In Defense of Emma Chamberlain

Identity, celebrity, and anonymity on the internet.

Mar 18, 2024

Hi! I’m in California, my second favorite state, for the second week of spring break. I’m finally tan and happy to be near the ocean.

The ADHOC categories of the week are Avatars, Distractions, Handover, Orange County, and Emma Chamberlain. Thank you to Sarah, Ryan, Zack, and Chela for writing parts of this letter. It’s a little longer, but it might be my favorite so far.

A: Avatars

I’m reading a book about video game makers, and it’s made me think about the avatars I used to inhabit in the early age of multiplayer, internet-based games: Webkinz, Poptropica, Movie Star Planet, Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin, Minecraft.

Circa 2010, I would log onto my family's Mac and launch myself into quests, interior design, and live chatrooms. My username never contained my real name, and I optimized my avatars for cuteness, not self-similarity. In her essay "'Real' personhood" writer Terry Nguyen marks this era as the last time the internet was truly anonymous and unlinked to our offscreen social lives. I could be a white poodle, a water fairy, and a dip-dyed blonde movie star all at the same time. I could make friends without knowing anything about them (Scary? Awesome?).

Ten years later, our avatars have our own names and faces. To have an Instagram account in 2024 is to be a creator (or at least feel pressure to create) to contribute to the digital web that connects all of us, to fix yourself into permanence, to monetize your content and escape your 9-5. Some of my friends who want to be artists, writers, comedians, and entrepreneurs think virality is the fast-pass to achieving their creative goals. It means less to be backed by the right agency or work the right entry-level job. If you have talent, you can take it online.

Even as a 21-year-old student, I find myself performing for the internet—filming TikToks, photographing the food I cook, writing this letter—and possibly replacing the games I used to play. Maybe I accumulate likes and followers instead of Webkinz dollars; I decorate my social profiles instead of my home/avatar. Why do I feel an urge to turn my hobbies into consumable internet bites? Does the commodification of my content necessitate the commodification of myself?

Not to make this entirely dark…but it is not only influencers who are subject to the attention economy and the monetization of everything on the internet. Big tech platforms want all of its users to become creators to become sellers. Instagram and TikTok are marketplaces as much as they are content sharing platforms.

During lockdown, I played a lot of Animal Crossing. It felt peaceful to return to a game isolated from the uncertainty of real life. I harvested fruit and welcomed new villagers and went fishing for rare specimen. Eventually I grew tired of making my beautiful island more beautiful. I haven’t touched it since.

D: Distractions (Sarah Feng)

“Junior year, it has felt easier and easier to lose myself in work. I’ve been developing new distractions that make each day a little different.

One of these is rewatching Studio Ghibli films as I do my homework. I think it’s fun that there’s competition between the work I’m doing (which is becoming increasingly interesting) and the movie in the background. I notice new details and touches I never did upon my first watch, and even though I tell myself I won’t be distracted, I am pulled into the storyline once again. It’s never been rational to me why we derive so much enjoyment from rewatching things if we already know the plot intimately. But sometimes I really cherish that feeling of being pulled off track and scrambling back to what you need to do.

I think distractions make student life so enjoyable and unpredictable, and I find that they are moments in which I feel the most carried away, that is to say, not in control of myself. I am the most child-like, which is a precious feeling in college.

Here’s a photograph of something that’s distracted me recently:

My friend and I are travelling in Rome. Although we stuck to a practiced itinerary the first few days, we decided to begin wandering without a goal in mind. We began to feel enveloped by the city; we stumbled upon neighbourhoods untouched by tourism where Vespas roared past and little lights dripped down the bricked sides of restaurant walls, and wisterias leaned out from beautiful windows. We walked by the river aimlessly and found ourselves distracted by a man juggling sticks set aflame. We circled around a garden for hours and came across what I photographed above — a locked secret garden with lemon trees. It felt very Italian. I know that’s American of me to say but I think beauty distracts us often, it arrests us, and it feels like a moment in which we are not in control of ourselves. That’s what distractions do; they remind us of the bits of ourselves pulled towards the unknown.”

H: Handover (?)

According to this Puck article, Glossier is doing quite well and might be looking for an acquisition.

All I’ll say is that I was a Glossier groupie in middle school and would go to the store every time I was in SoHo: I loved the millennial pink, the packaging, the free stickers, the way I ordered makeup like I was at a restaurant. But I knew from the first uses that I did not like the products. The lip balm was glorified fragrant vaseline, the cheek tints were oversaturated and patchy, the concealer wouldn’t blend right. I liked their Solution exfoliator for a while, but then I stopped using it when my acne cleared.

Rachel Strugatz writes that “it’s not about the products; frankly, it doesn’t matter how good they are, as long as they’re not terrible. The line’s voice, aesthetic, and essence was clear in everything it touched, from product launches to merch, and was probably best executed in its own stores, which as of last year still had lines to get in.”

