“Oh, that’s cool, because I work with kids! And one of these kids, he’d really love to get into fashion. Do you have any advice for him?” she asks as we lean against the sweaty walls. Oh no. I puff the cigarette to buy time. Do I tell the cold hard truth? (Don’t do it! If you value your bank account and sanity, for the love of god, don’t do it!) Or, do I give the PR answer? (The usual spiel about portfolios, fashion school, internships, blah blah blah…)

Despite a tongue lubricated by vodka lemonades, I opted for the softer route. You don’t want to be a dick, do you? I’m not here to crush anyone’s dreams. Besides, we need delusional optimism in the arts spaces, otherwise how would people stick out the insanity of an unstable, non-linear, at times financially-parched career path? People who must be artists will be artists anyway. No good trying to talk sense into them.

“How can I get into fashion?” is a question I’m frequently asked. And, look, I don’t begrudge anyone career advice. I love walking the children in nature, and all that… But I also feel a nagging icky-ness when I encourage someone down this road, knowing what’s in store for them. It feels a bit irresponsible. Maybe it’s how veterans feel seeing young conscripts.

Fashion has been good to me. In the past year, I’ve travelled to places like Barcelona, Lisbon and Ljubljana. I was in a box for Lady Gaga at the O2, saw Raye up-close at the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve had more fancy dinners than I can count, and more gifted bags than I know what to do with. But, simultaneously, I do not have a stable enough income to move out of my parents’ house at 26 years old. (I’m actually 27 in a few days, but that’s even more embarrassing in its proximity to 30.)

Part of that is down to my own idiocy, like pouring years into a platform like Instagram, which does not pay you for views. Creating an online presence that is far from brand-friendly (talking about the Epstein files is not exactly a selling point for luxury fashion…) And, most recently, leaving a stable, if unfulfilling, job at a corporate publishing entity and going freelance instead, because I “needed the creative control”.

Raised by immigrant parents whose entire goal was to work hard, make money and assimilate into the British middle class, centring your life around work is not something I questioned too hard. That’s just life… right? But, in pursuing a fashion career with such a one-track mind for most of my 20s, I have stunted the development in other parts of my life. I’m almost old enough to be in the 27 club, for fuck’s sake, and I feel like my life hasn’t even started. (Oh, Amy, how am I almost the age you were when you died?)

Simultaneously, being able to live at home in London while taking unpaid internships and clout-based opportunities is a privilege that many don’t have. It’s why I feel uncomfortable giving other people advice. There’s that saying, if your business is built on unpaid internships, it’s not a real business plan. If your success was facilitated by family support, it’s not exactly a replicable model for everyone. My path is unusual. Or maybe not really that unusual, since most of fashion is comprised of middle and upper class kids. By the industry’s very design, they’re the only people that can survive.

There’s a stiletto-steep gap between the perceived glamour of fashion work and its reality. It’s why my parents scoffed at the thought of me pursuing musical theatre, (“How will you make a living?”) but didn’t bat an eyelid at me doing fashion journalism. It’s a world that constantly has you rubbing shoulders with luxury, so the assumption is that the luxury translates to your daily life, too. And, sure, you might be gifted fabulous things. But stuff – yes, Miranda Priestly, stuff – doesn’t pay the rent. (Unless you sell it, which I’ve heard is a way to get blacklisted by PR companies. But, perhaps it’s time for me to do this. As a colleague said the other day, how will they know?)

Anyways, perhaps this isn’t really about fashion at all. I’m a little dissatisfied with life. The semi-nomadic lifestyle I’ve adopted to limit time around my family is getting unsettling. (Boyfriend’s house, to press trip, to few days at home, to friend’s flat, to boyfriend’s house, to few days at home is the current pipeline.) I love my parents, but I get whiplash when, at industry events, I’m a respected writer, and when I come home, I’m a child.

Perhaps this isn’t really about fashion at all, but the imposter syndrome I feel when people turn to me for wisdom. Why the hell are you asking me? I haven’t even figured out how to look after myself! To me, all of this fashion stuff is fake until I can fully support myself and build the life I want. Maybe no career is worth putting your life and independence on hold? Or maybe it is? I’ve had a pretty good time so far. I’m so lucky to do this crazy, ridiculous, fabulous job. It’d be nice to be regularly paid from it, though.

The irritability I feel while scrolling is, of course, a glaring sign to log off. But there’s also something to be said about how the requirement for visibility today is to be annoying. To shove yourself down your audience’s throat with bite-sized content. To endlessly insist upon yourself by posting everyday, lest your audience (or more importantly, the algorithm) forgets about you. To grab attention with snappy edits, hot takes, wide eyes, robotic smiles and just general… loudness. Perhaps it bothers me so much because it reminds me of the silly dance I must also do to be seen online. In this world of abundant, fast-paced media, the goal today is not to be good, it’s to be noticeable.

