customer. And deliver Tiff did: on a night out at one of her recommended spots, I ran into another NYC micro-influencer whose TikTok I’d classify as a core tenet of the niche.
As a viewer, what I look for in an influencer is precisely that hyper-specificity of their micro-advice. Tiff told Vanity Fair she believes that:
“We can utilize TikTok as a way to share information and to tell the next generation of creatives…if I can help you get a little closer to your fashion dream without having to go through what I went through, I’m going to do it.”
Not unlike the pursuit of balling on a budget popularized by influencers dedicated to helping their followers combat inflation through #frugalhacks (see our last article on Costco), this phenomenon speaks to a greater trend in and of itself: influencers spreading the word to genuinely help people out, at least with the little things.
While some challenges are certainly niche-specific – and in the case of NYFW – are even more certainly champagne problems, they still need solutions.
And personally, I’ve got a feeling that influencers like Tiff will continue to deliver.