46 new york | september 16–29, 2019
involve posing with various lotions and a tacked-on message
about self-love. Sometimes, brands our publisher had secured
for Rookie partnerships wanted a post on my Instagram as part
of the deal, too.
This is where the luxury rental building comes in. I was asked
to live at 300 Ashland, right by the Atlantic Terminal in Brook-
lyn, as part of a campaign the real-estate company Two Trees
was doing to promote three new developments. In a deal that
covered my rent for a year, I agreed to do press about the build-
ing, host an event for my followers on its plaza, and post about
the building and neighborhood on my account. I’d long shared
my living space online and decided to see this as no different,
except I would get paid. And so, for a year, I lent my face to pro-
mote a borrowed home.
I was paid a flat rate for the whole year, not by the post, and
the question of how often to post was left pretty open. Mostly,
the marketing firm deferred to me, as they too wanted my Ins-
tagram to feel like I was posting the same content I would nor-
mally. Before the campaign was announced, the firm asked me
to post a photo showing I had moved, geotagging the building
but not tagging it as an #ad. I complied, figuring I’d have shared
that I’d moved anyway. Of course, that didn’t make it not an ad,
so I was called out in the comments for not being transparent.
From then on, the firm asked that I use the hashtag
#300AshlandPartner.
Shortly thereafter—June 2017—Instagram introduced the
partnership tag feature, so that influencers could clearly iden-
tify paid posts and there’d be no more confusion. Today, along
with partnership tags, there’s a Checkout feature, available only
to select influencers, that allows their followers to purchase
products directly through sponsored posts. Sponcon has also
become more common among people who are not considered
influencers first: art curators, magazine editors, actors, illus-
trators. But in those early days, at least among some of my
followers, the idea of advertising that posed as organic only
read as creepy. I don’t know if they now see deals like mine
more as a necessary evil or (as I did) an easy way to subsidize
lower-paying projects, or if they’ve just accepted that Insta-
gram has become one big shopping mall.
Some of the criticism I received included speculation around
my financial situation. With multiple high profile jobs, how
much more did I really need? I learned that influence, visibility,
and cultural currency imply a wealth that the imagination can
really run with. But as plenty of actors, models, and content cre-
ators can attest, visibility and money do not have a direct cor-
relation. The internet is full of people making free content in the
hope of eventually being known enough to get sponsored or
hired. Actors receive press and accolades for movies for which
they were paid scale. Until recently, models regularly walked
shows for luxury fashion brands for trade.
Conversely, some types of visibility can pay disproportion-
ately well: I once made more money doing a daylong photo
shoot for a fashion campaign than I did performing in eight
shows a week in five different nonprofit theater productions
combined. Rookie helped me make a personal brand I could
leverage for money, but I never profited from it financially—the
two times I did pay myself for my work at Rookie, that money
went back into it soon after.
None of this negates the criticisms I received for my initial lack
of transparency or for the building’s contribution to gentrification.
It only serves to highlight the way the black hole can make some-
thing as personal as one’s finances seem knowable to strangers.I saw Rookie not as a financially successful business but as a
publication good enough to organically gain millions of readers.
Still, I felt like a fraud for being more valuable as a personal
brand making money on Instagram than as a founder whose
business couldn’t afford to give her a salary and who couldn’t get
certain investors or buyers onboard or chickened out from pur-
suing those who’d expressed interest. In an ad campaign or on
Instagram, my face tells a story of self-made, multi-hyphenate
success; it represents Rookie’s influence and the web’s democra-
tization of fashion and publishing. Those were all real. But they
felt less real if I considered that I could only actually support
myself using the face part.
In the mirror, my face tells me the story of my own anxiety.
In 2014, the same year I moved to New York, with my face on
the cover of this very magazine, I developed a habit of picking
at its skin. I sometimes do it mindlessly in the middle of
another activity and almost always if I find myself in front of a
mirror. Once I start, I continue until I feel some release via
peel, pop, et cetera. (Sorry.) Once I realize what I have done, I
examine my reflection and feel like a stupid feral animal. I hate
that my anxiety is so easily betrayed by my face, that whether
I go bare or wear cakey makeup, I am wearing my psychology
for all to see. The self-loathing leads to more picking, and the
cycle continues.
Of all the nervous habits to have, why claw at my greatest
asset? One friend suggests it is a territorial response to public-
ness, a way of exercising control. Another thinks it is a subcon-
scious rejection of the type of fame I have both relied on and
resented. I wonder if—much like my old refusal to see Rookie
as a business—the longer I continue to pick at my face, the
longer I feel less like a participant in the adult world and more
like a teenager who is still just visiting. I imagine that the day
my skin clears will be the day I become a woman, greeted by
new forms of sexism and ageism. With scabs and pimples, I am
not taking any of this too seriously; I am dodging certain
expectations before I can fail to meet
them. I am still an advanced child,
rather than an average adult.
Whatever the source of this anxiety, it
seemed foolish to do things I knew were
making it worse. So in the fall of 2017,
I evaluated which activities could go.
Rookie, at that time, felt nonnegotiable.
So did promoting it on Instagram. And
promoting my sponsored apartment and my acting projects
and my general self I make money off, also on Instagram. But
the actual act of posting—and of mindlessly scrolling through
the black hole, looking for a self-destructive hit, much in the
style of skin-picking—that could go. I asked a woman who had
done personal-assistant work for me if she wanted a new gig.
Since then, I’ve texted her my photos andcaptions,andshehas
posted them on my behalf.ACTIV
TheRelatable
Aspirationalphotos
nolongerperformas
wellasonesthatfeel
#real.(Continued on page 120)