For the past month, Kristina Avakyan alias @SubwaySessions has been posting her divisive looks on TikTok, which people are reposting on Twitter to criticize her. To the point of making her a micro-celebrity, ready to monetize this sudden virality typical of how hate-watching can serve as a visibility accelerator.
If TikTok understands that you like fashion, the Chinese social network may have suggested the profile of @SubwaySessions to you. Real name Kristina Avakyan regularly posts videos of her wacky looks from the New York subway platform. And it is perhaps because a large part of the West is bored and nothing is happening in its small fashion sphere, that the eccentric look of the bartender apprentice stylist could go viral on TikTok since July 31, 2023. In particular because of one of her latest looks, consisting of a very transparent flesh-colored lace bodysuit worn over a black bra, high-waisted panties of the same color, a bright orange basketball shorts rolled up on the hips, and a pair of pink pumps.
We can cry genius or stylistic horror, still this divisive look has generated so many reactions and comments that it has helped to make Kristina Avakyan alias @SubwaySessions a controversial little star of TikTok and beyond .
How TikTokeuse Kristina Avakyan aka @SubwaySessions broke through thanks to haters
Indeed, 1.6 million views on TikTok in just four days (notably due to republications of haters on Twitter), Kyan Ki for the intimates is already beginning to be solicited by the media regarding her unique style. Other savvy people predicted that the art of stirring up outrage and hateful comments can make you a star. It’s up to you to try to extend your ” quarter hour of fame theorized by Andy Warhol. This is what Shelby Ivey Christie, fashion and costume historian notes in a particularly cynical tweet:
“By dint of tweeting, this disheveled white woman from the metro will end up in fashion editorials, then in the front row of fashion week. I don’t want thought pieces on white mediocrity and ascension when it comes. »
While you can come across ever more zany looks every day on public transport in big cities, those of Kristina Avakyan stand out perhaps less for their eccentricity than for the will of the bartender-stylist to affirm them as worthy of public interest. Hence their daily staging on TikTok. It’s what Gen Z might call “ live for the cameras or take yourself for the main character of existence, or just egocentrism. But when you’re a tall, slim, able-bodied white woman who meets most mainstream beauty criteria, that may be enough to become a fashion icon, however controversial that may be.
The media The Cut interviewed Kristina Avakyan who first connects the clichés:
“Clothing is my art. I also mentioned that my body is a canvas. It’s like painting. Each time it comes out differently, but it reflects your emotion and how you feel.
I like to provoke emotion in others. I also like to feel myself; if what I put on doesn’t make me feel, I can’t wear it. Everything is so bland these days. »
Kristina Avakyan aka @SubwaySessions describes her style as “a car accident”
While she started posting on TikTok only a month ago, it’s just the repost by a hasten on Twitter which helped her break through, since her video with the basketball shorts cumulates on the network bought by Elon Musk and renamed X has 57 million views there. Well aware that the fascination she arouses stems from the divisive nature of her looks, she therefore defines her style as deliberately accidental:
“I think it’s like a car accident. There is something wrong, and there is something fascinating. It’s wrong, but it makes you feel something, it makes you wonder, ‘What the hell is that?’ You can’t put your finger on it, and that’s what interests me. I don’t like to put on a nice dress and just be a nice girl, it’s too simple. I like to put things together. Skin is the best part of an outfit, in my opinion, so I always try to show it off if I can. »
In this interview for The Cut, the TikTokeuse Kristina Avakyan alias @SubwaySessions says above all that she has fun with her clothes and that’s the most important. She also adds that she has never experienced negative reactions in real life, only online, and this is precisely what is making her a star of the networks.
Online outrage, a visibility accelerator to be monetized
Whether we find his style in good or bad taste, worthy of the exquisite corpses of Carrie Bradshaw or the latest micro trend classy ketamine is not the point. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this story lies rather in the way in which the hate watching and the hate-commenting of a part of the Internet always quick to judge has made her a content creator who will now be able to monetize this sudden virality. Because online indignation remains the best of the accelerators of virality that one can always more easily transform into cold hard cash.
Read also :
#SubwayShirt: when women wear a t-shirt over their outfit against harassment in the subway
You surely know, or perhaps are yourself, a person who loves to hate popular cultural content, sometimes going so far as to consume it in order to be able to criticize it better. Whether on social media, or in the comments under an article, see a media forum, creating conversations that only boost the hated content.
From reality TV to Emily in ParisPassing by Barbiethe practice of hate watching and hate-commentingwhich is often designated in France to give oneself an intellectual countenance by ” look ironically ” Or “ second degree » a program, has the gift of prolonging the life of mediocre productions as they know how to arouse indignation, and therefore interest. While we could simply let die what we deem uninteresting, some people prefer to shout, or rather get excited on their keyboard, to display their aesthetic, moral and intellectual superiority. For the greater financial happiness of the people who produce the content in question. Either way, those who love @subaysessions will take the train.
