Writer & Influencer Camille Charrière On the art of authentic influencing

Over the past decade, no industry was more impacted by the ‘democratisation of influence’ than fashion. Perhaps even more so than its cultural cousins: the film, music and art worlds, fashion felt like a vestige of an untouchable, unplaceable elitism; Central St Martins, Parsons, a certain type of magazine internship to assistant pipeline. Camille Charrière, with a French law degree and an early career in investment banking was perfectly misfit to be one of the industry’s most notable early blogging disruptors. Before long, she became a front row fixture at fashion weeks; her style a mix of French restraint and British daring. Camille’s work has gone on to span collaborations with brands including Mango, Chloé, and Chanel; a podcast ‘Fashion No Filter’; a television debut on Canal+, not to mention countless appearances across YouTube. That’s before a growing, widely-circulated and referenced list of articles and essays that continue to evolve and inform a boldening journalistic resolve. No matter what field, all reflect an understanding of personal branding, and  Camille remains committed to both her personal style and personal opinion: “I truly believe in having the hard stuff out in the open,” she wrote in British Vogue, “because I’m convinced sharing our stories is what helps us overcome stigma and loneliness.” In a multi-hyphenated world that has to span a presence across Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and TikTok, Camille has simultaneously remained relevant and conscious of the shifting sands of an industry fixated on what’s next. Here, she generously shares a deeply insightful perspective on an industry in flux, and how she continues to relate to it.

JW: I think we first met twelve years ago. How do you, today (getting the dreaded question out of the way) reflect on the shape and definition of your work and to what degree has that changed over time?

CC: It's almost impossible to answer. With the first generation of bloggers, we began sharing stuff online because we weren’t part of the industry – I don't think any of us could see a way into it – so instead, we built these communities outside of it. As I progressed, I feel I did a lot to prove myself within the establishment and gain respect – through a podcast, for example, where I was interviewing people, and positioning myself as more of a broadcaster rather than just as someone there to share themself. 

It's been really nice to feel that I'm more part of the industry than when I started. But at the same time, as I've gained respect, I've lost...some...respect for the industry, which is unfortunate. It's depressing to see how things don't change and how we're sort of stuck in these cycles and circles of toxicity, bad production practices; of pure capitalistic gain and constant growth, and consequently, the loss of creativity.

This is more apparent to me than ever. Brands are scared of putting out collections and campaigns that are remotely interesting and everything feels flattened by the algorithm and by what sells. But beyond that, it can feel quite treacherous; an industry where you could have a weak moment and you're out. We've seen it, with all the designer musical chairs and with the ups and downs of editors-in-chief being taken down and replaced with people who don't have as much expertise in favour of making everything more commercial and, in my opinion, boring. Those things can make you question what you're doing here in the first place. 

I really did feel that we – as the social media side of the industry, as part of the ecosystem – could actually bring something different: a real understanding of our audiences, and help connect brands with media, and all these other spaces. But, I think everything is all over the place right now. There are so many platforms, there are so many influencers, there are so many brands, there are so many celebrities, there are so many pop stars. The fashion industry used to be a small club. Now there's so much on offer that it feels like both everyone and no one is important.

It can be difficult to trust the people whose voices you used to trust – I don't mean the journalists, I mean the magazines. They've really lost that voice of authority, and everybody wants to call themselves an expert. It makes you realise that you yourself are kind of contributing to that.   

Obviously, a lot of an influencer’s job feels similar to what magazines do selling advertising space. A brand will reach out to you because they view your reach and relationship with your audience as an opportunity to advertise whatever they're looking to market. It’s something that's become bigger and bigger on social media; it's a huge, huge chunk of the market now, of the advertising and marketing budgets. 

I’ve been thinking about what I want my legacy to be. The industry is something that you can't really change, but now what you need to leave behind is something that you feel good about. When you've been talking about yourself for more than twelve years, after a while, it comes to feel a little bit transactional within yourself. That’s something I've struggled with. It becomes a little bit of a gilded cage.

