Emma Chamberlain doesn’t care about being famous

Emma Chamberlain is experiencing ​“ego death”. She tells me this when I ask how she goes between the Emma speaking with me now, who is warm and down-to-earth, and the Emma posing for the camera downstairs, who moves like a woman with no qualms about giving herself over to the power of a creative vision (which, in this case, involves little clothing and, at one point, a strawberry the size of a boulder).

​“I think now I find opportunities to be a character almost therapeutic, because it’s a relief from being myself,” she says, knees tucked to her chest as we sit together between set changes in a Los Angeles photography studio. For most of Emma’s career, being herself has been her business.

Still only 23, she’s been famous for around a third of her life, starting out on YouTube in 2016. Her early videos were characterised by an energetic editing style and an informal depiction of her life at high school in the California suburbs. While other content geared towards girls at the time offered images of aspiration and tips to get there, Emma zoomed in on being real. She had acne. She made jokes at her own expense. She gained millions of followers. The internet was never the same.

Eventually, those millions of followers turned into ambassadorships with Louis Vuitton and Lancôme, presenting gigs for Vogue at the Met Gala and a splashy exclusive with Spotify for her podcast, Anything Goes. Those things are a big deal for anyone, but especially for someone who got famous on the internet.

Whatever you call this – transcending the title of ​“influencer” or just proving that it doesn’t have to carry stigma – Emma was the first of her gen to do it. Her 2019 partnership with Louis Vuitton radically changed the idea of who luxury brands deemed ​“acceptable” and what was considered possible for creators.

Even with no designer names or fancy clothes, there’s something about Emma that makes people want what she has. When she posted a photo in stretchy flared pants in 2020, the internet declared that she’d single-handedly made yoga pants cool again (she says the idea to wear them possibly came to her in a dream).

Emma has loved getting dressed up since she was a kid (“literally five”). Back then, she was obsessed with costumes and the plastic jewellery you win at amusement arcades. But she really got into fashion when she developed an online presence in the second half of her teen years. She’d spend hours on Pinterest and at the thrift store, and having an online audience react to what she put together inspired her to keep experimenting with style.

​“It was like: ​‘Oh, people are actually perceiving me,’” she remembers. Kind of like how a night out makes it more exciting to get dressed? ​“Absolutely,” although she wasn’t going out much at the time. Her social circle had shrunk: she’d decided not to go to college and her friends from school were off doing their own things. ​“The first time that I had a reason to dress up was when I was on the internet.”

Getting paid to be yourself, wear cool clothes and post about it online is a lot better than most jobs. Emma knows this. But there have been times when social media has made her sick. She frequently speaks at length on her podcast about the psychological toll of being online, especially if you make a living from it. ​“Not to get spiritual, but you never get anything [in life] for free,” she says in the straightforward manner of someone who had to make peace with the vicissitudes of life at a young age. ​“There’s always a cost. With great success or fortune, there’s always going to be an equal that is pain.”

Compared to other creators, Emma hasn’t had it all that bad. She’s never been cancelled and no one’s ever said anything mean to her in person. Even so, ​“the constant fear of being the internet’s punching bag is” – she pauses, as if to make sure her words are consequential enough to capture this feeling – ​“the heaviest weight I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s terrifying.” At times, she’s found herself paralysed by the unpredictable nature of online opinion. ​“I never get comfortable being in the moment when I’m liked, because that can go away tomorrow. On the other hand, people can love you again tomorrow.”

Most recently, Emma faced criticism for her approach to Anything Goes, where her topics range from philosophy to pop culture, with listeners questioning the depth of her thinking and suggesting, rather bluntly, that she should go to university to develop it. Emma seems aware of this response as she explains that, by design, episode prep usually involves minimal research and a ​“stream of consciousness” outline: ​“I’m never trying to teach anyone anything. I’m more trying to learn with the audience and maybe be a thought-starter for people.” But she acknowledges that, as with any creative pursuit, you can’t always get it right. ​“At times, too, I think I’ve sort of lost myself and the episode has maybe even come off as me trying to teach. But that was more of a miss.”

She’s learned to deal with the whiplash of life in the digital spotlight by training herself not to scroll and mostly only going online to post. When she does find herself spiralling, she grounds herself by spending time with her small inner circle and going somewhere ordinary like the grocery store or a bar. ​“Touching grass!” she says, her voice lifting the way it does on her podcast when she goes from philosophical to funny in the same breath. ​“That’s the best advice the internet has ever backhandedly given.”

There’s also the issue of the thing that made the internet love her in the first place: relatability. Emma knows it’s not relatable to sit front row at fashion week’s most exclusive shows or to have your home featured in Architectural Digest at 21. The comments telling her as much used to upset her. Regardless of money or fame, though, she believes a connection can still be made from being open about what we all have in common: heartbreak, failure, mental health struggles – all topics that she regularly addresses on Anything Goes. ​“But,” she continues, ​“you also don’t necessarily need to be relatable to provide value, and that’s something I’ve realised.”

