The designer clothes and bags they flaunt in their posts? We know those are freebies from brands who also pay the influencers handsomely to highlight products on their accounts. Yet people buy them anyway.
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Online celebrities rise like phoenixes, admired for their fashion and charm. Yet nothing gets the online community more excited than the fall of a phoenix who bursts into flames and crashes to Earth.
Celebrity’s phoenix is Seo Ah-ri (Park), who lives in a humble home with her mother and works as a door-to-door make-up saleswoman – a job on which the skills she honed will later be put to use elsewhere.
Ah-ri doesn’t use social media at first, but that changes after a meeting with her childhood friend Oh Min-hye (Jun Hyo-seong), an influencer with over 300,000 followers. Ah-ri doesn’t recognise Min-hye straight away, but her fawning friend Yoon Jeong-sun (Park Ye-ni) does.
Friends might not be the best way to describe them. Ah-ri used to be rich and Min-hye was a hanger-on who was jealous of her wealth. Seeing Ah-ri again, Min-hye is desperate to flaunt her status to her, not realising that Ah-ri has fallen on hard times.
Min-hye invites Ah-ri to a celebrity party where she introduces her to the catty Gabin Society influencer group. Ah-ri’s mother, who runs a dry-cleaning business, insists Ah-ri borrows a fetching tweed dress suit to wear at the party.
Only two sets of the outfit were ever made, and the owner of one of them happens to be Yoon Shi-hyeon (Lee Chung-ah), the eonni (big sister) of the Gabin Society and the only one not on social media.
Ah-ri is outed as a “former” member of the elite at the party and a glass of wine is thrown over her expensive suit, which is the one that belongs to Shi-hyeon. However, she stands up for her herself and a new social media star is born.
Min-hye and her Gabin cohorts, save for the refined Shi-hyeon, resent Ah-ri’s new-found fame. Tensions rise with Ah-ri’s success, which soon eclipses that of everyone else in the group. She eventually surpasses the vaunted one-million-followers mark, thanks to her fashion sense and business acumen.
All of this is shown in flashbacks, with episodes beginning and ending with snippets of a live broadcast of Ah-ri’s confession. This stream shocks the nation, as Ah-ri was believed to have died three months earlier.
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She tells the story of her rise, and several falls, revealing the lies and crimes of the Gabin Society and their enablers along the way.
While Celebrity makes a point of highlighting the negative side of online celebrity, it does so in a distressingly classist way.
The only morally upright characters in the show are Ah-ri, Shi-hyeon and the handsome and aloof cosmetics company heir Han Jun-kyung (Kang Min-hyuk of the K-pop group CNBlue).
All of them are from old money and seemingly immune to the vanity of social media. Ah-ri may be a social media star, but it’s a tool she uses to build a successful fashion empire.
All the other influencers or online commenters, including Ah-ri’s friend Jeong-sun and a meddling character who goes by the handle _bbbfamous, are shown to be hopelessly shallow and insecure. None of them come from money and all of them are corrupted by vanity and jealousy.
Averaging only 45 minutes, Celebrity’s episodes run on the short side for a K-drama. Then again, there isn’t much to the story. It’s nice to see a show with fewer secondary plot strands, but their absence here only highlights the weaknesses of the main one.
Ah-ri’s ups and downs become increasingly repetitive, and the live-stream framing device that bookends each episode offers no new information until the flashbacks finally catch up with it at the end of the series. Yet after all that build-up, the finale proves anticlimactic.
Celebrity is shallow in its rendering of a compelling social paradox, and is hobbled by its repetitive structure and a weak cast – save for Park, who recently signed on to season two of Squid Game. Still, it retains some value as an unintentional experiment.People have watched the show and acknowledged its message about the dark side of influencer culture, yet the internet has been flooded with posts and articles about where to find the outfits worn in the show.
Then again, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Celebrity is streaming on Netflix.
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