Today I Learned There's An Entire "Fake Wealth" Industry Making A Killing Off Wanna Be Instagram Influencers

Vice - Earlier this year, a now-deleted tweet showing influencers hiring out a Los Angeles photo studio staged to look like the inside of a private jet went viral. For $64 (£49) an hour, influencers and their friends can pretend they’ve chartered a plane and live out their dream of writing captions like “catching flights not feelings x” or “head in the clouds” – and, of course, flex that they, unlike you, can afford a private jet in the first place. 

In China, there’s an even cheaper option. For only 6 Yuan (less than £1), you can have a recording of your voice added to stock videos of expensive cars, tropical views and stacks of cash, ready to upload to your IG story.   

While readymade private jet photo studios and clout-chasing voiceovers aren’t widely available in the UK, snapping up empty designer packaging – like boxes or shopping bags – is commonplace.

Search “empty box” or “empty bag” on Depop and you’ll find hundreds of results. It used to be that the only people gagging for empty packaging were Year 9s desperate to put their PE kit in an Abercrombie & Fitch bag. These days, wannabe Molly Maes are at it too. In an interview with Input Mag, an anonymous designer reseller, with a mainly influencer clientele, revealed a recent uptick in requests for empty boxes from designer brands – namely Hermes, Pandora and Tiffany. “At first, I thought it was maybe to store some stuff at home, or to recycle it as a gift box for someone,” she told Input. “I didn’t know they used it for Instagram shoots.”

On Depop, some sellers have an entire account dedicated to empties; one has posted over 600 empty boxes and bags on their account. The items are repetitive, mainly Chanel, Tiffany, Pandora or Selfridges bags and boxes, or dust bags from Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Dior. The listings are also wildly expensive: a Gucci hat box for £35; a Dior shoe box for £30, four Hermes ribbons for £20; a Louboutin shoe box and gift bag for £55 (this one does come with the original Harrods receipt, to be fair).

Vice did a long article on this fucked up side-industry that has popped up taking advantage of just how desperate and thirsty the wannabe influencer community is. I highlighted the part mentioning the secondary market and black market that has sprung up not for designer label clothes and accessories, but BAGS and BOXES. 

We all remember the story a little while back of the company in LA that had a movie set setup to look like a private jet and were selling photoshoots for $65 an hour. JackMac blogged about it. 

Now, people are literally going online and scouring the internet to find used and knockoff Chanel and Gucci bags so that they can hold them in staged photoshoots that they can then upload to their Instagrams and try to look what exactly? Wealthy? Cool? Worthy of envy? 

Fake it til you make it right?

And laugh it up at these bootleg fools, but in some cases, shit actually worked out-

While you might think stacking up empty boxes is the definition of an anti-flex, according to the seller in the Input Mag piece, one of the influencers who bought Pandora boxes from her now has genuine sponsorship deals with luxury brands. 

Input- Sarah, not her real name, lives in the Philippines, and can sell up to 850 designer items a month – from leather handbags to watches and shoes – to customers mainly in the United States, Philippines, Malaysia and Macau. “Most buyers are well-known local bloggers, influencers or just aspiring models from Instagram and other sites,” she explains. She set up her business after selling beauty products in a local market as a side hustle to fund her college tuition. She saw that people buy beauty products – but they buy designer goods more frequently.

“At first I thought it was maybe to store some stuff at home, or to recycle it as a gift box for someone,” she says. “I didn’t know they used it for Instagram shoots until I saw some of them did it.”

When people order from Sarah, they put their username in the checkout section. She tracked that username back to one influencer, who at that point had 200,000 followers, posting a video on Instagram unboxing Pandora jewelry. “She’s using one of the Pandora boxes she purchased while the rest were in the background,” she says. “I’m not sure where she got the jewelry, but I’m sure those were the boxes she purchased.”

Some of them end up making it big: one Australian Filipino influencer who was a regular customer of Sarah’s through her assistant used to purchase Hermes and Louis Vuitton boxes through her online store. Sarah followed the influencer online and was a big fan of hers, didn’t put two and two together until she found out the influencer’s assistant was the person she was sending boxes to. “She gets sponsored by the real store of those brands now, but way back then I knew she was faking her posts looking rich and being able to buy lots of branded stuff,” she explains. The influencer now has more than four million followers.

I can't tell if these people deserve props for their hustle, and suckering designer brands into partnership deals, or if they're just flat out pathetic? 

Buying the bag or box something comes in, rather than the actual item, just to give off the impression to people you don't even know on the other side of a screen is a wild thought. Another one of those things that make you think what somebody who grew up through the Depression would think if you tried to explain to them-

"… no grandpa, they just buy the bag from the store so they can take a picture holding it."

"what the fuck do they want an empty bag for a picture for?"

"because they post it on this thing called Instagram where lots of people can see it and like it"

"why the fuck do they do that?"

"in hopes that one day a rich, old, middle eastern man will fly them out to Dubai and buy them the actual purse or bracelet that belongs in the bag. In exchange for peeing on them"

"weird times"

"weird times indeed"

From the looks of it, this has been going on forever. 

That influencer – who Sarah declines to name because of the need to continue doing business with creators – wasn’t alone. The influencer world’s worst-kept secret is that the oodles of boxes and bags they post with in glamorous photo shoots aren’t direct from Louis Vuitton’s store or the Gucci outlet. They’re bought from sites like Sarah’s, or bigger ones like Poshmark and eBay – and they’re often empty.

It shouldn’t surprise us that people are taking empty bags and boxes and projecting an extravagant lifestyle into them, says Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism, a New York creative agency. “Instagram acts as a social media avatar for our lives. The rich and famous take photos on private jets, [of] beautiful destinations, and shopping for expensive clothes. It’s aspirational for many,” he says. “Naturally people want to project a similar image of themselves. So they utilize social media to manufacture that identity.”

Poshmark, whose users list thousands of empty designer shopping bags and empty boxes for sale from some of the world’s biggest luxury brands, are circumspect about their contribution to the artifice of the creator economy. The site’s PR agency initially offered to help gather data with this story, over the course of nearly a week in late September and early October. When they learned the story would identify people who pretend they bought items from brands – or try to give off that impression – they said they wouldn’t be able to participate in the story. The PR declined to answer what caused the change of heart.

p.s.- Seriously does anybody know what the hell happened and when exactly?

How did we get to this point and, where does it end?