Emma is so influential – 12 million YouTube subscribers, 15 million Instagram followers, even 444,000 followers of her ​“grid zero” TikTok page – that her name has become shorthand for the characteristics of her entire generation. Everything she does, from the shoes she wears and how she shows up to Coachella to the way she arranges her ​“photo dumps” on Instagram, is analysed. And it’s not just marketers and journalists using Emma to explain Gen Z. Across the internet, creators speak in authoritative tones about the state of her style, content and business, often as a means of triangulating a trend prediction or making a larger point about culture. Creating content about Emma Chamberlain is its own content genre, and these takes regularly receive hundreds of thousands of views.

Emma’s low-scroll lifestyle helps her avoid content about herself, which she believes justifies the sacrifice of missing out what’s going on online. ​“Me not knowing what’s going on on my phone all the time. Me not knowing what ​‘so demure’ means [when everyone on set is referencing the meme]. Me finding out about Brat summer, like, two months late, even though I was in [Charli’s 360 music video]… That is worth it for the peace I have from not constantly being bombarded with information all the time – [especially] information about myself.”

Still, she’s aware of the label that’s assigned to her through much of the media coverage: ​“voice of a generation”. And while Emma doesn’t consider it her identity, it does make her want to rise to the occasion by being as real as she can be about issues she and her peers face, whether that’s her own addictions to vaping and nicotine or the negative impacts of social media. ​“I wanna go on my show and talk about how the fuck I’m dealing with the fact that this thing,” she says, pointing to the phone on the table in front of us, ​“is ruining my brain. To me, that’s being the voice of a generation.”

I begin to imagine Emma as one of Andy Warhol’s superstars about 15 minutes into our first conversation of the day, which takes place as she is getting her hair and makeup done. Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling and co became famous for just being themselves on camera, too. And as it happens, Emma has been inspired by ​’60s and ​’70s style recently, particularly the more androgynous stuff. She’s been thinking about chopping her hair and swipes through her phone to show me photos of her in a few short wigs from those eras. Someone on set assures her she can pull it off because she’s got that Sedgwick thing going on.

Emma goes full superstar a few minutes later, during the first shot of the day. She’s wearing underwear and a vest, a ​’60s-style lampshade hat and a pair of gold Adidas trainers. She’s magnetic as she moves from pose to pose. Set against a black backdrop dotted with jagged white stars, the whole scene looks like something straight out of The Factory.

Back upstairs, Emma reveals that she’s been auditioning for acting roles. ​“I literally always said: ​‘I could never do that.’ My whole personality is, like, myself. That’s my one superpower. Why would I ever do something else?” But she’s discovered that trying to be someone else, even if just for an audition, has given her a feeling of freedom – a feeling not dissimilar to the ego death she experiences when she embodies a character for a photoshoot.

Her few auditions so far have been unsuccessful, but she insists that this rejection is ​“great”. Part of her resistance to acting in the first place was a fear that she might be cast purely on the strength of her following rather than what she can bring to a character. With a few ​“no”s under her belt, she feels more confident that if she does land something, it’ll be because she’s right for the role. For now, it’s just fun.

Is there a world in which Emma Chamberlain isn’t in the public eye? The day of our interview, it’s announced that she’s stepping up as co-CEO of Chamberlain Coffee, the start-up she founded in 2019 – might the C‑suite be ultimately more appealing than the VIP suite? Her focus on the company, which she stresses is ​“100 per cent,” is a bit like podcasting star Alex Cooper launching her own media company in 2023 – a strategic decision to allow business to proceed without the person in charge having to be mic’d up or captured on camera.

But even with all our talk of ego death and the existential terror of having a platform that will literally go down in internet history, Emma Chamberlain still grasps the power of her own voice, even if she finds it hard to come to terms with. ​“Would certain things I do be as impactful if I wasn’t present, if it wasn’t my face, if it wasn’t me telling the story?” she muses. She says she doesn’t know, but it sounds like she does. As she said earlier, not necessarily as an answer to the question, but as a mission statement for herself: ​“I don’t care about being famous as much as I care about doing a good thing.”

HAIR Rena Calhoun at A‑Frame Agency MAKE-UP Lilly Keys at A‑Frame Agency SET DESIGN Daniel Horowitz PRODUCTION Dylan Brackpool PRODUCTION MANAGER Rebecca Aaron THE FACE PRODUCTION May Powell PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS Liam O’Herlihy and Breyer Floyd STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS Natassia Casas, Elliot Sorriano, Amilia Howells, Sophie Richardson and Ellie Marles