Carina Chocano’s Vanity Fair feature on Courtney Adamo, Amelia Fullarton and other ‘Instagram Influencer Mamas’ in Byron Bay is beautifully written and thought-provoking. It is also savage and scathing.
Why the American magazine despatched a writer and a photographer down under to eviscerate these women – in particular – so brutally is unclear.
Each of the ‘influencers’ from the ‘Coast of Utopia’ has had the gall to amass thousands of followers on Instagram, to surf, to wear linen, to live in minimalist chicly-renovated homes, to have kids and to run successful businesses off the back of their loyal followers. (Or, is it the other way around?)
They are all almost impossibly beautiful. Their homes, their children, themselves. One of the lead protagonists, Courtney Adamo, has committed another crime: the mother-of-five heralds from an ultra-wealthy family in America.
So far, despite the abundance of cause for envy, it still isn’t exactly clear why these women earned Vanity Fair’s wrath for the chasm between reality and perception in the Instagram age.
Certainly these women are remarkably privileged and ridiculously photogenic. Their lives look almost comically effortless and perfect. But they’re far from alone.
Search every nook and cranny of Instagram and you will uncover ‘Influencers’ with enormous followings spruiking various aspects of their equally unattainably beautiful lives.
Their wardrobes. Their renovations. Their bodies. Their children. Their beauty regimes. Their make up. Their parenting. Their storage solutions. Their travels. Pick a niche and you will find any number of genetically-blessed women (mostly) making a living from having made a life on the gram their thing.
Plenty of it is icky and artificial and discombobulating.
But you could be forgiven, after reading Chocano’s essay, for thinking that Adamo and Fullarton and Aimee Winchester and Amanda Callan are not just the only women the world over using Instagram to their advantage in creating commercial success but that they created materialism. That they are responsible for the commodification of life as we now know it.
Making this Byron clique the scapegoats for all the evils in the age of Instagram Influencers seems rich.
Chocano’s main rub with these Byron-based mamas centres around a lack of authenticity in the image of life they pedal. They use social media themselves but ban their kids from screens. They fail to recognise adequately the privileges they enjoy.


Byron Bay Compounds of Cacao and Beyond 


The 10 Best Foods Recommended by Experts 2019

 

You may know of Erik Larson from his excellent book on the 1893 World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City. Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin was published in 2011 and tells the story of William Dodd, America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany, roughly from the time of his appointment in 1933 to the events of the Night of the Long Knives, the July 1934 purge that consolidated Adolf Hitler’s power.