In Texas, a lawsuit has been filed in which one Amazon influencer is being sued by another Amazon influencer for damages that could reach into the millions, impact how influencers influence forever, and also how we see the colour beige. The job of an Amazon influencer, let me explain – let me quickly explain – for those of you who just see letters here, smudged together without thought or meaning, is to buy things from Amazon – luggage, jewellery, a handbag in the shape of a conch – then recommend it to their online followers. If someone else purchases it by clicking on their link, they get up to 10% commission on the sale. It’s a whole job – it’s a whole life. According to online tech magazine The Verge, Sydney Nicole Gifford of Minneapolis is accusing Alyssa Sheil of Austin of (among other things) “copyright infringement, tortious interference with prospective business relations and misappropriating another person’s likeness”, and the case, to my eyes anyway, pivots on beige.
I write this as Pantone reveals its colour of the year, which they describe as an “evocative soft brown” called Mocha Mousse. It’s beige. It’s beige in shadow, in low light through ivory voile, it’s the colour of Molly-Mae and tradwives and quiet luxury, it’s the colour of expensive coats and discounted Amazon jewellery stands. It reflects our current politics, our current mood. It’s slightly shitty. It’s of the colour family of fear, I believe, of conservatism and control, even capitalism, perhaps, illustrated by the rotating nothingness of our influencers and the objects’ thirst for stains. It makes perfect sense to me that a rise in cases of anxiety rose in parallel with a return to minimalism – the women enamoured with beige are creating anxious spaces, not because of their aesthetic intentions, rooms for peaceful meditation, but because they expose a fear both of spillages and of getting it wrong.
“Clean girl” beauty and interiors persist. In the last five years, we have seen influencers rebrand their cleaning or shopping obsessions as “wellness hacks”, as methods of control and routine that help dispel anxiety disorders. In a vacuum of mental healthcare, these women (like Mrs Hinch, the highest-paid “cleanfluencer” in the UK, her home famously all white and grey, its windowsills spotless) have been elevated to guru status. But the fact that the hobbies they promote, the cleaning, the baking, the baby and homemaking, are all components of housewifery, does not seem coincidental. Cleanliness, in practice and aesthetic, is the modern cure for anxiety – a greige serenity, a padded cell in which women cautiously jail themselves.
The two Amazon influencers’ Instagrams are both vast deserts of oatmeal and putty and taupe. In one post, we watch Gifford clean her closet, where every shoe, trouser, sweater is a matching shade of cream. Just as there are a hundred gradations of beige, so are there a hundred shades of influencer, their contents overlapping and shifting according to profit, leading a follower like me down an algorithmic alleyway. To click between the two women’s pages is to fall slightly into a gap between worlds. You start looking for an 11th finger or third ear, or some other evidence of AI. Their homes are empty but for identical objects purchased from the middle aisles of Amazon, and they walk through these spaces in fawn-coloured cardigans and strappy vests, opening cardboard boxes (brown) and making beds (white). To be one of their combined million followers is to witness the seasons turning on their lives in hues of Amazon basic – in one post they are setting up their home office, then an inch of time passes and they’re setting up a baby’s crib. It would be moving perhaps, if there was something concrete for the eye to fix on.
Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her “neutral, beige, and cream aesthetic”, and that her “uncannily similar content” has cut into her earnings – she claims she’s owed up to £117,000 in damages for mental anguish and lost sales commission from Amazon. The two women have the same doormats, the same storage benches, the same towel warmers, the same fake olive trees and odd boucle storage stools in which cream trainers are kept, and they pose in the same way for selfies, a work of uncanny performance art. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance and even tattoos. Sheil told The Verge that she was being unfairly targeted. “There are hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic and I’m the only one that’s having to go through this.” She’s right, equality matters, extend the brief, sue them all.
There is a sense, scrolling through the influencers’ pages and their disorienting lawsuit, that this “clean girl” aesthetic has come, finally, to its natural conclusion – that a woman has scrubbed so hard at a life there is nothing left. Chaos is extinguished, as is colour, as is age, as is risk – everything is tidy, everything is box-fresh, unwrapped today from plastic, everything is smooth and blended, to a fine mocha mousse.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