I’m not alone in this fatigue. Hating on influencers is the topic du jour. I try to stay away from internet discourse nowadays because it irritates me more than it educates me, but this one’s personal. Fashion critic Philippe Pourhashemi recently satirised the little mic epidemic in an Instagram post. “I want a fluffy microphone and force my face on your phone every single day.” “I want to monetise myself, my friends, my babies, my loved ones and my family.” “I want my face to be covered with affiliate links, selling shit I don’t really believe in,” the carousel goes on, a scathing critique of influencer culture.

Forcing my face onto your phone every single day… That’s exactly how it feels. “Quantity over quality” is the social media strategy of most influencers and media brands. A well-known fashion influencer once advised me that spending too long on my content is a mistake. I will admit, I’ve often taken the path of least resistance: a 5-minute, opinionated video that takes an afternoon to put out, as opposed to a piece I’ve spent days researching, writing and editing. And even a 5-minute long video is doing too much, the Instagram Edits app reminds me. I’m often met with the small hazard icon, which means that clips over 3 minutes won’t be recommended to a new audience. That’s the goal, isn’t it? More views equals more growth equals more money. Right?

Spending days on an article is also a mistake, I’ve been told by journalists more experienced than I. Freelance rates I’ve encountered at popular magazines have been anywhere from £60 to £200 for an article. Divided up by the time spent working on it (conceiving an idea, researching it, reaching out for quotes, interviewing people, writing the piece up and editing it), that’s not even minimum wage.

If you’re in-house at a magazine, you get a steady wage, but you’re expected to pump out around 3 pieces of varying quality a day with the hopes that one of them will be a traffic hit on Google. I once spoke to a seasoned journalist who came up in print media. They said to me: “When I started doing digital journalism, my editor told me I had to forget my standards.” A phrase I really liked to describe this phenomenon was “churn-alism”.

Whether you’re an influencer, writer or journalist, spending your time and careful effort on media is no longer incentivised. Around the board, the point is not to create a loyal, discerning audience (increasingly hard to do as we’ve all been zombified by the eternal scroll), but to farm engagement. Spiritually, we’re no better than those AI fruit videos.

“Slop” is a buzzword at the moment because of how AI is making everything a bit… shit. But slop has existed for a long time. It existed in every short video screaming “you just have to check out this crazy thing.” In every article written in one morning as a reaction to trending Google search terms. In every photo with a meaningless caption slapped in the middle to boost engagement. (A topic explored by Brenda Hashtag and Street Night Live.) In every piece of content I made because I knew it would do well, not because I thought it was worthwhile.

I started my online fashion career in late 2018, at the passionate, if not slightly ignorant, age of 19. Traditional media was flopping: fashion editorials which probably took weeks to put together getting 50 likes, magazines closing left and right… I realised it was about working smarter, not harder. What was the point in putting effort into something original when I could get more reach with a collection of runway photos and a caption compiled from a half-hour internet search? A meme put together in 10 minutes? Or, most recently, a funny quote pasted onto a pink background?

My love for memes is, of course, genuine. I’m obsessed with the internet and its absurdities. How it has shaped the sense of humour of multiple generations. How memes say so much about our collective fears and frustrations. How they are probably one of the most honest pieces of media we have today. But, I must admit, I also capitalised on how low-effort but high-yield they are online. Sorry! (And it seems like magazines have caught on to this now, because I’ve increasingly seen memes and silly captions from mainstream publications.)

What about ragebait? We’ve covered low-effort content, but nowadays there’s an undisputed king when it comes to getting attention online, and that’s harnessing people’s anger. Or at least annoyance. Recently, writer Rebecca Jennings wrote a piece in Vulture about how we’re entering an “influencer recession”. She followed the trajectory of influencer Audrey Peters, who turned to ragebait when her luxury fashion videos stopped performing as well. (Unsurprisingly, showing off Hermés bags loses its appeal when hundreds of others are posting the exact same bland videos, while some of your audience struggles to buy their groceries.) Jennings perfectly summed up today’s social media landscape in her analysis:

“Once upon a time, influencers could post beautiful photos of their lives — their outfits, their coffee, their vacations, their children — and, with enough consistency, amass an audience of followers who looked to them for inspiration or escape. Now… the only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swaths of the public. Showing off a cute outfit, an ab routine, or a gorgeous home can’t possibly compete with the army of people doing the exact same thing… In an era of oversaturation and slop, audiences want one of two things: to be sucked into the endless scroll by titillation and rage-bait or to be lured away from it by a fresh filming style, a gripping series, access to an exclusive community, a spot-on cultural analysis, or an outlandish personality.”

