Look, I know you are tired of hearing about that wedding, yes the Ambani one, but it was a seminal event. Not (just) because of the number of events they managed to create and brand, or the emeralds the size of chunky chocolate bars, or the number of private flights that flew into and out of the various venues.
The Ambani wedding was a seminal event because it successfully heralded the arrival of influencers into the mainstream. While Orry, who is so famous that he neither needs a second name nor indeed a proper first, has for long been a feature at Ambani events, by the time the wedding caravan rolled into Mumbai for the big day, the call sheet of influencers attending the wedding expanded to dozens, if not hundreds.
Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian in Mumbai, India for the Ambani wedding.
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If you followed them (or even if you didn’t, they popped up on your feed anyway), you could clearly see the agenda of the day. For example, one day was about the jewellery Ambani women re-wore, the second was about a dupatta made with flowers, the third was about the respect shown to a nanny who had helped raise the groom, and so on.
As the proceedings wore on, the organisers doubled down on influencers, finally bringing in the OG, the person who, for all practical purposes, created this industry of influencers—Kim Kardashian. The moment the visuals of Kim K, dressed in a deep red lehenga, holding hands and walking into the venue with Nita Ambani were released marked the point where influencers moved out of our phone screens and into the centrestage of our lives. I can predict with reasonable certainty that influencers will now be a part of most weddings, starting with the elite and quickly cascading down the class lines.
US rapper and artist Pharell Williams, who also helms the LVMH men’s collections, during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games Torch Relay at Saint-Denis, outside Paris.
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At the Olympics now
None of this is surprising. The last few years have seen a steady rise in the value, relevance, and well, influence, of influencers. The social media feed of the ongoing Olympic Games is predominantly created by influencers. The official Olympics site itself has a section on influencers, plus the big brands have brought in their own arsenal of sport-fluencers. If a decade ago, someone would have said the rapper Snoop Dogg would one day be goofing around with an Olympic torch, we would have laughed. Well, that’s exactly what happened last week.
Earlier this year at the Cannes Film festival, all one could see on the red carpet were influencers. It did not matter that they weren’t film stars or movie makers or related to cinema in any way. A chunk was from that allied business, fashion, but there were several whose link to a film festival was so tenuous that it was comical. I watched a video of an Indian fin-tech influencer, a stock market tipster, twirling around a promenade in the French Riviera, before tying himself into knots explaining what he was doing there. If a movie star can be paid millions to promote a sportswear brand, why can’t a regular Joe who once made a funny video that went viral be paid a million to act like a movie star at a film festival? Whoever gets the most eyeballs, wins.
Influencer Farhana Bodi at Cannes Film Festival 2024
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Corporate brands were the first to hire influencers as paid spokespeople, thereby guaranteeing the “authenticity” of a user review that has reach and is not authentic at all. The simplicity of this business proposition — money in exchange of praise — ensured that the model spread quite quickly, so much so that an influencer who one day was extolling the virtues of taking probiotic supplements for gut health found himself, within the matter of a year, interviewing Cabinet ministers on the country’s plans for digital leadership.
Prime Minister Narenda Modi, who has cast himself as a kind of a political influencer, was quick to understand the value of this. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, he granted interviews only to favourable mediapersons and influencers.
Tom Cruise (right) attended the Artistic Gymnastics Women’s Qualification on day two of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Bercy Arena.
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Slaves to our screens
Nobody in this chain of communication owes any fealty to the truth, only to money, and everybody is happy, including the end consumers — people like us — who have, whether we like it or not, become indolent slaves to our screens. In fact, in most social circles, anyone who stands up and states an opinion that is counter to this culture is immediately classified a luddite. “Sit down, boomer,” is the usual manner of shutting them up.
In the past, I too have made the mistake of rolling my eyes at these bizarre new events, and then felt foolish when they became trends that everyone adopted. Which is why I feel comfortable now predicting that influencers will be on the guest list at most future weddings. As is their won’t, the Ambanis were the first to lean into this lucrative new business, and the rest of us will follow. Because there are only two kinds of people in the world now. Those who are influencers and those who can’t get enough of them.
The author has written ‘Independence Day: A People’s History.’
