Confessions of a Recovering Influencer

At the height of her status as an Instagram influencer, Lyn Slater, a 60-something-year-old professor-cum-fashion blogger, was putting up multiple branded posts a day (La Prairie, Burberry, Dior, Brooklinen, GoDaddy, Visa, Bally) for her more than 700,000 Instagram followers, fielding unceasing invites to fashion and beauty events, and banking the retirement nest egg she did not have the means to acquire while earning advanced degrees and toiling in academia. And she was miserable. “I really lost my grip. I just became this disembodied, disconnected digital creature who I was starting not to like,” says Slater during a recent Zoom interview from her home in Peekskill, N.Y., a formerly down-at-the-heel industrial town that has been reinvented as a Hudson Valley refuge for creative exiles from New York City. Slater, now 70, and her partner Calvin Lom, 66, a retired cyclotron engineer and the photographer of many of her Instagram photos, bought this house during the pandemic, after Slater realized that being a so-called influencer was a downward spiral of self-erasure. Moving here meant she could be closer to her mother, who died on Christmas morning in 2021, and her grandchildren. On this day, Slater sits in front of a mint-green wall in

Follow WWD on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

from WWDRecent Stories https://ift.tt/XrJ7wN8