When Lydia Millen’s heating broke in late November, she checked into Britain’s oldest luxury hotel, the Savoy, where gilded rooms go for anywhere from $700 to $5,500 a night. “I’m going to make full use of their wonderful hot water,” the British influencer told her 797,000 TikTok followers.
The response—3.9 million views later—was predictably vehement. Many commenters compared Millen to Marie Antoinette; others cracked jokes like “My TV is broken so I’ve hired a private jet to fly me to Qatar so I can watch the footie.” One comment with more than 14,000 likes summed up the sentiment best: “The room (a very cold one) has not been read.”
Millions of Britons are currently experiencing “fuel poverty” as energy prices soar; six days before Millen checked into the Savoy, UK inflation reached a 41-year high. Many British families are currently choosing between heating and eating, while rail workers, nurses, and firefighters are planning to strike for livable wages.
Globally, the story is much the same, and economists fear that the world is on the brink of another recession. So the backlash against Millen raises an interesting question: In times of economic hardship, what exactly happens to influencers? What does content creation look like during a cost-of-living crisis, when more and more people are shut out of the lifestyle that luxury influencers flaunt? And how will brands, agencies, and creators themselves navigate this changing landscape?
“When Black Friday happened, I didn’t post any sales,” says 25-year-old New Yorker Sophie Wood, who has been creating fashion, beauty, and lifestyle content since 2015 and has more than 59,000 followers across her Instagram and TikTok accounts. “I think it’s kind of silly to be encouraging frivolous spending at a time like this, when so many people are getting laid off. And it seems really insensitive for me to be spending and showing items that I’m buying.”
Wood, who has previously done campaigns for Urban Outfitters, Crocs, HBO Max, and Google, says she has recently begun working with sustainable and ethical fashion brands who produce clothing that’s “built to last.” She also now posts fewer pictures of gifts and PR packages that she receives, “just because it feels like bragging,” and has even asked some companies to take her off their gifting lists.
Yet while Wood has made a personal choice to post more sensitively, she hasn’t yet noticed a change in the way companies approach campaigns.
Across the pond, Amy Zwirn, head of agencies at London-based marketing company Influencer, says that brands are becoming more discerning about the talent they work with, opting for “trusted voices.”
“Speaking to your favorite creator during a really uncertain time is very different than if you’re spoken to directly by brands,” she says. Zwirn believes that if the UK does enter a recession, companies will build trust with consumers by seeking out specific influencers to act as longe-term ambassadors, rather than doing ad hoc campaigns with numerous creators.
While the term “influencer” often conjures up images of vacationing women who are as thin as they are wealthy, the reality is that it’s a broad industry, and cooking, cleaning, parenting, and budgeting influencers may find themselves in demand as brands try to relate to consumers. But fine, OK, sure: What about luxury lifestyle influencers like Millen?
The truth—says Mae Karwowski, founder of New York-based influencer marketing platform Obviously—is that people don’t necessarily want luxury influencers to be down-to-earth. “People love watching luxury content as something aspirational, as an escape; even if I can’t purchase an Hermès bag, I still want to learn more about how you get it,” she says. “I think that’s not going away.” Nor, it seems, will luxury spending: Hermès sales jumped 24 percent globally in the third quarter of this year, while Moët says it’s running out of premium champagne due to high demand.
Kenneth Lord, the dean of East Michigan University’s College of Business and an expert in celebrity endorsements, says that prestige brands care more about “upholding their luxury image” than any perceived insensitivity to “people who aren’t within their market anyway.” He spent some time estimating the cost of the clothing and accessories that Millen showcased in her video about getting ready to go to the Savoy.
“What she was talking about came to $38,826.57,” Lord says. “So who’s she targeting? She’s not targeting people who are being hard hit.” Lord believes that people who aspire to be like Millen are unlikely to be offended by her life choices. “People who are being influenced by her, if they’re actually in the market for those things, they have so much money to burn that they’re not going to be bothered by her going off to the Savoy to escape a temporary heating outage.”
Still, Lord believes that consumers more generally could be harder to influence in the coming months. In his research, he has spent time looking at “informational” versus “transformational” motivations in customer responses to celebrity endorsements. He found that people who are informationally motivated consider the functional risks of a purchase, whereas those who are transformationally orientated are focused on their mental or social state. This means that the former weigh up a celebrity endorser based on their trustworthiness and expertise, whereas the latter are affected by the attractiveness and emotional appeal of the endorser.
Lord theorizes that worsening economic conditions may force more consumers to become informationally motivated, which may affect the overall effectiveness of influencer marketing (or, as Zwirn speculated, lead to a greater emphasis on trustworthy figures). “But having said that,” Lord adds, “the market is never homogeneous. Even in bad economic times, it’s not as if everybody becomes informationally motivated.”
Karwowski says she doesn’t see luxury “as a sector of the creator economy that’s going to take a hit,” but she does think that some influencers will start to caveat their purchases and express more gratitude to their fans. “Relatability is going to go a long way,” she says. “If I’m looking at aspirational content and I can’t afford these things anyway, I want to know the person I’m watching is a good person and they get how cool and lucky what they’re doing is.”
While luxury spenders may remain luxury spenders, the ever increasing popularity of TikTok—where content spreads like wildfire and doesn’t stay as siloed as on Instagram—will inevitably lead to more backlashes. Millen isn’t the only influencer to earn the internet’s ire in recent months. In early November, lifestyle influencer Tara Lynn was lambasted for spending $10,000 on two Harry Styles tickets, while in September, beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira was mocked for an old video in which she complained that influencing was hard because she “literally just finished working” at 5:19 pm.
Millen did not respond to a request for comment, but she has posted 10 more TikToks since her controversial Savoy video. In the first, she asks her audience whether she should wear a $2,500 dress or a similarly priced suit to the theater. While some commenters continued to mock Millen under the video, many more defended her: “She’s a luxury content creator, why is everyone mad at her” (5,300 likes); “She’s a luxury influencer & people are upset she’s posting her luxury lifestyle … make it make sense.” In Millen’s last and latest video, she models “six cashmere and silk outfits for winter.” Almost every single comment is positive.
