Over the weekend, The New York Times reported on a marketing agency’s bold vision: a penthouse apartment designed solely for Instagram influencers to use in their photos.
Village Marketing has set up a 2,400 square foot penthouse apartment in SoHo to be a millennials’ dream: millennial pink couches, white walls, gold accents, and even a rooftop deck.
It was opened in August, and according to the 35-year-old founder of the marketing agency, is designed to serve a need: many influencers ‘struggle’ to find picturesque locations to take the photos they need to promote their sponsors.
It’s a tragedy that nobody has reported on this very real struggle until now.
The marketing agency recently invited influencers to use the apartment, although all of the influencers included in the New York Times article are fairly low-level, imo. No Kardashians here! I guess that’s because upper-level influencers can afford to redecorate their own homes to meet their strict Instgram influencer standards.
Everything about this is so incredibly bleak. We all know social media is a performance, and none more so than Instagram, but taking photos in the bed of an apartment that a marketing agency has set up specifically for that purpose is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever heard.
There’s a reason YouTubers have such dedicated and loyal fans: people feel like they’re getting a glimpse into their lives with their videos, however edited they might be. There’s none of that with so many Instagram personalities, no relationship-building or sense of fan community; it’s all hollow and driven by an interest in outward appearances. The only things a certain class of influencers have in common are their aesthetics and an interest in making money for every post they make.
It’s all a little too Ingrid Goes West for my liking.
One of the influencers admitted that Instagram creates a false reality, but said that “having a place like this, for me, is not about pretending your life looks like something else. It’s about having a space you need to get your work done.”
It seems slightly suspicious to me that the space you use to get your work done looks exactly like the spaces every other influencer uses to get their work done, until you can’t tell where one space ends and another begins.
It also starts to become a problem when young people who aren’t as aware of how constructed and artificial Instagram is start to aspire to the carefully curated perfection they see on their feeds. At that point, it stops being harmless and starts being a problem. See: all of the young women buying skinny tea and elasticated corsets because Instagram influencers (including the Kardashians) told them to.
We all know Instagram is fake; I just wish influencers would own up to that more often instead of perpetuating the lie.
(Header photo courtesy of Neon)