While I haven’t purposefully engaged in ragebait (yet), my career has benefitted from the internet’s love for emotions over intelligence. Negative emotions, in particular, are a powerful force. It’s why being a fashion critic made such a splash, particularly in my early days of 2019 and 2020, when not many people were criticising fashion online yet. Either people agreed with you, in which case they wanted to see you take this thing down - out of a desire for genuine change, or, often, bloodsport. If they disagreed with you, their enraged comments boosted your engagement all the same. (One time, a popular designer’s boyfriend left an angry comment under one of my posts… Not saying who.)

My early content called out the industry in a Diet Prada-esque, outrage culture way. It’s not that my criticisms were unwarranted. Labour abuses at every level from garment worker to model, Eurocentric and paedophilic beauty standards disseminated under the guise of what’s “cool”, power-drunk people simply being cunts: it’s surely an industry worth criticising. But, as an inexperienced writer who had spent a lot of my teens chronically on Tumblr and Twitter, my online persona could easily veer into reactive, righteous, preachy and, for lack of a better word, shout-y.

Even now, I get the biggest response when I speak in certain terms and absolutes, in emotional statements and pithy phrases rather than careful reporting. “Sometimes”, “can be” and “might” are an instant turn off. Saying something like “the latest cover of Vogue was shit” does much better than “these are some innovative young talents you should pay attention to”. As much as people claim they want a better industry, they want to be around for the takedowns, not the building. Because drama and outrage is exciting. Putting in effort is not.

As I’ve matured, my voice has become more considered and less brash. Simultaneously, my reach has dropped. Part of that is my fault for disappearing on multiple hiatuses. (Being in the public eye is terrible for your nervous system, people!) But perhaps it’s also a prison I built for myself. Long ago, the lazy stoner in me realised that certain styles of content do much better than others: scathing critiques, hot takes, meme formats, weird and satirical fashion that grabs attention. Things that provoke.

Before you call me cynical, I’m genuinely interested in these things: as a child of the internet, it fascinates me what manages to make people pause their scroll. But I’d be a big fat liar if I said that the attention wasn’t addictive. Both because likes are quite literally designed to give you dopamine, but also because every new thousand followers promised me a better life. A shortcut to success, a world of excitement, a life outside the dreaded 9 to 5.

If you can elicit a reaction from someone, you’ve won. And if you can do that with a video that takes you two hours as opposed to a book that takes you two years, even better. But this sort of short-form, quick-to-put-together content is just as quickly forgotten. Like fast food, it satisfies for a moment, without nourishing. And an audience bred on this is less likely to sit down and read your writing for 10 minutes or watch a video for 30. (So, if you’re still reading this, let me give you a big virtual kiss!)

As always, I don’t hate the player, I hate the game. It’s not a writer’s fault that execs value short-term views over building a loyal audience. It’s not an influencer’s fault that the algorithm rewards being annoying. You have to do the stupid little dance to get noticed in the attention economy. But, we also have to take a little responsibility at some point.

Can I ignore the cheap dopamine of likes? The short-term spikes in views that promise quick success and fast money? Lasting success comes slowly, away from the peaks and valleys of virality versus flop-dom. I’ve had Reels and TikToks hit a million views on multiple occasions, but that has not changed my life. It’s more valuable to slowly and consistently build a loyal audience who actually cares about what I have to say. Even if it’s very easy to lose sight of that, because I’m used to measuring my value with figures.

But, dear audience, I also need your help. Everyone says they’re over the Kardashians, but they consistently bring in views. People claim they’re sick of hot takes, yet the engagement on my fluffy mic opinion videos would disagree. Use your engagement wisely, because the tech lords are watching. Or, don’t. I hope you like slop.

An unexpected upside to this warm bin juice that we call social media, is that the scroll is getting so bad that it’s starting to counteract its addictive effects. When every other post is someone trying to sell you something or waffling into the camera about some new chronically online discourse or some sort of trending template, why not just pick up a book and block it all out?

I’m rebuilding my algorithm to be filled with strange but comfortingly human content: random people waxing philosophical in grainy videos; uncles enjoying their tomatoes and cucumbers in the mountains; an awkward family party in an Eastern European village… Low cortisol content at its finest: no internet discourse, trends or formats, just vibes. People filming a video like they have no idea what a hook, a microtrend, a ring light or an affiliate link is. But that’s exactly the appeal.

