On a recent Friday afternoon, Emma Chamberlain passed a tow yard during a photo shoot in Beverly Hills. She walked by a row of dented sedans and sat on the step of a tow truck, her platinum mullet glowing white in the sun.
“Honestly, this is my enemy,” she said, eyeing the vehicle.
She told the story in the confessional, self-deprecating patter that helped make her one of her generation’s biggest YouTube stars: When she was 17 and had just moved to Los Angeles, she had made a critical parking error on a street-sweeping day in East Hollywood. The car was towed. She panicked.
“I just called my mom immediately,” she said. “Now, I think I’d know how to handle it, but back then I did not.”
A lot has changed since Ms. Chamberlain arrived in Los Angeles from the Bay Area six years ago, after leaving high school to focus on her vlogging career. At 23, she has 12 million subscribers on YouTube and 15 million followers on Instagram — more than Gwyneth Paltrow, more than Travis and Jason Kelce combined. She walks the red carpet at the Met Gala and sits in the front row at fashion weeks. When Charli XCX gathered a coterie of “it” girls for a music video this spring, Ms. Chamberlain was among them, checking her makeup in the rearview of a smashed-up S.U.V.
She is aware that this probably sounds like a dream job, and some days it feels like one. But the older Ms. Chamberlain gets, the more uneasy she feels about a future of sprinting on the social media hamster wheel.
“I’m having a moral dilemma about these platforms in the first place — like, do I want to feed the beast?” she said. She has been posting only sparingly on YouTube lately, and keeps ignoring advice that she should be trying to gain a foothold on the newer, hotter video platform: TikTok. (She has an account with half a million followers and no videos.)
She has been redirecting her efforts toward an expanding business empire, and a life that she hopes will involve less screen time and more creative control. In August, she became co-chief executive of the coffee company she started in 2019. She signed a Spotify deal in 2022 for her podcast “Anything Goes.” And on Friday she is releasing her second collaboration with the eyewear company Warby Parker — the first she has designed herself.
All of the above are potential answers to what is proving to be a slippery question: What comes after social media stardom?
“People are like, ‘Your job is to be on these platforms,’” she said. “I get it. I don’t like a lot of the platforms. So I’m going to try to shift my job so that I don’t have to be on them.”
Good Phone, Bad Phone
After the photo shoot wrapped up, Ms. Chamberlain retreated into her talent agency’s office building and changed into a crew-neck T-shirt and Uggs. She settled on a beige couch and pulled an iPhone out of her purse, her glossy maroon nails clacking against its screen.
This was her “good phone,” loaded with apps including her email, Goodreads and Merriam-Webster. Her “bad phone,” where social media apps fester, was tucked away somewhere in her office so she wouldn’t lose the day — or her mind — endlessly scrolling.
The two-phone system, which she enacted in June, is intended to help her deal with the fact that the internet is both her full-time job and a reliable source of anxiety.
Ms. Chamberlain began watching YouTube videos when she was 6, and making them when she was 16. She worked with what she had, as an only child of divorced parents growing up in San Bruno, Calif.: She baked “mediocre” cookies (2.5 million views), went to the dollar store (4.5 million views) and read her own hate comments aloud (3.2 million views).
She dressed up her day-to-day with a chaotic editing style that involved pausing the frame to zoom in on a pimple, or distorting her entire body with a filter that turned her into the shape of a crinkle-cut fry. She spawned a subgenre in her image, and an article in The Atlantic declared her at the vanguard of a new kind of “relatable” influencer.
The fashion world was not far behind. She became an ambassador for Louis Vuitton, a face of Lancôme. Vogue handed her its microphone on the Met Gala red carpet.
As she was transitioning from YouTube celebrity to just-plain celebrity, she felt that she should have been happier than ever before. Instead, her anxiety and depression surged. “I felt guilty because I had what people dream of, and I was so scared and depressed and broken,” she told The New York Times Magazine last year.
