Stewart seems sunny and rather sweet, a twenty-nine-year-old who blogs about going to the gym, hanging out with her friends, and sunbathing topless — though she says she prefers not to “show my boobs” as others in her peer group do, “because my mom reads my blog.” (In her teens, she posed in a not-so-fashionable bikini as a Sunshine Girl in the Toronto Sun.) When I check Klout, a company that “identifies influencers on topics across the social web,” I find her score is a healthy fifty-eight out of 100. The Klout score is an entirely scary invention that quantifies registrants’ ubiquity and audience reach by looking at their social media profiles and interactions. Gregory Gorgeous ranks a sixty-one. Lauren O’Nizzle, a friend and digital soulmate of Stewart’s, scores a sixty-three. Kim Kardashian’s hovers around ninety-two.
I see where Stewart is coming from. For someone with small-town roots (Cambridge, Ontario), living large in the big city of Toronto is a thrill. She runs her personal brand as a full-time job, having been fired from a marketing position at Much mtv for excessive blogging on the job. She employs a paid intern, and has managed to climb out of a tuition-fuelled $30,000 debt through an appearance on the W Network’s financial makeover show, Maxed Out. She now makes bank by speaking to companies about ramping up their social media strategies.
“The brand,” she says, “is bigger than me now.” When she describes how she built it, I’m reminded of an interview I read with marketer Hubert Rampersad, author of the bestseller Authentic Personal Branding: A New Blueprint for Building and Aligning a Powerful Leadership Brand, part of a recent pack of books instructing us all to self-market. Branding, he writes, is about controlling the impression people have of you, and making that impression desirable (which is not, of course, the cakewalk these authors make it out to be). Building an authentic personal brand is a way of “improving yourself continuously.” Though we’re obsessive about improvement, my generation might feel almost as embarrassed touting Rampersad’s advice as we would be donning folk costumes and dancing the mazurka. But because Stewart’s peers have not known self-doubt as much as we have, and because they’re so much better at manoeuvring in the digital age than we were, they feel perfectly at ease. “I think to myself,” Stewart says, “that I created all this by putting out positive thoughts and accepting things into my life. I dreamt about doing this — getting the star treatment — and now I am.”
Sidling up to every willing PR agent, then, is a Millennial way to present the authentic self, about as awkward and disingenuous as New Age was thirty years ago. Yet Stewart seems blissfully, radiantly, ear-to-ear happy.
But not everyone finds their bliss in doing dumb stuff: not style and society blogger Nolan Bryant, who is about to turn twenty. Though his mini-fame resulted from his smart use of digital resources, he is nothing like Casie Stewart. For him, the star treatment is a beast of a different stripe. A follower of fashion since childhood, he is known for his long hair and his six-foot-five stature, and for wearing capes. Those who follow his personal brand assume he comes from money. In truth, like the Factory crew orbiting Andy Warhol, or Truman Capote orbiting Babe Paley and Slim Keith, he is enthralled with the rich and famous. His budding career is as a social chronicler/new media socialite, and he’s good at it.
Another small-town kid (from Newcastle, Ontario), Bryant belongs to a WASP family, he says, but not a society one. His father worked in corporate communications, promoting hotels for Fairmont. As a boy of six, he would find himself sitting rapt in the Library Bar of the Royal York Hotel. “I believe the socially affluent in Toronto to be fascinating,” he says, paraphrasing a Herb Caen quote about “cockroaches and socialites being the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything.”
Bryant began attending Toronto Fashion Week shows when he was in grade nine, via an aunt who worked at CBC and had a connection to the television show Fashion File. That was the era, he says, when “everyone worked in magazines or was a buyer.” Now, he observes, “everyone is a blogger. Everyone has a Twitter account. So many of them hang around outside at fashion shows, taking pictures of people in weird outfits. That’s not for me.” He had bigger aspirations. Through a friendship with Marissa Bronfman (of the Seagram Bronfmans), whom he met at Fashion Week, he became well known to the right PR people, was photographed for the party pages, and found himself in the front rows alongside the reed-thin elite. He took their pictures, which provided much of the content for nolanbryant.com, which he launched in 2008. The exposure brought him attention, including an invitation by Hugo Boss to shoot the company’s collection at Berlin Fashion Week in 2010.
When we meet for coffee, I find it remarkable that he is only nineteen; he is so self-confident and measured. “I wear the fun clothes, I blog about it, and I socialize,” he says when I ask him to describe what defines his personal brand. He also understands the line between self-promotion and exploitation. “When you’re photographed by the party pages, they always list your name and where you work. In the beginning, it was just my name. I wanted to go to events and have something else people could say about me.”
What he was really doing, like so many others, was looking for a way to present his identity — which is, in the end, the purpose of youth. It’s just that he started with a baseline the teenagers of my era lacked. As well as the digital tools, he possessed an uncannily solid sense of himself. Like all socialites on the ascent, confidence became his key. His generation lives out life in public; my generation chose to lurk in the shadows, scared shitless about what others thought of us. To paraphrase Henry Rollins, we spent half of our lives screwing up, and the other half making up for it. Bryant and his peers strode purposefully out of the gate. This, at the very least, is admirable.
Ifind no new media arriviste more sure of herself than Sarah Nicole Prickett, a brand who craves some distance from the Blondebots of the world. She doesn’t consider herself a style blogger, although she blogs about style (and happens to be blond). That label would put her in the wider concentric circle of online personalities whose ambitions are shallow, whose observations are generic, and whose writing is poor.
Meanwhile, she struggles with a few categories of her own. “I’m a Millennial, right?” she asks me. “I keep reading about how unhappy we supposedly are.” One such piece happens to appear on the cover of New York magazine the week she and I meet in a downtown Toronto restaurant called the Böhemian Gastropub. (When she points out how awful the name is, and I agree, I’m left wondering which of our generations has the bigger compulsion to comment on everything.)
The New York cover shows a guy I can only describe as an emo — which is probably no longer a Millennially correct designation — shot in black and white and looking nobly tragic. The line across his chest says, “Sucks to Be Us.” The story is about children of over-praising parents, kids who grow up to Google Chat and live in angst in Brooklyn. Held up as symbols of “post-hope America,” they are described as “screwed, coddled, self-absorbed, mocked,” yet “surprisingly resilient.”
Many of these adjectives might seem appropriate — but not “screwed.” Prickett strikes me as neither unhappy nor disadvantaged. Her red lipstick is too flawless, her five-inch wedge platforms imperially high. By her own account, she is right where she wants to be, and is far more in control of her personal image at twenty-six than I was of mine at thirty-six. She has a career as a freelance writer for the National Post, the Toronto Standard, and Fashion magazine. She confidently calls herself a “good writer.” (I wouldn’t have had the guts to say that about my own writing at twenty-six — or forty!) And she has something her 5,000 or so Twitter followers consider significant: a growing status as a new media personality and party fixture. Strangers refer to her by the abbreviation SNP, and when visitors read her site, snprickett.com, which has seventeen sections, like a lifestyle magazine, they will assume she is the centre of a magnificent universe. It’s more accurate to call her a big fish in the medium-sized pond of Toronto fashion.
