The Frivolancer Economy

When Fashion Ran Out of Attention

There was a time when becoming a fashion influencer looked suspiciously like escaping work.

You dressed well, went somewhere photogenic, photographed yourself holding something expensive and gradually converted the performance of having a desirable life into an occupation. The product was ostensibly fashion, but the real product was aspiration. The handbag, hotel, sunglasses and impossible breakfast were props in a larger transaction: I have access to this life; perhaps you could too.

It was an extraordinarily successful business model. So successful, inevitably, that everybody copied it.

Fashion influencers now compete not only with one another but with brands, celebrities, retailers, publications, resale platforms, paid UGC, professional clipping operations and an expanding ocean of synthetic content. The problem is not that attention has disappeared. The supply of things demanding it has exploded, while the number of hours in a human day has stubbornly refused to increase.

The influencer economy has discovered the same uncomfortable law that fashion itself knows very well: abundance destroys distinction.

And so the frivolancer has had to evolve.

The Frivolancer Grows Up

We coined frivolancer some time ago for a particular creature of contemporary fashion culture: someone whose apparent occupation consists largely of being photographed attending, wearing, unboxing, holidaying and lunching.

But the word has become more interesting because the frivolancer's job is becoming considerably less frivolous.

Rebecca Jennings’s recent New York Magazine article, “You Can’t Just Be Showing Matcha-Pilates-Alo,” follows Audrey Peters, a 29-year-old New York lifestyle influencer who built her audience around luxury fashion, from CHANEL shopping trips to HERMÈS appointments, and has since become an unusually candid practitioner of strategic rage bait. Through Peters, Jennings describes an influencer economy undergoing something resembling a labor-market correction.

Peters herself is a fascinating case because she understands this perfectly. Luxury fashion remains her territory, but the familiar material has stopped performing as it once did. A trip to CHANEL that could once attract millions of views might now attract a fraction of that. Even she admits to being bored with watching yet another influencer unbox a Birkin.

This isn't necessarily the death of luxury. It may be the death of luxury as reliable content.

There are simply too many Birkins on the internet.

That creates a peculiar predicament. The frivolancer was hired to make us want things. Now she increasingly has to make us feel something about them.

Admiration will do.

Desire is better.

But anger works surprisingly well.

From Aspirational to Irrational

Rage bait sounds like the opposite of luxury marketing.

Luxury spent decades controlling every pixel of its image. The lighting was exquisite. The model was exquisite. The shop was exquisite. The advertising existed in a hermetically sealed universe in which nobody had mortgages, grocery bills or irritating neighbors.

Social media punctured the membrane.

Fashion discovered that a ridiculous object can travel farther than a beautiful one. An absurd price can generate more attention than an elegant campaign. Something doesn't necessarily need to be desirable anymore. It needs to be discussable.

This produces a fascinating new category of fashion object: the product that functions simultaneously as merchandise and media.

A roughly $3,000 Prada shirt that appears dirty, discussed in the video that prompted this article, doesn't have to persuade millions of people to buy it. Almost none of them will. It only needs to make millions of people ask the obvious question:

Who the hell would pay $3,000 for that?

The price has become part of the content.

And here the frivolancer economy collides with something we've been watching for much longer: the financialization of fashion.

The Price Is the Message

Luxury prices used to communicate fairly legible things. Better materials. Craftsmanship. Provenance. Exclusivity. Status. Sometimes simply an expensive brand name sewn into a relatively ordinary object.

Those explanations have become increasingly inadequate.

The modern luxury price can perform several jobs simultaneously.

A higher price protects scarcity. It separates luxury from an increasingly sophisticated mass market capable of producing aesthetically convincing alternatives. It raises margins. It strengthens the perception of investment value. It reassures existing owners that their purchases belong to an appreciating universe rather than a depreciating wardrobe.

But now price can do something else.

It can generate attention.

The outrageous price becomes a marketing asset in its own right.

A $300 shirt may pass unnoticed. A $3,000 shirt that looks as though someone repaired a motorcycle in it becomes a story. People screenshot it. Creators discuss it. Comment sections ignite. Publications write about it. People who would never voluntarily watch a Prada campaign suddenly participate in Prada's cultural circulation.

Whether the brand deliberately engineered the object as rage bait almost becomes irrelevant. The attention economy has learned how to use it as rage bait anyway.

That changes the economics of outrageous fashion.

The question is no longer merely whether enough customers will buy the product to justify its existence. Its absurdity can create a secondary return through attention.

The price itself has become media.

Luxury's Inflationary Spiral

This gives the extraordinary inflation of luxury prices another possible meaning.

