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CC Clarke, an influencer with 2 million followers, has parlayed her enthusiasm for make-up into everything from contracts with L’Oreal to founding a wig brand and signing a record deal. In 2020, she launched a side account called @ccclarkehome, where she documented the redesign and renovation of her second property.
On the account, she ran most of the renovation by committee, posing questions like “bi-folds or hinged doors?” She celebrated the completion of an en suite in her dressing room and a “sexy shower” in her “zen room” with captions like: “When you realise you’re soaking up the moment you’ve spent years MANIFESTING”. From pink gemstone tiles to burnished bronze electrical sockets, the manufacturers of everything in Clarke’s Barbie-dream house are diligently tagged and thanked for (presumably gifted or discounted) materials.
As a renter, bifolds and hinged doors are low on my list of concerns. I’m too busy squabbling with housemates about washing up in the sink and trying to suppress mounting dread about lease renewal rental increases. Yet, I still find myself perusing Clarke’s waterfall showerhead and raising my eyebrows at her tile choices (too much) while urgently trying to contact my real estate agent about the water damage mark on our living room ceiling that has expanded with recent rainfall and caused us to dine by candlelight for two months.
In the UK, Love Island stars have also joined the home-reno club, maximising their on-screen love fame with back-on-dry-land property ventures.
Lucie Donlan and Luke Mabbott went viral on TikTok while documenting the transformation of their cottage in 2023. Now they’re levelling up, promising fans front-row seats as they steamroll a Cornish chapel into an open-plan modernist nightmare.
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Meanwhile, Tasha Ghouri and Andrew Le Page are documenting their home renovation at @lepagepropertiesshowing followers which walls will be knocked through to accommodate his and hers walk-in-robes, and where the two-storey addition, housing a master en suite, will begin.
It feels like Millennial Grand Designs with bigger blowdries and better fake tans. But instead of experiencing delicious glee when planning permits stall, Italian marble goes missing, budgets blow out and marriages dissolve, we are eagerly cheering them on.
We have no reason to be. In news most will find hard to believe, England has won the race for worst country to find housing in the developed world. For every Millennial currently considering investing in their first home in Australia, there’s at least two tossing up moving back in with their parents.
Traditionally, the relationship between influencers and their audiences has hinged on a careful balance of aspiration and relatability. In 2014, I would tune into YouTube to tune out my life as an unreliable bartender and uni student. Beauty YouTubers, with their luxurious but affordable YSL lipsticks and Urban Decay setting sprays encouraged me in my unfortunate experiments with contouring and ultimately, I parlayed my studies into a far less lucrative career as a beauty journalist (with a staggering HECS debt).
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But as my favourite influencers have aged, they’ve become less fiscally relatable. In 2021, CC Clarke celebrated her successes with an earnest post and a lavender Chanel handbag (currently available for $11,000 on resale). The list of unexpected life events I’d need to bank on to mimic that sort of celebratory purchase is long.
There’s no dodging the cost of buying a house. In her first post, Phipps says buying a derelict house was “cheaper” than buying a turn-key property in her home city of Vancouver. But the investment still set her back $US2.1 million ($3.2 million), according to the Vancouver Sun.
But I can’t begrudge Phipps an investment that will likely provide years of highly profitable content (sorry, craftsnarkers). While her purchase may be out of my price range, her life trajectory isn’t beyond my imagination.
Millennials have been described by The New York Times as an “outsized generation, trying to squeeze ourselves into a too-small financial sweater”. We’ve copped gruelling challenges at significant life milestones: multiple recessions, unfriendly job markets, and a once-in-a-century pandemic. But we’ve also grown up with a new form of social media entrepreneurialism that has allowed our peers to (seemingly) skyrocket social classes with only an iPhone camera backing them. It’s the adult version of fantasising about your letter to Hogwarts, or the teenage hope you’ll be stopped on the street and scouted as a model (both yet to happen for me).
The path to homeownership in the 2020s may well be paved in sponcon and #trythis content. Posting assiduously to social media may be our version of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.
Whatever the case, one thing is for sure: I will watch a woman I have never met rapidly renovate a slowly crumbling mansion and combat black mould, just as I’ll watch a teenager from France show me how to nail concealer application. In the world of social media, both exert an equal lure.
Ruby Feneley is a freelance writer.
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