If you drew two circles and labelled them “astonishingly famous” and “completely unknown”, most Instagram/YouTube personalities would sit neatly inside the area where those two circles cross. There are so many people in the world now that it’s increasingly possible for someone to be unbelievably famous without anyone ever having heard of them. It would be fair to say that Insta/YouTube lifestyle influencer and singer Gabbie Hannah, or “Just a girl doin her best and making a fool of herself while she’s at it” as she describes herself, falls into that category.
Gabbie’s 6.5 million YouTube subscribers and 3.8 million Instagram followers give her undeniable clout – her fans love her brand of lifestyle vlogging, professionally polished music videos and gymspiration pics – but her latest piece parodies the otherworldly and unattainable existences often peddled by some of the biggest in the sponcon game.
With “I Faked Going to Coachella…”, Gabbie details how she used photoshop wizardry to fool her followers into believing she went to the Californian festival, which has become more synonymous with celebrity and influencer culture than it has with the artists who perform there.
Gabbie also chronicled her festival experience on her Insta story, posing in festival garb in her “cute” AirBnb and reposting videos of actual festival attendees: “I cannot believe I woke up in time for this but so glad I did” she wrote over someone else’s video of Kanye West’s 10AM Sunday Service.
In her YouTube video revealing the fakery, Gabbie said: “If you’ve paid close attention to me over the last couple or few years, you know I’m not Coachella’s biggest advocate… That was the purpose of this whole thing was how easy it is to fake things on social media.”
She added: “People look at people on Instagram and social media and they think, ‘wow their life is impossibly perfect, that body that vacation that car...’ so much of it’s fake, and that’s okay, I’m not shading anybody who does that on social media because it is a viable career but for an average viewer who’s just watching these things and is firing for these things, just know that those things aren’t always as attainable as they seem.”
We could be witnessing the beginning of the end for influencer culture, when even they themselves are tired of the game.
Watch Gabbie’s full explainer on YouTube here