JW: Getting to understand what it is like inside the machine and taking a look at the mechanics of how everything works can, over time, lead to disillusionment presumably? What did the earliest conversations look like with a potential brand partner? I remember so many conversations with advertisers (as a print dinosaur) that marketing spend was going down again to shift to digital…towards people who could influence their audience in a much more direct, immediate and intimate way.

CC: What everyone seems to have forgotten, is that fashion is an industry based on building community, on building an identity and a reputation. These things take time, and working with the right people. Unfortunately, I don't know whether this way – of just putting clothes on people who shoot them in their own way – has actually really helped brands. I think they're finding out now that actually, in the long-run, it’s creating a big gap between them and the people buying from them, because ultimately, to keep a brand up and running for a long time, it's about a lot more than just sales. It's about the storytelling, it's about the messaging, it's about who this is for. There’s a lot more world-building involved.

I think brands are losing themselves a little bit in this wave of advertising, because, unlike with a magazine, when you're working with an influencer, it’s a lot more personal. It's not a voice that’s been developed by a group of people who are really thinking about what the message is, and reflecting on who they're talking to. It's a lot more selfish in a way; it's more about me, my life and I. Ultimately, to build a world, you need more depth.

But the big brands, like Chanel and Hermès, will surf the waves and survive. Having super-strong brand identity and history allows you to float about; you don't even necessarily have to do anything that's that good anymore. People  are obsessed with the core heritage of the brand.

JW: That feels like a very developed, 30,000 foot view, that I'm not sure people, especially an executive at a fashion brand for example, would see, because: a) they all fear for their jobs, and b) all of the numbers are down.

CC: It's just quite challenging because how on earth are people meant to do a good job if they don't feel like they can take risks? Risk-taking is the only way to do things that are interesting and different and stand out, and fashion is about standing out. 

JW: Just to rewind quickly, when you first started your site, I remember very vividly, there was a sort of incubation period of blogs; they had this kind of alchemy that was in part boosted by street-style photography at fashion weeks. Did you notice, when the blogs first started becoming successful, a developing stigma towards that from legacy media?

CC: Yes, it was awful. But now, legacy media has had a kind of downfall and everybody has become an influencer. Magazine editors are doing paid posts...everyone is a public persona now. The magazines are expected to do it. The brands are doing it. So in that sense, yes, they have to respect influencers, because they're part of the machine now. It's actually creating chaos within the industry because you don't really know what everyone is and where they’re coming from.

With TikTok, we’ve seen this huge influx of new social media kids who are really good at what they do – they’re used to being a lot more real and taking away the polished, curated, filtered, Photoshopped version of whatever we were doing. They’re used to showing the reality – without makeup, before and after, talking about their lives – and all of that I think, is a positive. I mean, I really admire Amelia Dimoldenberg and her Chicken Shop Dates for example; it’s deeply impressive.

But what’s a little bit frustrating is to see that – and I don't think you could say this about the journalists that came before me, because they were working in traditional media that had been respected for ages – although we earned the respect, we never get the jobs, because they’re handed straight to the younger generation. What we built – which opened the doors for them and allowed them to build incredible, lucrative careers – has pushed out the generation that actually made that happen. I never really saw a lot of my peers getting the flowers that they should have got. I mean, Susie Bubble definitely didn't, though she's  found a legacy place within the industry, and I think Brian Boy is the same. 

Fashion often seems to push out anybody with expertise and latch on instead to the ‘hot new thing’. But having a ton of people at a fashion show just because they have views doesn't make sense for an industry that is desperately in need of real talent.

JW: Did you notice  an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality? At fashion shows, you are literally partitioned into different sections based on what sector of the industry you work in, like you'd have print editors and then you'd have influencers.

CC: It doesn't make sense. If you had a dinner party at your house, you wouldn't sit the two doctors next to each other, the two lawyers. No. Mix it up. Because there are all kinds of influencers, all kinds of journalists, all kinds of photographers. If they were allowed to meet,  a lot of very fruitful things would be allowed to happen in fashion. This obsession with dividing everyone, and keeping everybody in their box is detrimental to creating electricity and inventing new ways of communicating with each other and doing things. 

