MEME QUEENS
Marie Claire Australia|October 2023
Ah, memes. They make us laugh, get us thinking and hold up a mirror to society. But what becomes of the people behind our favourite faces on the internet? Alley Pascoe tracks them down to find out
Alley Pascoe
MEME QUEENS

Imagine walking down the street and running into a stranger wearing a T-shirt with your face on it. How would you feel if you found out you were the butt of a family’s in-joke for a decade? What about if you saw someone dressed up as you for Halloween? Becoming a meme is an unusual experience; it’s hard to comprehend how it would feel for millions of people to know your face, or to be thought of as “Success Kid”, “Disaster Girl” or “Trying to Hold a Fart Next to a Cute Girl in Class Guy”. Here, we speak to three regular people who became meme-famous and lived to tell the tale.

“I was about 11 years old, playing dress up at my friend’s house and taking Polaroid photos. I pulled an outfit together from her dress-up box and she put my hair in pigtails and had me put my [dental] retainer in. She gathered some Goosebumps books and told me to give the most excited expression possible. That’s how the photo came about, but I had no idea how it went on to appear on Reddit, which is how it became a meme.

This story is from the October 2023 edition of Marie Claire Australia.

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This story is from the October 2023 edition of Marie Claire Australia.

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