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Arielle norma charmas5/4/2023 ![]() Threads of this kind are breeding grounds for anonymous users to pick apart and amateur-sleuth about things-real or imagined-that they deem as both important and their business, despite the fact that they do not actually know these influencers. In the last year, Reddit commenters have noticed some changes in Charnas’s feed, giving way to venomous threads devoted to sleuthing real and imagined perceptions about her life. But with that comes a following that feels entitled to know more and more and more-and if that following feels like things are being hidden from them, or faked, they feel betrayed. Hers is the height of aspirational content, in an age when that aesthetic has long ago peaked.Ĭharnas, who, according to Business Insider, can charge $20,000 per sponsored post and about half that for posts to her Instagram Story, has forged her own star using the details of her life. It is a window into a perfect-looking family, business, and life of a 30-something rich girl on the Upper East Side of New York City (who in the summer goes to the Hamptons, and winter, South Florida). She benefited from being one of the few influencer pioneers, planting the flag and hanging on to the pole long enough to amass 1.3 million Instagram followers who have tuned in to her daily posts about what she’s wearing (lately, some combination of The Row, Chanel, and Hermès), and the goings-on of her husband and three young children, whose day-to-day lives she’s chronicled for the masses since their births. Charnas, as a 20-something in posed outfit-of-the-day posts made to impress an ex-boyfriend, started blogging in 2009 in the nascent form of the medium. To understand where we are today, it’s useful to take a look back. And not for the first or last time, but maybe the most obvious time, as I talked to people around the controversy, what transpired pointed out how quickly the internet can collectively lose its mind and how there are real-life, actual implications to all of that anonymous inanity. It was Pizzagate for overeducated, coastal millennials. For group chats and Slack channels and brunch tables up and down the coasts, it was D-Day. But to the millions of people who have, over the course of a decade, spent hundreds of hours following Charnas’s ascent from pioneering fashion blogger to influencer to brand founder to subject of online ire, what unfolded last month was the mother of all schadenfreude bombs. ![]() ![]() Because to the rest of the world, in the light of actual reality, the contours of what happened to Charnas would sound-do sound-deranged. What happened online to Charnas last month, and how it involves a grandmother who lives halfway across the country, is near impossible to explain to anyone not plugged into a very specific corner of internet culture. ![]() That’s why the text about influencer Arielle Charnas and her clothing company, Something Navy, grabbed her. It was about lunchtime in Memphis in early December when Julie Pollack Belz pulled out her phone and opened Instagram, where she’s in a group chat about celebrity and royal gossip with 14 other people. The 60-year-old grandmother-who worked in broadcasting and public relations and is a self-described “pop culture whore”-says that she, “like everybody else with probably too much downtime or too much negativity in their life” gets on social media to rant about this celebrity or that influencer.
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