I agree, which is ultimately frustrating. In a fair and true world, great branding wouldn’t save mediocre products. To suggest some alternatives, my favorite (mostly clean!) beauty right now includes the concealer from Kosas, flawless finish primer from Charlotte Tilbury, niacinamide and hyaluronic acid serums from The Ordinary, liquid blush from Saie, and the lip gloss from Merit.

O: Orange County

My friends and I are visiting my roommate Grace in Orange County. Yesterday we walked around Newport Beach for the St. Patrick’s Day festivities and played hot seat and watched the third Twilight movie.

Things you can find in OC:

Men with green beards
Green beer
Jumbo farmers market strawberries
“Califoriental Cuisine”
Dolphins in the Pacific

C: Emma Chamberlain

If I become attached to someone, I will watch and love everything they make. Case and point…Emma Chamberlain. I started watching her when she was a Bay Area high schooler, trying on outfits and driving around her neighborhood. I loved her for her relatability, her ability to make fun of herself.

Then something strange happened. In her vlogs, she’d string together clips of her playing the drums, stalking around her LA mansion in a bathrobe or baggy hoodie, and editing videos late at night. At the same time, Vogue hired her to do Met Gala carpet interviews and published thirty-or-so interactions between Emma and celebrities like Gigi Hadid and Billie Eilish. In one of them, Jack Harlow famously tells her he loves her. Her coffee company was gaining traction. She had a rockstar boyfriend. While Emma claimed to be lonely and sad, I didn’t believe her, because she was rich and successful. I wrote an essay for my first Yale English class on the paradox of her ascent to fame, oscillating between authenticity and inaccessible glamor.

But she probably was lonely and sad, and I can’t imagine living alone in a gargantuan, empty house made it any better. I used to resent famous people who claimed to be unhappy—I didn’t understand how you could work so hard for something and then hate its side effects (cyberbullying, strangers recognizing you in public, anxiety etc.). But now I think being a celebrity must be so isolating and difficult because people stop treating you like a person.

Emma has a magnetism that is difficult to place: she charms you, but she also meets you at your level. Her tone is sarcastic without being condescending. She’s generous with her laughter.

Some people accuse her podcast as being devoid of substance and her new style of videos as boring and her recent pivot to “fashion girlie” as disingenuous. Two of my friends are in the anti camp:

Ryan: “The non-digital-media media industry has clearly latched onto her as someone that they will continuously invite everywhere and throw dollars at despite a declining audience and lack of substance or cohesion in her content, so I literally never think about her until she’s invited to places like the Vanity Fair Oscar party where she does interviews about how she’s never seen any of the classics. And not in a fun way like how Dominic Sessa (who is a brilliant actor)’s favorite movie is Over the Hedge, but in this really boring way that is just super annoying. But I’ve gotten used to her presence because she’s clearly not going away anytime soon. Great coffee though!”

Zack: “I’ve been watching Emma for years. Fans used to talk about “the old Emma” and how they missed that persona. Frankly, it’s surprising to me that someone’s career can feel so long and yet have only lasted 6 or 7 years. The thing is, she won’t do something crazy like a Tana Mongeau or Trisha Paytas to stay relevant. It seems like she’ll merely be around as long as she keeps interviewing celebrities on the red carpet.”

To this I say two things:

No one goes to Emma for intellectual rigor, and she’s never promised to deliver it either. I also think her podcast is where she’s been able to be the most vulnerable about her breakup, her loneliness, her nicotine addiction, her body.
The high fashion images and aesthetic vlogs feel to me like a protective layer. Emma no longer lives a normal/relatable life. As a part of growing up, she’s being more selective about the images she shares, which I respect.

I’ll let Chela (my long lost roommate and BFF) have the last word:

“Does anyone else have a comfort youtube video? Mine is Emma Chamberlain’s first Paris fashion week vlog from 2019. She visits the Eiffel Tower, skips the museums, shops a lot at Zara, and goes to a French spin class. There is some distinct combination of confident independence, cringe, and charm in this video that is addictive and comforting. In her videos today, Emma is almost unrecognizable from the Emma of that Paris vlog. Her cringe changed to composure, and she is no longer someone who is out of place in scenes like Paris fashion week. I remain loyal to her, and she kept me company during Covid. I felt myself gain composure and maturity along with her. Over the summer, I showed up to a hot Pilates class to find Emma on the mat right next to me. Having grown up in LA, I never get starstruck, but I could not bring myself to speak to her. Sitting in my car an hour later, I decided on what I would have said: Your videos were the first thing that my best friend Arden and I bonded over. And it’s true—thank you Emma. ❤️"

See you next week, I’ll be back at school!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.