Tube Girl has made her way from the Underground to the front rows and runways of Paris Fashion Week. While Paris Fashion Week historically boasts an air of exclusivity, many brands have turned the high-class event into a dog and pony show for influencers.
Paris Fashion Week is a dégueuler de la mode, welcoming the world’s most renowned houses of fashion to “The City of Love.” Yet front row spots once reserved for fashion editors, writers, stylists and the like are now filled with celebrities and influencers. And if you’re Tube Girl, a viral TikTok video lands you on the runway.
Sabrina Bahsoon, the woman behind the online personality “Tube Girl,” posted her first viral TikTok on Aug. 13. In the short span of two months, she has gone from strutting down the aisle of a train to strutting runways in London, Milan and Paris.
Her 764.5K TikTok followers have afforded her model status at the Christian Cowan show, an invitation to the Valentino show — where she created exclusive backstage content for the brand’s socials — and a visit to Vogue House.
During her visit to Vogue House, Bahsoon discussed her rapid rise to stardom, which has afforded her opportunities many models and creators work to achieve throughout their entire careers.
She also found herself spontaneously challenged to deliver an on-the-spot performance of her quirky TikTok style by junior fashion editor Alex Kessler, which he describes warranted a flock of Vogue editors and onlookers attempting to snap a selfie with the online personality.
Kessler’s on-the-spot request for Bahsoon to reenact her Tube Girl content reveals a strange voyeuristic relationship between influencers and followers.
Even in real life, influencers are treated as though they are something to be watched rather than a person to be interacted with. It resembles an extremely convoluted parasocial relationship where the desired intentionally stokes the fire of their desiree’s pathological fixation.
One TikTok user posted a video of Tube Girl filming herself at the Valentino show. Rather than engaging in conversation, Bahsoon becomes a spectacle to be filmed and probed by onlookers.
Yet the biggest culprits in the commodification of influencers are not social media followers, but brands who milk all social currency from young influencers who boast little life experience.
The influx of influencers at events such as Paris Fashion Week suggests how quantity reigns supreme over quality in our modern culture. In the perfect words of Nina Maria for NSS Magazine, “why should one learn skills when all that matters is a platform?”
Rather than valuing experience, commitment and expertise, both brands and individuals subscribe to the endless cycle of trends with short lifespans. We are hooked on the addicting drug of short-lived, momentary bursts of excitement.
Flashy faces such as Tube Girl at events like Paris Fashion Week reveal how consumer culture now insidiously transcends the material — we can now consume people and discard them when they no longer serve our desired purpose.
It is high time to reevaluate the role social media and influencers play in our lives. The digital world needs to stay where it is — online.
Piper Puccetti joined the Opinion column for the University Daily Kansan in 2023. She enjoys writing on topics surrounding popular culture, society and inspiration she takes from literature. Piper is a junior at the University of Kansas studying journalism and art history. Outside of the UDK, she works at the Spencer Museum of Art in the K-12 & Family Education department.