In my high school years, I was friends with huns. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it describes mainstream British womanhood. Think Love Island, The Only Way Is Essex, fake tan and bright white teeth. As a grown adult, I know there’s nothing wrong with this sort of woman. In fact, they’re rather camp and fun to party with. But, as a teenager, I was boiling over with angst. I felt so alien. My friends’ lunchtime conversations, about what boys they fancied and what parties they were invited to, made me want to stick forks into my eyes. So much so that I began to retreat to the library or the toilet cubicle to read John Green books, because I was just so different and special.

I remember thinking how much I craved the friendship of alternative people. If I could just befriend some people with cool style, who listened to Lana Del Rey and had a Tumblr account, life would be good. And so, when it came to sixth form, I befriended a group of girls who fit the bill. They went to indie music gigs, dressed in Urban Outfitters and dated skinny creative guys rather than rugby lads. And it was good. We bonded over Drag Race, smoked weed in our free periods and listened to Fleetwood Mac. But, although I didn’t know it at the time, I still craved something crazier.

Fast forward a few years, a university dropout and the birth of Fat Anna Wintour, and I was enrolling in the famed fashion school, Central Saint Martins. This was my time. My first night in my student accommodation, I knew I was in the right place. Within moments I had met a drag queen who was drunkenly performing Lady Gaga’s newly-released 911 in the smoking area to an audience of nobody. I was in f*g hag heaven.

When people find out I went to CSM, they often ask me how I found it with a sort of grimace that implies they want to hear how awful it was. And while it was extremely panic-inducing at times, I can also safely say that I have never felt so at home anywhere else. It wasn’t even CSM itself that brought me my friends for life, but the student accommodation (shout out to Emily Bowes Court in Tottenham!), which was an amalgamation of students from arts unis across London. Without a doubt, it changed me. It was the academic year 2020/2021, which meant that we were under COVID lockdowns while also trying to enjoy our student lives. It was like a huge, gay, art school Big Brother house.

In this environment, suddenly, I no longer felt like the odd one out. In fact, I felt almost basic. I wanted to befriend the coolest people, the most artsy, the most weird, the most avant garde. And so I did. I was immediately attracted to a guy with a severe black bob, a John Waters-like moustache and a penchant for crossdressing in big fluffy coats and black latex maid outfits. We’re still best friends to this day and I would class him as one of the only people who truly knows me. Later, when we lived together, he swapped that get-up for lounging 24/7 in a hospital gown, which scared our local high street when we used to do our groceries. He’s also an autistic psychic who had a doomsday prepping phase. You can see why I adore him so much.

But, in my quest for the weirdos, I realised something. The outside doesn’t necessarily reflect the inside. I mean, duh, they made an idiom about it: don’t judge a book by its cover. With horror, I realised that some of the most fabulous-looking people at fashion school were… actually kind of boring, uptight and rude. Underneath the eyeliner, the fishnets, the tiny Y2K sunglasses and the platform shoes, were people who were more dedicated to looking interesting than being interesting. And my desire to find the coolest people based on how they looked made me just as bad.

One of my other close friends is the opposite of this phenomenon. He loves the sun beds and the gym, is blonde, handsome and fit, and even had a jaw filler phase at one point. He’s the gay Ken. Despite the Essex twink appearance, he’s one of the most spiritual, emotionally intelligent and intellectually stimulating people I know. Yet, in our student accommodation, he was passed over for not looking artsy enough.

Clearly, I’m attracted to real characters, not just people who curate a persona. And, increasingly, I’ve noticed there are people with 0 personality who look like they’ve been spat out of Pinterest. Now that I’m older and wiser, I can spot it very quickly. I’ve met many people who wear all the right things, have a cool online presence and look like they just came out of a charity shop bin (complimentary.) But the aura is only skin-deep.

Posing has always been a thing, but it’s undeniable how obsessed we are with appearance right now. Even the rise of the term “aesthetic”, a neatly packaged, shoppable label for a type of style, indicates this shallowness. Countless people have written about the death of the subculture: instead of being a punk or goth, people are keen to shop the label and try on a new aesthetic as they please, without any of the substance behind it. And, hey, I’m not here to shit on the kids. We all do cringey things while we’re trying to figure ourselves out. I drew from online aesthetics too as a teen, like Tumblr’s soft grunge. (I had the baby pink creepers and galaxy leggings to prove it.)

