YouTubing is a democratised kind of fame – unlike mainstream entertainment, there are no gatekeepers. It takes merit to amass a following.
This is why 18-year-old YouTuber Emma Chamberlain is the most accurate representation I’ve seen so far of my generation. Chamberlain is not some 34-year-old scriptwriter’s conception of what youth looks like, nor are her videos a cherry-picked snapchat reel of parties and promotional events — she’s the real deal.
This real deal is a far cry from Dazed and Confused-style teenagehood – it’s hard to imagine her smoking Marijuana in an empty suburban football field (besides, our generation prefers TikTok, Juul and Adderall). You could call her wholesome in that regard, but also uninhibited, speaking with surprising frankness about the times she’s cried over twitter hate or the current digestive status of yesterday’s burrito (“There’s still shit left in my bottom-right bowel,” a friend shouts off-screen in one of the videos). Her personality can be described as TFW you wash down 400mg of modafinil with a couple of coffees and suddenly become faster, funnier, euphoric, verbose – but also capable of feats like sitting down to edit a video for 15 hours straight.
The older video – and with Chamberlain’s impressive growth rate, by old I mean twelve months – the more accurate the generational depiction, back before YouTube turned her life less-than-normal. Particularly resonant is all the time she spends in the car, iced almond milk latte in hand, chatting to a camera affixed to the dashboard as she shuttles from coffee drive-thru to Target to random parking lot, unglamourous Bay Area sprawl passing by out the window.
Most importantly, however, Chamberlain is the sartorial embodiment of our generation. Her wardrobe is a rapidly rotating array of athleisure, fast fashion, and impulse purchases: sweatpants and a crop top, oversized rugby shirts hiding the shorts underneath, slides, scrunchies, and her signature sloppy (not even stylised-messy) bun, broken up by intense, unprovoked displays of effort in fashion and makeup. Every upload, I’m in suspense over where Chamberlain will lie this time on the acne-breakout to *OutFiT* spectrum.
There’s also an apparent love of novelty. In one video she shows off a thrift store t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Edible Arrangements’, a catering chain specialising in tacky bouquets of fruit salad: “How fucking sick is that. That’s just funny. I can’t wait to wear that and have people be like, ‘why?’”. In a crossover episode with fellow ‘Tubers James Charles and the Dolan Twins, Chamberlain announces the gimmick of turning herself into an ‘L.A. bitch’ and attempts to dress the part, but the crew decides that what the outfit needs is a Gucci belt – so, in a winning combo of YouTube advertising wealth and ADD-style spontaneity, they GO TO THE MALL AND BUY A GUCCI BELT.
Tracking a YouTuber’s rise to fame has the same satisfaction – or I-was-here-first indignation – of watching a beloved indie band make it. At the same time, videos logging every milestone (The first 100,000 followers, the first million, the first Gucci) leave a digital trail, allowing newer followers to retrace those steps. The ability to watch that story unfold creates a far more personal kind of fandom.
In the past 18 months, fans (stans?) have had the privilege of watching Chamberlain drop out of 11th grade (she’s since taken the California High School Exit Exam), move out of her parents’ places in San Francisco, and at 17, settle into her own apartment in L.A., and upgrade to an even better apartment – with great lighting, for a life devoted to vlogging.
Her video premises have since become more elaborate, including random stunts like pretending to be pregnant and collaborations with other YouTubers like the Gucci belt episode, but thankfully, her throw it against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks style remains unchanged.
Indeed, that style has taken on an “auteur” status now widely imitated and parodied. Videos are layered with warped filters and stock sound effects. A long clip will include frequent cutaways to Chamberlain’s face (often tired and laptop-illuminated) as she edits the video, adding some meta-commentary to the scene. The result is an impressively fast pace, once again reminiscent of modern attention spans, making what is essentially Chamberlain talking at a camera for 20 minutes somehow addicting to watch.
Critics of Emma Chamberlain would have been the same people criticising Lena Dunham when Girls came out in 2012, if it weren’t for the fact that they were probably still in junior high. The same jabs, however, still ring true – self-centred, self-absorbed, representative of everything wrong with “kids these days,” except that now that millennial Dunham (whose character Hannah Horvath once called herself ‘the voice of my generation’) has reached her 30s, “kids these days” refer to Chamberlain’s Generation Z.
If Chamberlain is self-absorbed, she takes it to refreshing new heights. Whereas Dunham constantly strove to distinguish the artist from the art – many took the ‘voice of the generation’ quote to be autobiographical – Chamberlain unapologetically is the art, in a medium where such navel-gazing is taken for granted if not sought out for its voyeuristic thrill. Indeed, if Chamberlain’s fans have any complaints, it’s her distance when she refuses to discuss her rumoured relationship with Ethan Dolan or weigh in on the tea with James Charles.
Still, despite all the shameless self-promotion and random, unnecessary consumption, Chamberlain is saved (imho) by the more winning characteristics of our generation – flexibility, open-mindedness and a lack of pretension. Freed from rigidity and social norms, Chamberlain doesn’t even appear to observe normal sit-down meals, wandering aimlessly around her open-plan apartment and L.A. from coffee to frozen yogurt to Postmated burrito. Where some may tip-toe around tricky conversations about gender, Chamberlain creates content like “DRESSING UP AS EACHOTHER ft Dolan Twins & James Charles”, in which Chamberlain sports a beard and one of the twins imitates Charles by dipping his face in make-up.
She also, unlike Dunham, doesn’t pontificate about philosophy or arts or the purpose behind her own art. Instead, topics are straightforwardly declared in titles like “GOING ON A TRIP BY MYSELF *lonely*” or “I MADE MYSELF DINNER”. Behind the click, the videos are exactly as advertised – no grandiose hidden agenda to be found.
