Over the past couple of years, the prestigious Cannes Film Festival has been subject to a new form of criticism.
The red carpet of the film festival has long been a glamorous ramp for beautiful people to showcase wonderful fashion, the invitees are traditionally people from the world of film, or film-adjacent, such as models, producers, and rich financiers.
But the last few editions have seen a new category of attendees: influencers.
This year too, a host of Indian (and foreign) influencers descended upon the French Riviera and created content around the festival – but not about it.
By overshadowing the films themselves, culture critics point out, the influencers are taking attention away from those who truly deserve it (a point I mostly concur with, though it begs the question: how many of us even cared about Cannes before the influencers were there?).
This critique has been further magnified by allegations from industry insiders that the influencers’
All this has led to widespread panning of all the influencers who have ‘made it’ to Cannes, with one exception.
Nancy Tyagi, a 23-year-old fashion influencer from Uttar Pradesh.
Nancy, The Underdog Who ‘Made It’
ho rose to fame with her Instagram reels of making outfits from scratch on her hand-powered sewing machine, has received widespread adoration for her appearance there, as well as her outfits.
Continuing her signature ‘outfit from scratch’ move, a video by Brut shows Nancy excitedly explaining to a red carpet interviewer that she created her own outfit, using 1000 metres of fabric and spending 30 days of effort in it.
She speaks in Hindi, assisted by an interviewer, and is visibly overwhelmed in the now-viral video which has over 20,00,000 likes on Instagram. (Brut is also the media partner of the event and allegedly part of the effort of putting up tickets for purchase.)
An overwhelming majority of people have been supporting Nancy across platforms: her Instagram followers have grown to 1.3 million, and she was trending on social media on the day of an IPL match (which usually overshadows all other topics).
Her follow-up looks have been well-received, with audiences lauding her effort and style, and she has been featured in various best-dressed lists, by both Indian and foreign media and bloggers.
People are proud of her.
And even as the news of influencers buying their tickets to Cannes broke out and they were ridiculed on social media, Nancy, who herself was included in the list of people who paid to go, has mostly escaped the criticism – still getting largely positive coverage, albeit with a few commentators here and there saying how they can’t ‘see her the same way’ after knowing she paid to go.
It’s a problem borne out of our need to ‘see’ influencers in some way at all, to place them somewhere in the moral compasses of our worldview, to decide if we see them as individuals who are working or as the juggernaut of the creator economy (or both).