Everyone’s an Influencer Now
Somewhere around 2016, "blogger" stopped being sufficient. The people who had built audiences on personal style—who had turned their wardrobes and their taste and their photogenic lives into a professional practice—started getting called something new: influencers. Caro Daur from Germany, Sara from Collage Vintage in Spain, Nicole Mazzocato from Italy, Lisa Olsson from Sweden—all of them had been doing more or less the same thing for years, and now they were Influencers, capital I, which came with different rates, different deliverables, and apparently the option to get paid to splash around in a pool for a denim brand.
The Levi’s pool party is exactly what it sounds like: gather a group of photogenic people with large followings, give them 501s, photograph them near water. Nothing cynical about saying that—everyone involved understands the transaction. What’s interesting is how naturally it works when executed well, and how a pair of jeans in continuous production for over a century somehow remains the default signifier for "casual but intentional." The 501 is basically unkillable.
Lisa Olsson, though. If I’m honest, the reason I kept clicking through campaign content that year was largely Lisa Olsson, who has that quality of making everything she wears look like it belongs specifically to her—like the clothes are completing a sentence she started. She’s Swedish, which helps; there’s something about Scandinavian fashion people that makes everyone else look like they’re trying too hard by comparison. But it’s more than geography. She photographs well. Not model-well, which is a different thing. Human-well.
The word "influencer" hasn’t aged gracefully. It peaked as a descriptor right around the moment everyone started using it unironically, which is usually how these things work. But the people it described were real, and some of them were genuinely good at what they did. The pool party happened. The jeans exist. Lisa Olsson is still photographing things, and they still look like hers.