But I would argue that the ubiquity of a platform like TikTok today vs Tumblr in its heyday 10 years ago, means that many more people are literate in fashion trends now. When I was 16, maybe a couple people had Tumblr or Pinterest in the whole class. Today, everyone has TikTok. Meaning that someone who might have been sartorially “basic” if they grew up 10 years ago is dressing up in boho chic today. (Of course, everyone had Instagram back then, but in those days it was more for keeping up with friends than being glued to the eternal scroll.)

My disillusionment upon realising that style doesn’t mean substance also extends to the whole industry. (Yeah, I know… where have I been all this time?) I went into fashion because I didn’t want a regular life. I saw it as a world that lets you live outside the norm. Where freaks are celebrated, and being a weirdo is exactly the point. Dressing strangely is an act of expression, but also one of rebellion against the greyness and monotony of life. And I highly, highly respect all those who do that. It takes a lot of balls to be an individual. But individuality is not what makes the trillion dollar industry go round.

I used to think fashion was counter cultural. But the more I learn about the industry, the more I learn that it’s really not. It’s about who can maintain relationships with brands by posting about products and re-wording press releases. Who can attract an audience without actually offending anybody. Fashion is ultimately a job like any other, but the kooky facade made me think otherwise. Outspoken artists like Lee Alexander McQueen, mythical but messy figures like Isabella Blow, these are the exception, not the rule. Maybe in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, there was more of this crazy world that I long for. It certainly feels like it, when I read memoirs like André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches. But, in the 21st century, the fashion world is soul-crushingly corporate.

Last season, I met a drag queen on the front row, right after I had taken an edible. (Sorry! You try watching models walk back and forth all day for hours!) Naturally, they – the drag queen and the edible – got me into fits of giggles. Especially when they started to mimic the boring fashion small talk going on all around us, their eyes glinting cheekily as they mocked the self-seriousness of it all.

“I have too much personality,” I said.

“What, too much personality for fashion?” they replied with a smirk.

And I think I’m beginning to agree.

Fashion is bursting with pretentiousness right now. Social media has made us all idiots (me certainly), which in turn has made reading the most chic, it-girl thing you could do at this moment. Every major brand has done some sort of literary moment. Dior made tote bags out of classics like Dracula and Crime and Punishment. Miu Miu started a literary club, complete with celebs sporting their best librarian chic looks. Coach made bag charms out of seminal books like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Valentino threw an event at a bookstore in New York, while Saint Laurent opened its own in Paris. And that’s just the tip of the nerdy iceberg.

But it’s more than just reading. Every fashion launch, event and activation (three words which I think are basically all the same thing) has to have some sort of deeper meaning to it. It can’t be just: “Hey, here are some new bags!” It must be an exploration of womanhood. A love letter to the psyche. A challenge to the hegemony.

Collections are accompanied by a panel talk with a niche creative on some buzzy topic. Or a film showing. Or a live performance. Or some sort of pledge to change the world. And I get it: the sheer amount of brands and designers creates a need to stand out. It’s not enough to invite people with the promise of a stylish venue and free drinks. You must make it something more profound, something deeper.

Perhaps we also feel a kind of guilt about enjoying fashion for pretty clothes’ sake. In our hearts, we know that there’s no real need for this industry. At least not on this scale. And so, fashion needs to have some sort of deeper meaning to validate its existence. Or, as one of my followers, Madison Cheng-Trpisovsky, messaged in response to my stories: “Luxury fashion is trying to adopt the overwrought language of the art world to justify itself.”

Being an intellectual is chic-er than being a mindless consumer. Spending the afternoon at an exhibition or independent cinema makes you look, like, way more esoteric than spending the afternoon shopping. And the appearance of taste, in a world of Letterboxd and ‘performative reading’, is far more important than really having it.

Society is spilling over with entertainment from every angle. Short-term gratification everywhere the eye can see, from porn to processed foods. In this environment of numbing hedonism, intellectual pursuits are now seen as extra cool. And fashion, ultimately, is all about this cool factor.

Brands engaging with art, while a little bit cringey and a whole lot farty, is not all bad. Using a corporate luxury budget to pay artists is ultimately a good thing. The insufferable part is how these elaborate adverts are positioned as cultural events. We all know that the bottom line is selling people stuff they don’t need. So all this extra fanfare feels like a bunch of expensive, pretentious foreplay.

Attention is already a precious resource, we know this. I’m certainly a brain rot patient: I would read more books as a literal child than I do now. So, the rare times when I can actually bring myself to read, I want to read a real book, not a glorified advert. When I watch a film, I’m in the mood for actual cinema, not a beautifully-shot campaign with some added steps. And if I go to a poetry reading, I’d rather go to an event run by unemployed gay people rather than one with a giant logo in the corner.