When we spoke, she described crying at a recent Sabrina Carpenter concert because she was moved by a song, then looking up to see several iPhones filming her outpouring of emotion. She assumes she is being filmed at all times, she said, which makes her feel as if she cannot ever make any mistakes.
She wrestles with those feelings on her podcast, “Anything Goes,” which she started in 2020. Episodes cover her struggles with mental health, her crushes and her ongoing efforts to quit vaping.
Listeners are not always receptive to the grievances of a woman whose exquisite marble countertops are viewable on Architectural Digest’s YouTube channel for millions of viewers to see. “People get upset with me for complaining about it or saying the truth about it, because they’re like, ‘You’re in such a privileged position,’” Ms. Chamberlain said. “Completely valid point.”
But she is even more worried that she will encourage people to buy into the idea that social media fame brings constant bliss. “It’s an industry with a lot of false promises,” she said. “I feel like it’s my duty to say, OK, someone has to tell you that you’re not going to reach nirvana.”
Moving Beyond ‘the Canvas’
Ms. Chamberlain is part of a class of stars who broke out on YouTube and have since graduated into the next phase of their careers. Some are jumping to other platforms. Others are becoming professional wrestlers, trying out late-night shows, getting divorced or getting sued.
Ms. Chamberlain wants to move beyond being thought of as a blank canvas used to display the business strategies and creative ideas of others. She wants to be involved in the development of the products she’s selling.
“I tried sort of being the canvas,” she said. “I did not like it. It just doesn’t work for me.”
She steered clear of naming specific companies. But legacy brands including Cartier, Levi’s and the camera company Canon seem to flock to Ms. Chamberlain as a lifeline to younger customers, a cheat code of sorts to appeal to the taste of her generation. Her authentic and “uncontroversial” persona made her a go-to for brands, Yarden Horwitz, a founder of the trend-forecasting company Spate, said in an email: “Emma’s style has come to define the Gen Z look.”
When Ms. Chamberlain dresses in a maxi skirt with scrunched-up socks and loafers, hundreds of young women post TikTok videos following suit.
As pigeonholes go, it is a lucrative one. Ms. Chamberlain, though, has lately been more interested in working for herself. This summer she decided she was ready to make the leap from chief creative officer to co-chief executive of Chamberlain Coffee, the company she founded when she was a teenager. The shift allowed her to get more deeply involved with the company’s retail strategy and fund-raising, she said.
The company amassed $7 million from investors in a fund-raising round that ended last year. A representative for Ms. Chamberlain declined to disclose sales information for Chamberlain Coffee, but Forbes estimated that the company drew $20 million in revenue last year.
She has also expanded her role with Warby Parker, whose glasses she says she has been wearing since she was 14.
For her first collaboration with the brand, last November, she chose new colors for three existing frames and conceived of a promotional shoot featuring live pigeons. It is the best-selling collaboration in Warby Parker’s 14-year history, said Neil Blumenthal, Warby Parker’s co-chief executive and a founder of the company.
This time, Ms. Chamberlain’s involvement was “soup to nuts,” added Kim Nemser, Warby Parker’s chief merchandising officer. Ms. Chamberlain showed up to meetings with mood boards of eyewear from the 1960s and 1990s, and made suggestions about silhouettes, tints, etching and temple curvature.
The result was four new frame shapes, $95 apiece, that range from sultry-librarian oval readers to oversize, shield-style sunglasses with yellow tinted lenses. “She came with a strong point of view,” Ms. Nemser said. “She knows her audience.”
Given those instincts, is there a world in which Ms. Chamberlain attempts to fashion herself in the style of Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, the actresses who started the luxury fashion label the Row, or Kim Kardashian, the influencer-turned-shapewear mogul?
Ms. Chamberlain is not sure. She considered the paths available to her last month on a road trip through Wyoming and Colorado with her father, an oil painter. They went on meandering hikes and explored small towns; she saw wide-open vistas and plentiful taxidermy.
“I was so distracted that I was not on my phone at all,” she said. “It was a dream come true.”
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