JW: Not to turn that into a grand, universal point, but I think what you’re describing is applicable across almost every problem society faces – this wanting and needing to label something – if you don't know what that label is, it can be scary to people.

CC: Fashion used to be very snobby. It's definitely still snobby, but it's pretending not to be and it certainly can't afford to be. Everybody is allowed in – every pop star, every reality TV star; people who would have been shunned by the fashion industry previously. Obviously, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It’s something the social media community has brought to the table – the demand to respect everyone on different levels. Fashion has been forced to contend with that. And what’s happened is that the industry has realised that these people actually have a lot of power, that they actually do attract buzz.

Attention is the currency we’re using the most these days. That's what social media is, holding attention, and getting to deliver your message. But the gatekeepers in fashion used to be more apparent; there was an element of exclusivity, which I actually think was and is quite important. You want something to feel exclusive because then it does feel aspirational; there’s something to work towards. Losing that does mean losing part of what made fashion  special.  It is also an industry that's built on dreams and a reality that doesn't exist. You do need a little bit of that. 

You can’t criticise something that has happened and allowed so many minorities and people who were formerly excluded from fashion to finally be part of the conversation. And there’s still a long way to go in that respect – you’ve only to look at how few women are working in top jobs in fashion, or at the heads of the main fashion houses without even going into other minorities. It's just absurd when you know that the industry is, for the most part, speaking to women and that there are so few women at the top. 

Having said that, increasingly I’m shocked by the lack of understanding around who a brand is actually speaking to, because it just becomes this long list of whoever they think can draw attention to them and there's no real reasoning behind it. 

JW: When you first started, what did a conversation with a potential brand partner look like? How would they approach you and did you have the tools and the confidence to be able to field those negotiations with no prior understanding of what you should charge?

CC: Back then, it was a very different ball game. Friends would come to you and say, “we're launching this, we'll send it to you, do what you want to do. This is how much we're gonna give you, this is the date we need something by, do whatever you want.” And we would do whatever we wanted. Some of us did video, some of us did photos, some of us wrote, there were no rules. Nobody really understood blogging. Brands were just trusting us to pay attention and give it a go. One of my first jobs was a video for H&M that followed me around. I remember meeting their team and explaining to them what I did and how we could do something together. 

I found it quite easy to stand my ground with brands – to show my expertise and feel confident in what I could bring, because I knew how to speak to my audience. I knew how to make things interesting and fun. I think brands respected that because they didn't understand that world.

Now it's different because it's become a real industry, and there's real money to be earned. And with that comes a lot more rules and regulations. Unfortunately, brands have become obsessed with wanting to control everything; it's become such a struggle to get them to listen to your creative input and get them to do things in a way that will resonate with your audience. 

Younger audiences are able to see through things, so for an ad to work it has to feel authentic, it has to feel real. The whole point of doing things on social media was that it had to be different from in the campaigns and in magazines, and that you brought in a personal point of view. I know that there's this huge idea now that you're a personal brand yourself, but ultimately, we're not brands, we're people.

Eventually I think it's going to come back full circle to how it was before, where brands are going to have to place more trust in the creators that they decide to work with; I think they will find that doing something more fluid will be more successful. But right now, the documents that we receive to accompany a paid post are usually about seven pages long. I'm not exaggerating. And that takes away the freedom and spontaneity you need when you're building content for online, because it's not so much a formula – it’s more instinctive than that. 

JW: You’ve spoken about the joy of being an archivist to develop a sense of style no longer really being a possibility – is there still a place of discovery for you online that feels precious? Where feels like a place for discovery for you offline?

CC: I had a fashion awakening during COVID. During that time, because we were always in Notting Hill, I started spending more time at the market talking to people on the stalls, and I discovered One of a Kind Archive and became friends with the guys who worked there. I’d just go in and sit with them and we’d talk for hours about fashion and old campaigns and they showed me things and they were so knowledgeable. I never went to fashion school so I've always had holes in my knowledge.

