The Imitation Game
NYC Influencers are “Boring” for a Reason
The girlies are fighting, and this time, it’s over whether or not NYC influencers are boring. A single TikTok claiming that many of them are copy-paste versions of each other has sent them into a spiral, with frantic videos “defending themselves” that somehow only prove the original point. If the shoe doesn’t fit, why are you tripping over it?
At the end of the day, it’s not that deep. Social media, especially in a city as trend-driven as New York, naturally breeds a level of sameness. People gravitate toward what performs well — whether that’s an aesthetic, a style of content, or even identical personality quirks. Most industries boil down to people and companies doing the same things with slight variations — social media is no exception. Just look at streaming services; same content, different platform.
This is by no means a new concept. The same phenomenon has happened throughout history. Take the art world. Each movement — Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism — they all start with a handful of visionaries who introduce something fresh. As their work gains traction, a wave of artists (or, in this case, influencers) rushes in to replicate the aesthetic, making it almost indistinguishable from one creator to the next.
Take Cubism, for example. Picasso and Braque pioneered it, but soon, everyone was deconstructing forms into geometric planes, and the once radical style became an established “look.” Now, think about TikTokers: one girl starts wearing a slicked-back bun and posting “clean girl” content, and before you know it, thousands of others are doing the same, diluting the originality of the trend.
Or Surrealism — what started as a dreamlike exploration of the unconscious mind by artists like Dalí and Magritte turned into an aesthetic formula: melting clocks, floating apples, distorted realities. On TikTok, we’ve seen this with trends like “weird girl aesthetic” or “indie sleaze,” where the initial edge of a look gets flattened into a predictable, performative style that no longer feels truly weird or indie.
Even Abstract Expressionism, which was born out of raw emotion, eventually became a mass-produced aesthetic. Just like how Jackson Pollock’s style got reinterpreted into mass-market wall art, the same thing happens with influencer trends: what starts as deeply personal or experimental gets repackaged into something mainstream, digestible, and ultimately, unoriginal.
But to the point my friend and fellow TikToker, Jade, made: if the original poster feels so strongly about individuality, “be the change you wish to see in this world.” A quick scroll of her page reveals nothing but trends, aesthetics, and regurgitated internet takes. Critiquing the system is easy — breaking out of it is the real challenge. Originality may be dead, but I pray this discourse is too. Or, as Jade so aptly put it, "Thou doth protest too much.”
That said, movements, art or otherwise, evolve. They fracture, reinvent, and birth something new when the formula starts feeling stale. Instead of panicking over your lack of individuality, be the Basquiat of TikTok, rip apart the clean girl aesthetic and produce something fresh.
Jade and I both made TikToks on this topic, for your viewing pleasure.
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And with that, I’m off to retrain my algorithm because I simply cannot watch another video on this discourse.
As ever, xx Meg
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