Promising a life of luxury, the fashion influencer lures victims into her palace. Glamorous and shiny, it grasps onlookers in all their insecurities and questions about identity – their place in the world. The palace is the American Dream promised through countless ads and marketing campaigns. The palace is a hyper-capitalist world that takes labor from the underprivileged and the naive. Yet, the palace is broken, weak and only able to persist through the attention viewers provide and the self-esteem it consumes. This thesis is part of an MFA research-creation project that examines the impact of influencer culture on a larger scale, critiquing its impact on fashion cycles and the rise of overconsumption. Asking the big question: what role do social media influencers play in fashion and consumer culture? Examined through understanding social identity and consumer habits, the role of a fashion influencer becomes predominantly clear.

Through phenomenology and grounded theory methodology, the fragile nature of the palace is unveiled.

A Broken Palace, exhibited at OCAD University’s Ignite Gallery, presents a series of six large oil paintings installed within a collection of objects, antiques, and detritus that allude to ruins of old wealth. The older antiques convey the contrast between that old luxury and the contemporary idea of wealth in a hyper-capitalist world. The paintings combine eighteenth- century Rococo paintings by mainly women artists of a soon-to-be-deposed aristocracy with the images of online personalities in the social media landscape.

Keywords: capitalism, consumer culture, digital age, social media, fashion