Why do some influencer brands annoy me? #

October 26, 2025
Boulangerie Christophe

I’ve been noticing that a number of the influencers that I see every now and then on {pick your social media of choice} have started their own brands, and I don’t really know how to feel about this.

This is mostly me trying to understand why I feel the way I do about some of these brands, because internally, I feel a bit hypocritical over which brands seem reasonable to me and which seem unnecessary.

I’d say there are two different kinds of influencers sharing their brands online. One are those who started a brand before or around the time they started a social media account. These people tend to be using social media as a means of communicating their brand and their ideas, and sometimes just to talk about fashion and its history (usually as it relates to the garments they sell). A lot of these people stumbled upon influencer status in this way. Of course, this status is inevitable when you are marketing and showing off clothes online, but I imagine a lot of these people see themselves as designers or just “clothes people”, not influencers. Brands like The Iron Snail or Front Office seem to have their creators take on new personas as they have gotten more of a following online. For some reason these don’t bother me so much.

Front Office's Fingerprint Denim — This is Front Office's fingerprint denim. If you look closely at the jacket and pants, you can see that the way the texture on the fabric ebbs and flows looks quite like a person's fingerprint. Pulled from Front Office.

The brands I am speaking about here are independent people who have started labels of their own without the support of another company. There are a lot of Instagram brands that were really just funded by another fashion company and that don’t really influence or market themselves on Instagram through one singular person like the brands I mentioned previously do.

I think it might be in part due to how these people appear to us as oriented towards their brand and talking about it on the offset. So for the case of Front Office, we know Ken Sakata as primarily its founder, not as an influencer (though he is effectively one now as well). That seems more or less reasonable to me, and I feel that’s because there isn’t much deception here. Really, there can’t be much deception here, because the groundwork that was laid out is that this online presence is effectively an extension of the brand, and a means of communicating the brand to the public. It’s harder to build up a parasocial relationship with a person who exists online as marketing and can be readily understood as such.

On the other hand, there are a lot of brands started by influencers who began their online careers as influencers, not founders or designers. These tend to bother me much more. For one, I think that a lot of the generic fashion influencers (people who talk about quality, style very generally, trends, etc.) tend to be making brands that are often marketed as “elevated basics”. A lot of these “elevated basics” brands are selling the exact same things and aren’t doing anything new or giving out interesting information, they just seem to exist as merchandise for your favorite influencer. However, not every influencer that starts a brand is doing this, some do have interesting things to put out and interesting ideas they want to share, to which I am less bothered about.

Most likely, I’m just uncomfortable with how somebody who had initially presented themselves as a fashion or style communicator now has a lot of incentive to keep pushing their brand at you. Of course, this is what all influencers do, but at least with influencers who started off with just talking about clothes and style, there was some sort of expectation that they wouldn’t turn into continuous self-advertisements. While, of course, influencers exist to promote things, it feels like creating a label is just another step as part of “building your brand”, as opposed to something that you want to do because you have something to say.

That’s another reason why I don’t like those “elevated basics” labels, because they don’t say anything and they have no reason to exist. When it’s done by a faceless company, I can understand it more because they don’t have a soul, but when it’s done by a person, it feels kind of like a breaching of social trust, almost like creating a brand is an afterthought to becoming more famous or more relevant in fashion.

Alo's marketing — Alo seems to be marketing themselves as a sort of "elevated basics" company. I guess this outfit is kind of an "elevated basic"? Really it just feels like a few basics put together. This is partly why I feel like Alo doesn't have a soul. Pulled from Elle.

I’m probably overthinking this, and there are definitely a lot of exceptions to this, but I just feel weird about it. Given how parasocial our online experiences are, it’d be very odd if the person who I watch online for comfort or for style analysis made their own brand and started selling it to me. Though, to be fair, this is no different from any other online problem. The exact same thing can be said with Youtubers and streamers, I’m just more annoyed with this because I care more about fashion (and because of fashion’s outsized impact on the environment).