Don't worry, hating infuencers has become perfectly normal

If Fashion Week has taught me anything, it's to always moderate the use of Instagram during the days of the shows. Because there, in the feeds that are often a reason for peace and tranquility, photos of influencers are multiplied without any logic, of those who were there and want us to know at all costs. "But who is this?" I ask myself as I scroll through the photos of the Balenciaga show. We have the same shoes, but while for me getting them has meant months of incessant stress to store employees, a squeeze in my stomach before placing my card on the POS and a few days of guilt, for him they are instead one of the many #gifted stories to be posted during the week. Yet another package that will end up in some corner of the house after yet another catwalk immortalized in his immaculate feed. «But what happened to A$AP Nast?» I ask someone as I see him getting out of his van with tinted windows. He's everywhere, today in Paris and a few days earlier in Berlin. I wonder how he does it, but above all I wonder why he does it, what elevates him to the status of "person worthy of living the life that some of us dream of". The one of runway shows, parties and ever-changing outfits who goes to the Balenciaga show thinking Georgia is an STD.

«There's also Euphoria's along with that other guy, but what does he do?». I don't know, and probably at this point I'm also too tired to try to decipher cryptic Instagram bios where emoji and fundraisers come together without any logic. But I realize that being an influencer is not an easy job, it takes dedication, but most of all a lot of patience, as well as some nerve to ask some of your friends to take at least twenty pictures of you in the middle of the street as if suddenly the rest of the world's population had disappeared. In fact, you who have the same shoes as me wear them much better than I do and indeed, in your feed there is a photo that is exactly like the one I wanted to take but that, partly for lack of ability and partly because after a while it was enough, I never did. That's why I think of you as an anonymous influencer, a constant presence of street style with the gift of ubiquity, you who alternates a touching Instagram Story about Ukraine with one in which you thank the brand for the 800€ hoodie they gave you.

Don't worry, hating influencers has become perfectly normal. We feel that they have stolen our lives, that for some reason unexplainable to us they are allowed not to work a day of their lives while playing the part of those who do in a short circuit that resets meritocracy to zero, creating nightmarish crossovers in which Kim Kardashian sits a few feet away from Vanessa Friedman and Tim Blanks. But if we put our hatred aside, we realize that perhaps today, among the many problems of fashion, there is precisely the use and abuse of faces, of appearances at fashion shows in full outfits that should make us dream and that instead only make us regret our routine, often questioning the ambitions of that handful of fools who cyclically decide to put their dreams in a world that eats dreams for breakfast. It seems absurd that in the era of Web 3 and the Metaverse, in the era in which a brand can communicate with its buyers even through the screen of the refrigerator, we have to resort to Alexa Demie or Evan Mock to entice us to buy or even just to create reputation around a brand. But does it make sense? How many of those who watch Euphoria will become Balenciaga customers? Certainly less than those who will wonder why Polo G was present at one of the most important fashion shows in recent years.

Perhaps, for this very reason, ours is not hatred, but only annoyance at the idea they have of us, of those who observe and watch the long parades of more or less well-known faces, too naïve to appreciate something without seeing it worn by the protagonist of a Netflix series and somehow complicit in a mechanism that is gradually distancing fashion from those who appreciate it more than an anonymous influencer who is filmed eating an avocado toast but who sits in the shows also thanks to us, our likes and the importance we give her. But if it's true that "haters gonna hate", I still don't understand what A$AP Nast has to do with it.