A THING of the PAST

Is the reign of the influencer officially over? In a landscape defined by a constant craving for attention, one editor questions whether the search for online validation has finally come to an end.

- MAYA MENON

Picture this: it's the early 2000s. Your fashion and beauty inspiration comes from the style columns in magazines and a new wave of boundarypushing music videos. Every afternoon is punctuated with the eyeliner-laden Fefe Dobson belting out your favourite tunes while clad in a dizzying combination of stripes and fishnets.

Avril Lavigne is at the height of her career, challenging the precious pop princess persona of the time with her vocal chops and gender-defying outfits. Your aspirational vision of the world is in technicolour but at a safe distance, within the boxed-up walls of a desktop or a television screen. That is, until the conception of YouTube. With the explosion of the American video-sharing platform comes a tsunami of self-expression you've never experienced before.

Figures of inspiration are no longer simply desirable. Instead, they seem within reach, their lives achievable and their experiences, relatable. Their proclamations of their favourite things-a bubblegum-smelling body wash or a glittery eyeshadow-sound as if they might be coming from your best friend. What you're experiencing is the birth of the modernday influencer, the contemporary It girl. This soon branches out into a subset of digital personalities across Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest. In the blink of an eye, you're in a digital playground with confidants and tastemakers on call.

Most notably first introduced by the British novelist and scriptwriter Elinor Glyn, the concept of the It girl dates back to 1927. In Glyn's biography, titled Inventing the It Girl (2022), the definition underscores the book: "It girl, n. colloquial (orig.