Side Chat 4/21/22

Fyre Fest or just annoying? All about Revolve Fest

Hi,

I hope everyone is enjoying the Coachella content thus far.

*More like everyone. I know I am getting old because watching all the Coachella content made me feel tired. 😅

This week I wrote…

Why do people love these baby clothes with sexual innuendos?

I am at the age where a lot of people I know are having babies, and I have started to browse baby clothes as a result. Over time, I have started to find it ironic that so many onesies I see in stores and online have sexual innuendos, given the current rhetoric of the Republican Party right now (who buys a baby a onesie that reads, “I came from Nuttin’"??!?!!?!)

As I wrote:

“These days, the situation is much the same at big box stores and smaller online retailers alike. You can signpost that a baby is a ‘ladies’ man,’ that ‘ladies love him,’ and that he is a ‘lady killer.’ You can put a baby in a shirt that says he’s a lover boy, too. OK…noted.

Predictably, items designed for girls are even more cringe. While baby boys can unknowingly boast about how well they will be cleaning up with women, baby girls get to convey that they are off-limits, because they are under the control of their fathers. Stay away from me! This baby is not allowed to date, EVER, because I already found the man of my dreams, and it’s my DADDY. (Gross.) While baby boys get to be their dad’s teammates, girls must be kept under lock and key. Even Saturday Night Live has noticed the phenomenon, mocking dating-themed infant outfits in a recent sketch.”

Read on for what I found out and for more examples of the clothes I found. 😬

This week on the internet…

Was Revolve Festival the new Fyre Fest? Well…

As Coachella took over our feeds last weekend, a ~scandal~ began to emerge. Multiple influencers were complaining that the Revolve Festival, a huge event thrown by the clothing brand adjacent to the music festival, was a disaster on level with the infamous Fyre Festival.

As The Cut reported:

“How come some influencers are mad? In short: transportation. In order for invitees (whose last name isn’t Kardashian or Jenner) to get into the festival, they needed to use the fest’s shuttle service, which was allegedly less organized than some influencers had hoped. A series of tweets from Los Angeles magazine’s Joseph Kapsch first brought attention to the transportation drama. ‘Influencers stranded in the dirt with no water, under the hot sun for HOURS, waiting for buses,’ Kapsch wrote on Saturday, adding that fights had allegedly broken out and the police had been called. ‘Security had crowds of influencers yelling how ‘important they were and why they deserved the first seat,’ Kapsch continued. To those at home who gleefully watched influencers unravel during 2017’s Fyre Fest, the sentiment sounded familiar.

However, the major complaint among these invitees wasn’t that the festival didn’t actually exist … it was that they weren’t able to get in despite being invited. TikToker Averie Bishop posted a video calling the event ‘absolute chaos,’ claiming the shuttle service was disorganized and bordered on ‘dangerous.’ Bishop said she was among a group of people who waited in line for a shuttle for at least two hours but never got in.”

This went super viral over the weekend, likely because anytime you compare something to a big, juicy news event like Fyre the media starts chomping at the bit. But, as The Cut pointed out, while the event sounds frustrating and annoying, it’s not really the same as being stranded on an island with no food or shelter. (Revolve has apologized for the drama).

This has of course led people to mock the influencers who complained about Revolve Fest as ridiculous. But as blogger Elise Purdon pointed out on her stories yesterday, the influencers’ anxiety is a little more nuanced.

Revolve Fest has become one of the biggest and most important networking opportunities for influencers, especially smaller ones, every year, and many are dying to get in to advance their careers. Some of their reactions were likely driven by career anxiety of missing the festival and thus a huge opportunity, rather than being sweaty and bored. “The real problem is that Revolve has such a power over the industry that people are willing to fight and shove and stand all day in the desert to try and get on a bus to get into this thing where they aren’t even getting paid to create free advertising,” she said. (Many influencers receive store credit in exchange for posting about the invite-only event, according to reports).

So that’s something to keep in mind. But until I see a sad sandwich, I’m not ready to call this Fyre 2.0 just yet.

Some Instagram moms are paying their kids for their posts

Those who have been reading my work for a while know I have written a good amount about the lack of protections for children featured on creator accounts.

This week, Phoebe Bain at Morning Brew chatted with some parenting creators who are charging brands higher rates when her kids are featured.

As she wrote:

“There’s one creator-economy group that has, perhaps, been left out of the compensation conversation: kids.

They’re posing for sponsored Instagram pics, too. The Motherhood, an influencer marketing agency that partly specializes in parenting influencers, recently shared with us that it surveyed 359 influencers in its network, and 97% said they include their children in sponsored content.

But how often are those kids paid for their work? According to The Motherhood’s survey, 53% of parent-fluencers don’t charge an added fee when including their children in content, whereas 47% do.”

I wonder if that number will increase in the next few years?

One more thing…

This article from Caity Weaver of the New York Times about trying to be a #vanlife person for a week had me loling multiple times. Highly recommend.

Have a great week,

Stephanie