We've previously looked at fashion's transformation from an industry selling beautiful things into one increasingly governed by the logic of assets: scarcity, controlled distribution, resale values, investment narratives and relentless price escalation.

But financialization and the attention economy may now be reinforcing each other.

Raise the price and the product becomes more exclusive.

Raise it further and it becomes scarce.

Raise it further still and it becomes news.

At some point, economic irrationality acquires marketing value.

That doesn't mean every luxury price increase is a cynical attempt at rage bait. That would be far too neat. The more interesting point is that several systems which once operated separately are beginning to overlap.

Scarcity creates desire. Financialization encourages price escalation. Price escalation creates outrage. Outrage creates engagement. Engagement creates visibility. Visibility reinforces cultural importance. Cultural importance helps justify the price.

The snake has discovered a remarkably profitable way of eating its own tail.

And influencers sit conveniently in the middle of the loop.

When the Birkin Stops Working

This may explain something that initially looks contradictory.

Luxury goods remain extraordinarily potent status objects, yet luxury content can feel exhausted.

The distinction matters.

A Birkin can remain desirable precisely because relatively few people can obtain one while simultaneously becoming boring online because we've seen thousands of them. Physical scarcity can coexist with digital abundance.

That is a strange new problem for luxury.

The object is scarce.

The image of the object is infinite.

For years, influencers solved this by giving audiences access to otherwise inaccessible worlds. Come shopping with me at Chanel. Come to Paris Fashion Week. Come to the hotel. Come to the fitting. Come watch me open the box.

But eventually we came.

Again and again and again.

Jennings describes precisely this erosion of aspirational luxury content. Peters says the shopping videos that once generated millions of views have weakened considerably, while audiences have become less receptive to endless displays of free PR, designer purchases and privileged lifestyles.

The industry's response is telling. If aspiration no longer guarantees attention, provocation might.

The frivolancer therefore begins mutating from professional aspirational person into professional reaction generator.

The Rage Bait Trap

There is, however, an obvious problem with an economy built on provocation.

It suffers from exactly the same mechanism that destroyed the previous one.

Everybody learns the trick.

Once creators discover that outrage performs, feeds fill with outrage. Once brands discover that strange products attract attention, strange products multiply. Once deliberately ugly fashion becomes culturally legible, ugliness itself becomes conventional.

The shocking thing develops the same problem as the beautiful thing.

There is too much of it.

Rage bait therefore contains its own obsolescence. Every escalation raises the threshold required for the next reaction. Yesterday's ridiculous handbag becomes today's mildly eccentric handbag. Yesterday's outrageous price becomes today's luxury baseline.

The attention arms race has nowhere comfortable to end.

And fashion, perhaps more than any other industry, should recognize the danger. Fashion depends on novelty, but novelty is difficult to manufacture when everyone is manufacturing novelty simultaneously.

The Algorithm Is the New Editor

The old fashion system had gatekeepers. Editors decided what appeared in magazines. Buyers decided what appeared in stores. Designers and creative directors attempted to establish what came next.

The algorithm has no taste.

It has feedback.

That distinction may be one of the most consequential changes in contemporary fashion culture.

A magazine editor could decide that something deserved attention. An algorithm largely observes that something is receiving attention and gives it more.

The difference rewards reaction.

Beautiful can work. Intelligent can work. Original can work. But anger, disbelief and correction have a structural advantage because they compel participation.

The frivolancer understands this because her livelihood depends upon understanding it.

Jennings's article is striking in how little romance remains around the profession. Brands scrutinize engagement rates. Influencers monitor link clicks. Campaigns are judged against conversions. Peters describes deliberately using curiosity and price to generate clicks. What appears from the outside to be someone casually sharing her life increasingly resembles a tiny performance-marketing company with a human face.

The frivolancer has KPIs now.

How terribly corporate.

Fashion After Influence

And then comes the most amusing turn of all.

After years spent turning bloggers into influencers, the influencer economy is rediscovering writing.

Jennings describes renewed interest in newsletters and Substack because smaller audiences who intentionally subscribe can be more engaged and commercially useful than enormous populations of people who happen to encounter someone in a feed. The fashion industry is beginning to value not merely reach but attention with intent.

In other words, after optimizing photographs, videos, Stories, Reels, TikToks, unboxings, hauls and rage bait to survive ever-shorter attention spans, the industry has stumbled upon a revolutionary new technology:

People who actually want to hear from you.

Perhaps that is where the influencer recession becomes genuinely interesting.

The influencer isn't disappearing. Influence is being repriced.

