She doesn’t exist in the frame; she manufactures herself for the gallery of voyeurs. But why is Brooke Lim looking like Xiaxue?

Blame it on the algorithm. Silently existing in present times is apparently a violation of user terms and conditions. Try to mind your own business for five minutes, and your phone will violently vibrate with a notification to remind you that a minor influencer you don’t remember following is currently enjoying herself in big, beautiful America in just as glorious pink hair. As the universe would have it, we were informed that the influencer Brooke Lim has arrived at the convenient conclusion that surrendering to a pot of pink dye and hours at a salon constitutes a personality. It is possible that all other avenues of predictable non-conformity were fully booked. A belated rebellion, though, and executed with the exact, exhausting premeditation of someone who spent her post-adolescent years drafting lesson plans to break rules. Even when she is 14,000 kilometres away, this isn’t an authentic expression of a woman living her best life in California; it is calculated, assembly-line production, and thoroughly unburdened by the illusion of an inner life, let alone a normal one.

A young influencer with a tainted past wanting to flirt with the visual lexicon of the seduction industry is understandable, but why choose to look like the highly altered Xiaxue. That is a puzzler. In fact, when Ms Lim’s photo first staged its hostile takeover of our screen, we did not think it was the famous tutor herself until we saw the handle on the page. Influencers mimic influencers; it is the natural law of the digital terrarium. But this is a copy, currently suffering from severe generational degradation. Why a woman with youth on her side would actively choose the rigid, highly engineered look of someone desperate to preserve theirs is a fascinating irony of influencer styling. Apart from the hair streaked pink, the labour-intensive smoulder was further enhanced by a bikini top of such aggressive structural economy that it felt less like swimwear and more like a land grab. The styling achieved a rare, unfortunate synthesis: the aggressive scale of drag, minus any of the redemptive glamour.

In a world built on curated perfection, the only way to find out what actually makes an image work is to perform an aesthetic audit. Ms Lim is not an over-dresser. She has worn this much fabric before and often, but she has not achieved such amazing twinning, nor paired with the look of someone ready to skip the pleasantries—and foreplay—altogether. More and more, going scanty isn’t a creative choice; it’s a top-up strategy. In a digital terrarium that measures human worth by the millisecond, fabric is simply a barrier to entry. The bra is an interesting choice. Along the bustline there was a dark blue ribbon that featured what seemed to be the John Galliano logo-type in lower-case Gothic/Old English font. The fabric of the undergarment looked to be of the “Gazette” print, a bricolage of fake headlines and busy typography. First popularised in black-and-white for the Dior Spring/Summer 2000 ‘Tramps’ collection, Mr Galliano spun the graphic asset into his eponymous line. The garment may be laden with legacy, but let’s not mistake hinting at an archive for actual taste.

You can’t dodge the howling irony here. Mr Galliano’s print was designed to parody tabloid noise and media sensation. For ex-GP tutor Ms Lim, who suffered a catastrophic public default on her own teaching material and was subsequently exposed for plagiarism, this is an accidental punchline that is really too hard to script. And to exhibit a garment whose text is laid out with actual graphic literacy after a tuition agency still linked to Ms Lim shared a post—a 17-slide Instagram sprawl—about the Met Gala sans a single capital letter, even for proper nouns, is proof that punctuation, like taste, remains strictly optional in the influencer economy. But what she sells is education, although the curriculum evidently treats capitalisation—and persuasive arguments—as expendable luxuries. It is hard to know exactly how teachers or tutors are viewed. But to her past students, could the subsequent broadcasting of her gluteal anatomy in the follow-up photo in that post be anything other than body as commodity, rather than mind as guide? As an educator, Brooke Lim becomes both teacher and cautionary tale: the GP tutor undone by text, teaching (and influencing) through the display of her text-ridden bra.

Photos: sugaresque/Instagram