Long before we came up with the ‘it girl’ phrase, the internet had the ultimate older sister of our generation: posting YouTube vlogs where she’d go thrifting to find the coolest clothes, drink too much cold brew and convince us that being a little lost at 17 was actually normal.
The fashion icon and Met Gala regular Emma Chamberlain didn’t start out trying to be any of those things. She was simply a teenager filming from her bedroom, building a world out of half-finished thoughts and caffeine jitters. Her room was never clean and her closet was always too full. And that was the charm; she created something raw enough to feel private in a public space.
I started watching Emma Chamberlain in middle school, when I didn’t really know what to do with all the hours I spent online. She filmed herself driving around LA, sometimes hanging out in San Francisco, laughing at things that weren’t really funny but felt true anyway. Nothing about her life looked unreachable; it looked like what mine could be if I just had the nerve to record it.
The thrift stores, the caffeine highs, the blurry friendships — it all felt like a version of girlhood that wasn’t pretending to be better than it was. That’s what kept me watching. Not the plot, not the people around her. Just the sense that she was figuring things out in real time, the way we all were. Her unique fashion sense was a plus, too.
Though her YouTube channel was created in 2016, when Chamberlain felt dissatisfied with her high school life, it wasn’t until a year later — when she posted a ‘Dollar Tree Store haul’ that went viral overnight — that she became more than just another teen trying out vlogging. Unlike the overly filtered, perfected content we saw in the early 2010s, Emma was chaotic, awkward and refreshingly unpolished. Chamberlain succeeded in making people feel comfortable online — something that was extremely rare at the time.
“ Emma’s honesty drove her popularity. Not performative vulnerability or curated relatability, but actual, unfiltered honesty. She didn’t claim to have her life together; she made content out of not having it together. ”
Watching Emma didn’t feel like being taught something or being sold something. It felt like talking to a friend who validated my feelings, understood what I was going through and made me feel better.
That kind of honesty is hard to fake and even harder to scale. But Emma never tried to optimize her personality for the algorithm. She built trust instead. She earned her fans’ loyalty by showing up exactly as she was. Her videos had this twitchy rhythm that mirrored the inner monologue of an overstimulated teenager. Every zoom-in, every awkward pause felt like a signal to viewers that she was actually like them, not just pretending to be.
Within months, she gained hundreds of thousands of subscribers. By mid-2019, at just 18 years old, Emma’s channel had exploded to over eight million subscribers in under two years, making it one of the fastest-growing in the United States What followed was the wave of collabs with other major YouTubers, most notably the Dolan Twins and James Charles, with whom she created “the Sister Squad.” This friend group only accelerated her reach.
Even in that group, Chamberlain stood out. You’d see her making fun of herself, not being afraid to show the world she wasn’t perfect. It was an ideal match for a generation that was collectively tired of pretending. She was, in essence, the anti-brand who became a brand.
Somewhere along the way, Chamberlain stopped being just a YouTuber and became a blueprint not just for how to edit, dress or talk to a camera, but for how to exist on the internet without disappearing into it. And she got famous: Louis Vuitton invites, Met Gala interviews, a coffee company and the face of Cartier. In the span of two years, Emma Chamberlain had transformed from an ordinary teen vlogger into the poster child of a new, unfiltered era of influencing.
Today, she has inarguably become a taste-maker for Gen Z style and internet culture. Early on, fans began emulating Emma’s effortlessly cool fashion sense. She’d appear in videos wearing thrifted “dad” jeans, oversized teddy-bear jackets, scrunchies and funky sunglasses, sparking viral trends around each item. In fact, many staple looks of the late-2010s teen scene trace back to Chamberlain. She is often credited as “the original VSCO girl” for popularizing that casual, 90s-inspired aesthetic before it went mainstream. Emma didn’t just wear clothes, she made people care about the story behind them.
Yet, the most compelling part of Emma Chamberlain’s rise isn’t just how massive her following is –– it’s how unusually loyal and emotionally invested her fans are. This wasn’t the typical influencer-fan relationship built on envy or aspiration. Emma’s followers didn’t want her lifestyle so much as they wanted to feel like they were living alongside her. Her fandom is built on a sense of proximity, of growing up together. Watching Emma wasn’t about being wowed by her — it was about being seen by her, even when she didn’t know you existed.
That’s what makes her fanbase stick. They weren’t just watching to be entertained; they were watching to feel a little less alone. Emma never made people feel like they had to be cooler, prettier or more successful to be worth something. That kind of emotional connection builds a fandom that doesn’t fade when trends do.
In the end, in a world that keeps asking us to be filtered and sure of ourselves, Emma Chamberlain reminded us that it’s okay to just be figuring it out. And really, what’s more influential than that?
Bianca Mirica PO ’29 believes in three constants: cats, coffee and choruses by Taylor Swift or The Weeknd. She treats novels like sacred objects, gangster movies like moral philosophy, and suspects her bookshelf is one bad purchase away from collapse.
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