It feels like in the past few years the 100-foot fence that was holding all the influencers back from areas that felt like true celebrity spaces, has been completely knocked down. Now you have a swarm of fashion vloggers and influencers popping up on every red carpet. A lot of people don’t like seeing internet personalities cross over into the area of being considered a celebrity. As the years are going on, the line between celebrity and influencer just continues to get blurrier, hence why Tiktokers keep showing up to the met gala. To begin with, we think it’s important to define what an influencer is.
Not every person with a platform online necessarily falls into this category. There are tons of different genres of content you can make that can earn you a platform online. But to be an influencer it’s more of the lifestyle or beauty creators that tend to fit that category because they are more likely to rub shoulders with actual celebrities. It can get a bit confusing because, for example, gaming channels have millions of followers, so technically number wise has a lot more influence but these people don’t fit in the category of influencers.
The further you go down the celebrity tier, the more blurry the boundary between celebrity and influencers becomes. There are a lot of mid-to-low-level celebrities these days who may be regarded more influencers than celebrities because of how they conduct online. To create promotion for themselves, they must be active online, which often leads to their coming across as an influencer themselves.
There is something funny about the war between influencers and celebrities, since it isn’t about influencers and celebrities fighting each other, but rather the common audience fighting the influencers on behalf of the celebrity. The actual road for these influencers to get into these spaces has not been an easy one.
The reason things started to shift in their favor was mainly that celebrities realized what they could gain from them. It cannot be a coincidence that most of the first experiences of influencers and celebrities coming together were when they were promoting the said celebrity’s new product lines. We had seen celebrities interact with YouTubers before but not to this extent and it was around this time that we saw influencers start attending smaller award shows.
Since 2019 influencers have been scoring invites to way bigger events like the Met Gala and Grammys. It was not to the liking of many people because they had previously seen these events as too good for anybody but a refined famous folk.
Last year, Addison Rae and Dixie D’Amelio, as well as several older YouTubers, attended the Met Gala, but it was the two newest faces that sparked the most commotion. Some may find this scenario amusing, but most Twitter users become agitated while discussing it.
Influencers get a lot of side eyes and hatred for going to these events but there are some good moments sometimes. The hatred for influencers and events doesn’t start and end at the Met Gala though. A comparable situation happened at the Grammys. But views on this big event vary from person to person. According to some people, the Grammys should invite Tiktokers to participate, especially those who created the dances that made a lot of the nominated songs popular. There have always been famous people for just being famous and showing up to these events.
We might agree with what some people are saying online that the wrong influencers went and that there are people more deserving, it would be weird to pretend that the celebrity world isn’t always about numbers in the first place. It is not about who is more famous, it is about who is more relevant to fashion on 90% of the guest list.
Right now, there’s never been a stronger dislike for celebrities in these events because of how pompous they are yet it feels like more determined than ever to gatekeep the average out of them. It’s to the point where they are making up how regal these events used to be in the past.
People have recently become a lot more neutral about it all. It’s mainly because they don’t view those celebrity spaces anymore to be nearly as glamourous and amazing as they used to. Celebrity culture is dying, and they must start paying attention to the people that younger generations care about. If they don’t, they’re going to completely fall off.