A million followers who barely notice you may be worth less than a much smaller group who deliberately seek you out. Visibility isn't the same as relevance. Engagement isn't necessarily affection. And outrage, despite producing wonderful graphs, isn't loyalty.

Fashion may be rediscovering the difference between an audience and a crowd.

The Frivolancer Recession

So perhaps the frivolancer isn't dying either.

She is being forced to acquire a point of view.

That may prove uncomfortable for an industry that spent years demonstrating that personality could itself be industrialized. Find the right apartment. The right Pilates class. The right restaurant. The right bag. The right holiday. The right filter. Repeat until monetized.

But formulas are vulnerable to success.

Once everybody knows how to manufacture aspiration, aspiration becomes generic. Once everybody understands rage bait, outrage becomes wallpaper. Once everybody becomes an influencer, influence itself becomes scarce.

Which returns fashion to a surprisingly old-fashioned proposition.

Make something worth looking at.

Say something worth reading.

Have an idea that cannot be reproduced merely by copying the format.

The frivolancer economy was built on the fantasy that attention could be converted endlessly into money. Its recession reveals the flaw in the model. Attention isn't infinite, and the amount of content fighting for it increasingly is.

Luxury fashion has responded with scarcity, financialization, escalating prices and, whether deliberately or accidentally, products capable of functioning as rage bait. Influencers have responded by becoming ever more strategic about provoking, measuring and converting attention.

Both may eventually encounter the same problem.

When everything is engineered to get our attention, not giving it may become the ultimate luxury.

When Luxury Hits the Beach

Vamos LouBouBou

I wasn’t looking for an editorial. I was looking for a pair of flip-flops. Five minutes later I was questioning the economics of luxury, admiring the design, remembering product experiments from twenty years ago, and sketching ideas for a sandal collection of my own.

Ideas rarely arrive politely. They usually arrive arguing with you.

That argument began with a pair of Christian Louboutin rubber flip-flops carrying a price tag of more than $400. My first reaction was predictable. “This is absurd.” My second reaction surprised me. “They’re actually quite cool.”

That’s the fascinating thing about luxury. It bypasses rationality and goes straight to desire. If people bought these because the rubber was objectively better, Christian Louboutin would be competing with Havaianas.

They aren’t buying rubber. They’re buying participation in a story. That distinction explains far more about modern luxury than any balance sheet ever could.

The Most Democratic Shoe on Earth

The flip-flop occupies the absolute bottom of fashion’s hierarchy. It’s the shoe of beaches, swimming pools, hostels, backpackers, gardeners, and convenience stores. It asks almost nothing of its owner. It doesn’t promise status. It promises comfort. Or at least it used to.

Luxury has spent the last two decades performing a remarkable reversal.

Sneakers became luxury. Hoodies became luxury. T-shirts became luxury. Baseball caps became luxury. Now even the humble flip-flop has crossed the velvet rope.

Luxury spent a century climbing upward. Now it’s charging hundreds of dollars to climb back down. That sounds absurd. So does the product. Yet both are true.

The Story Is Worth More Than the Rubber

Ironically, I don’t dislike the sandal at all. Quite the opposite. It’s an intelligent piece of design.

Rubber is inexpensive. Injection molding is inexpensive. Metal studs cost very little. The tooling probably represents the largest investment. None of that matters.

Someone looked at one of the simplest products ever invented and asked a wonderfully uncomfortable question: Why should only leather have a monopoly on luxury?

That’s good design thinking. The real innovation isn’t the sandal. It’s convincing the market that a beach flip-flop deserves the same psychological shelf space as a CHANEL bag. That isn’t manufacturing. That’s mythology.

Luxury’s New Currency

For generations, luxury justified itself through craftsmanship, rarity, and precious materials. Those things still matter. But they’re no longer enough. Today, luxury increasingly creates value by changing how we perceive ordinary objects. The material remains ordinary. The meaning becomes extraordinary.

A rubber sandal doesn’t become expensive because rubber improved. It becomes expensive because attention became scarce. In an economy where almost everything can be copied, manufactured, or delivered tomorrow, perception has become the most valuable raw material of all.

Perhaps branding has quietly become applied mythology.

From Louboutin to LouBouBou

Luxury brands spend decades building immaculate worlds. Consumers dismantle them in a weekend. Within minutes, I had already renamed the sandal: LouBouBou.

Labubu. Different product. Same mechanics. Hype, scarcity, collectability, and a price that somehow becomes part of the entertainment.

That's the pattern.

Luxury Is a Conversation

This little encounter reminded me why I find luxury endlessly fascinating.

I can question the economics. Admire the design. Laugh at the mythology. Respect the branding. And still walk away inspired. The best products don’t simply ask whether you’ll buy them. They ask whether they’ll change the way you see the world.