It’s incredible to see fashion through the lens of people who are dealing with the product — how and where things get made, where and how to source things. Talking with them has made me fall back in love with the industry in a way that I wasn't expecting, because, what was making me feel very disillusioned was this notion that you could just click and buy, but actually, what makes fashion most special is when it’s a hunt; when you have to go out and search. 

These days, we see all these TikTok videos about how to find your personal style. But that’s a silly question, because how do you know what you like until you spend time on it? Reading, watching films, talking with different kinds of people who open your perspective on the world...it's the way you interact with the world that's going to bring you that point of view. Taste isn’t something you’re born with, it's something that you develop. And for me, falling back in love with fashion in the real world, having that experience of touching beautiful things and putting on old gowns that were just so well made, made me want to go and dig, to research and look differently.

JW: It’s interesting that podcasting and video-podcasting created a new space for indulgence of the  long-form. Do you find that that is where we – as a society – found ourselves being newly influenced? That somehow it picked-up the baton of personality-driven creators being able to work without guardrails?

CC: I'm a massive podcast listener. I do think the way now to create a real bond with your audience is by accepting the need to let audiences in on a much larger chunk of your life, which, if I was young,  I might be prepared to do, but I’m not anymore. I’ve seen people who went the vlogging route on YouTube. That’s something that I considered back in the day because I knew I could earn more money, but ultimately I felt it would come at too much personal cost. 

People who’ve erupted onto the scene, like Julia Fox, have done it through showing their personality. I don't think she would have reached that level of ‘It girl’, whereby she’s now a real figurehead of the industry, if she just kept quiet. Nowadays, to cut through the noise, it's almost the only way. It’s not necessarily a bad thing because it allows people to show a lot more depth. But it’s simultaneously a bit of a scam, because everybody's doing it.

JW: Having the “hard stuff out in the open” with vulnerability as social media currency is a very challenging tightrope to walk – I can attest to that – but you’ve spoken about it being the best way. You’ve specifically been very honest about your journey with IVF. Can you speak to how that article and the level of disclosure in it came about?

CC: When I wrote that piece that I did about IVF, it was something that I took a lot of time over and had thought about a lot before going into it. And even then, I received a lot of unwanted remarks and questions. There's a lot to be said for writing, because it allows you to put it out into the world, and then once it's there, it's like closing a chapter. You can put it out, and it's gone. Whereas, there's something about social media and the way it sits, which makes it feel like it has a much longer life, but a life that actually has less value. 

Maybe because I'm a bit older, and because I have shared things before that I now wish were no longer in the public space, or because I can simply see the pitfalls and how addictive it is to receive the attention of strangers online; that feeling of reward you can get  from giving a part of yourself, I worry about what the impact is going to be for that generation when those things start getting used a little bit against them, you know, when their names are searched, because right now it seems completely fine, but when you step back,  it is a bit odd the way it’s become such a huge part of the way we interact with each other online.

JW: I agree. I feel there's kind of  a grey area that lives in the middle, and it's about the forum and the format in which you put something out.

CC: I think it’s also about the reason, because if you're doing it just to get attention (and in my view, attention equals money, because that's what attention is these days), I don't see the value of it. But if you make it because you are really committed to sharing, to allowing other people to feel seen, to connect with other people who've gone through this and to leave a legacy, I think that has value. I mean, it's the reason why cinema and fiction is so important, because when you feel seen or you see yourself on a page you are able to be more empathetic within the world and I think that is also one of the biggest functions of fashion and perhaps it's something that has been lost a little bit. 

JW: I'm sure your writing, though challenging, will inevitably be something that you’ll treasure. 

CC: I think sometimes we forget that the practice itself is the reward. Because actually, if you can't enjoy it while you're doing it, if you are only looking at the end results, then you are missing the point. And regardless of how hard it is, and if you don’t actually allow yourself to find it hard and give yourself grace in that period, then you're fucked because, this is it, you know?

Follow Camille @camillecharriere