Sometimes they even send you back to the drawing board. Ten years ago I experimented with rubber combined with metal details for accessories. Looking at these sandals brought those memories rushing back.

Somewhere between ridiculous and brilliant is usually where the next idea is waiting. The beach hasn’t changed. Only the admission price has.

Vamos a la playa.

I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler

Why Nothing Feels Cool Anymore

There is a song by the American band Yacht called I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler. It was released more than a decade ago, long before artificial intelligence, TikTok, algorithmic shopping, and large language models quietly rearranged the cultural furniture of everyday life. At the time, it read like a clever piece of indie irony. Today, it feels uncomfortably literal.

Not because the future failed to arrive.

But because it arrived looking suspiciously like everything else.

We were promised rupture. Flying cars, immersive virtual worlds, creative liberation at planetary scale. A technological age that would multiply individuality rather than smooth it out. Instead, we got a world that feels eerily consistent from city to city: the same café aesthetic, the same apartment staging, the same hotel lobby lighting, the same fonts, the same curated imperfection that somehow always feels professionally approved.

The future did not disappoint us.

It standardized us.

Somewhere along the way, it stopped surprising us and became exceptionally good at repetition.

The Great Flattening

Walk through almost any fashionable district in the world and a strange déjà vu sets in. The café has the same poured concrete counter. The boutique sells the same oversized linen shirt. The hotel lobby smells like a memory you never actually had but somehow recognize. The branding is always restrained, the palette always earthy, the ceramics always artisanal, the soundtrack always drifting between ambient electronica and carefully nonchalant indie.

You have seen this place before.

Not because you travel too much.

But because everywhere has started to resemble everywhere else.

Cool used to be geographically anchored. It had an accent, a context, a sense of origin. You went to Tokyo for Tokyo, to Milan for Milan, to Copenhagen for Copenhagen. Difference was the point.

Now difference is just a variation in export settings.

The internet promised infinite cultural diversity. What it delivered instead was convergence at scale. Algorithms do not reward originality; they reward recognizability with minor deviation. They prefer the familiar slightly reassembled, the known gently rebranded.

So a design language born in Copenhagen becomes a hotel in Dubai, which becomes a café in Bangkok, which loops back into Stockholm as “Japanese-inspired minimalism with Mediterranean warmth.” Every reference is real. The combination is not.

Everyone is borrowing from everyone else until nobody remembers who started the conversation.

Global culture has become one enormous Pinterest board.

This is wonderful. It is also exhausting.

Global culture has become a single, endlessly replicated mood board that no one remembers assembling.

The Slop Economy

Every technological revolution begins with democratization. Photography, publishing, video, music production, design tools, distribution platforms—each wave lowers the barrier to entry and expands the number of people who can participate in cultural production.

This is, in almost every sense, a triumph.

It is also where things become interestingly overwhelming.

When creation becomes frictionless, output becomes infinite. And when output becomes infinite, quality stops being the differentiator. Competence becomes the baseline. Everything is well lit, well designed, well edited, and, increasingly, indistinguishable.

The internet is now saturated with what can only be described as competent excess: work that is technically correct, aesthetically fluent, and emotionally forgettable.

Not because people have become less talented. There may be more talent than ever. But much of it draws from the same references, responds to the same incentives, and ultimately converges on the same ideas.

This is the Slop Economy—not as an insult, but as a structural condition. A world where supply has expanded faster than attention, and where the median quality of everything has quietly converged toward “good enough to scroll past.”

When everything is possible, nothing feels necessary.

The Copy Machine Became Instant

Originality used to enjoy a brief, almost romantic delay. A new idea would appear, circulate slowly, mutate locally, and only then be absorbed into the mainstream.

That delay is gone.

Today, success is immediately legible and instantly reproducible. A handbag goes viral and is reverse-engineered within days. A visual identity gains traction and is replicated across continents before the original brand has finished its next campaign cycle. A TikTok aesthetic emerges and is industrialized before it has even stabilized into something coherent.

Even cultural discovery has become a form of real-time extraction.

Platforms do not just distribute ideas; they disassemble them. Meta’s ad libraries, TikTok analytics, and e-commerce dashboards turn creativity into a transparent system of inputs and outputs. What once required intuition can now be reverse-engineered.

The result is a strange acceleration: the lifecycle of originality has collapsed. It no longer has time to mature before it is cloned, optimized, and reissued as variation.

Success has become a template.

And templates, by definition, are meant to be copied.

AI Doesn’t Invent Culture

Artificial intelligence complicates this further, not because it is radically creative, but because it is structurally conservative.

It predicts. It averages. It interpolates. It produces the most statistically probable version of whatever you ask for.

Which makes it extraordinarily powerful—and culturally cautious.

AI is not a generator of rupture. It is a generator of consensus. It compresses the past into a smooth, optimized present. It is, in many ways, the perfect machine for a world already addicted to familiarity.

But culture does not evolve through consensus.

It evolves through deviation.

David Bowie was not an average of his time. Martin Margiela was not an optimization of existing fashion logic. Comme des Garçons did not emerge from customer research. The first iPhone was not the most likely phone—it was, in many ways, the least predictable one.

The uncomfortable truth is that cultural breakthroughs often look wrong before they look inevitable.

Prediction systems struggle with this because they are trained on what already exists. Culture, at its most interesting, is what refuses to exist until it does.

Consumers Graduated

There is another shift happening quietly in parallel: the audience has become far more literate than most brands are prepared to acknowledge.

Luxury used to operate on opacity. It relied on distance, mystique, and controlled information. Today, that distance has collapsed. Consumers know production costs. They understand supply chains. They watch factory breakdowns on YouTube. They compare materials, margins, and marketing strategies with the fluency of analysts.

Entire subcultures now exist to decode the mechanics of branding itself.

The customer, in effect, has completed a crash course in how everything is made.

And once you understand how the illusion works, it becomes harder to be impressed by it.

Luxury Was Never About Leather

One of the most persistent misunderstandings in luxury is the belief that value begins with material quality. It does not. Materials matter, of course, but they are only the most visible layer of a much deeper structure.

Luxury is accumulated meaning.

It is architecture, photography, typography, service, language, scarcity, timing, cultural memory, and above all, consistency. It is the slow construction of a world that feels internally coherent enough to justify belief.

The object is never the point.

It is the entry ticket.

People do not buy luxury products because they need them. They buy them because they want access to a narrative that feels more intentional than the everyday world around them.

The World Is the Product

This is where many contemporary brands misread the moment. They continue to think in terms of products when the real competition is between worlds.

Apple does not sell devices. It sells a controlled environment of interaction. Patagonia does not sell jackets. It sells a moral and ecological worldview. Hermès does not sell bags. It sells continuity across generations. LEGO does not sell plastic bricks. It sells structured imagination.

In each case, the object is secondary. The system around it is primary.

The strongest brands are not catalogues. They are places you can mentally inhabit.

The Return of Taste

For a long time, we outsourced taste to systems that promised efficiency. Streaming platforms decided what we listened to. Feeds decided what we saw. Recommendation engines decided what we discovered. Gradually, curation became invisible, and invisibility made it feel neutral.

But something is shifting again.

As algorithmic environments become more saturated with synthetic sameness, personal judgment begins to reassert itself as a form of distinction. Not loud opinion, but considered selection. Not endless consumption, but deliberate refusal.

Taste, in this context, is not about preference. It is about resistance to overexposure.

And in a world of infinite options, restraint becomes a signal.

Human Is Becoming Luxury

The next phase of cultural production may invert many of the assumptions of the last decade.

Machine-generated content will become effectively free. Human attention, judgment, and editorial clarity will become expensive.

Everyone will be able to produce. Very few will be able to decide what is worth producing.

Everyone will publish. Few will edit.

Everyone will generate. Few will curate.

In that environment, the most valuable creative act may not be addition, but subtraction. Not producing more, but refusing to contribute to noise.

When the world can generate millions of images before breakfast, choosing not to add another becomes a form of taste in itself.

What This Means

This is ultimately where the conversation about luxury becomes more interesting than luxury itself.

Luxury today is not just craftsmanship or heritage or design excellence. It is navigation through abundance.

It is the ability to recognize coherence in a landscape defined by replication. It is understanding why resale exploded, why dupes became inevitable, why AI reshapes aesthetics, why financial markets transformed fashion into assets, and why consumers increasingly value intelligence over aspiration.

The brands that will matter in the next decade will not simply look more expensive. They will feel more legible in a world that is becoming harder to interpret.

More coherent. More intentional. More unmistakably human.

Which brings us back to that song.

I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler.

Perhaps the mistake was assuming “cool” would survive optimization.

The future did not become less interesting.

It became more efficient.

And efficiency, as it turns out, has a peculiar aesthetic consequence: everything improves, and everything begins to resemble everything else.

In that sense, originality is not disappearing.

It is becoming harder to sustain.

Not because it is impossible.

But because it is no longer automatically protected by time.

In the age of infinite sameness, cool has not vanished.

It has simply become something you have to notice before it gets optimized away.