That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

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freshtodef
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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by freshtodef »

Derpina123 wrote:
Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:32 pm
freshtodef wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 7:22 pm
watched her "loft tour" she posted today. came up on my feed and i checked it out bc i hadn't watched anything of hers since the video she made about moving out/the breakup almost a year ago. while watching it, all i could think was that it must be absolutely exhausting to be her... to have to turn every. little. thing. into an aesthetic or "vibe." i can't even take her spiritual woo-woo, eco-friendly, "thrifting and reusing your old takeout containers is healthy for the environment and saves money" stuff seriously bc it all feels ingenuine and just an extension of her "aesthetic" and crafted persona.

i sometimes wonder if she has long breaks between uploads on youtube and instagram bc it's tiring for her to keep up the perfectly imperfect cool girl facade.
I agree. But how do you portray yourself as "authentic" or "genuine" anyway? Because crafting a persona/character to promote a certain worldview/lifestyle is part of the job. It's as "ingenuine" as setting up a subject and painting it. Even if you were being completely "raw", "authentic", "genuine" – whatever these things mean – you would have to carefully record and curate everything to make a good YouTube video. And people would still find something to complain about it. What "gurus" would you consider "authentic" and "genuine"?
i get where you're coming from, but i don't know if we're talking about the same thing. an example of someone who comes across authentic is her best friend karla (karla's closet and i think her ig is karla_deras if i remember correctly). she's a pretty good example. karla has a great aesthetic, great eye and seems authentic in the sense that her life seems to be curated naturally. even back in the days of fashion blogs, karla always stood out from the pack bc of that. alexis belon is another example. as well chrissstttiiine. i don't follow gurus closely and don't consider rachel to be one, so i couldn't name very many. if weylie and maybe stephanie villa are considered gurus then i guess them to a certain extent. and claire marshall for the first couple or so years of her channel.

rachel has just always, always, always come across as a self-important tryhard... like the art school kid who always has to keep topping themselves bc they thrive on being told how amazing and creative they are (can you tell how many people like this i went to school with? lol), even 12-13 years ago when i first discovered her via her blog, so it's nothing new. i don't expect her vlogs to be 100% raw and unedited, nobody's is. but when she says things like... "i like sound baths, thrifting, going to farmers markets, spiritual healing in joshua tree, etc bc of the vibe/aesthetic" it just makes me laugh. nothing is wrong or "inauthentic" about actually liking any of those things, but like some of us said a few pages back, she comes across as the type of person who literally spends all their free time trying to scour the internet for the "coolest", most subversive and obscure references (and mishmashes them with whatever the latest la hipster fads are) in order to feed her fake vibe and aesthetic. i think that is the main difference between her and the people i mention above... natural growth and curation.

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by slicker »

[/quote]

i get where you're coming from, but i don't know if we're talking about the same thing. an example of someone who comes across authentic is her best friend karla (karla's closet and i think her ig is karla_deras if i remember correctly). she's a pretty good example. karla has a great aesthetic, great eye and seems authentic in the sense that her life seems to be curated naturally. even back in the days of fashion blogs, karla always stood out from the pack bc of that. alexis belon is another example. as well chrissstttiiine. i don't follow gurus closely and don't consider rachel to be one, so i couldn't name very many. if weylie and maybe stephanie villa are considered gurus then i guess them to a certain extent. and claire marshall for the first couple or so years of her channel.

[/quote]

So true about Karla and Alexis Belon. We know you have to be conscious of how you portray yourself as a vlogger... but you can def tell who's aesthetic is organic to them and who just curated it to keep up. This is what I always liked about TheFashionCitizen as well.

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by babybear »

So apparently she’s gonna do vlog for the 2 weeks... and within the first one she’s reading us her diary and performatively crying lol...

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by Laceyspacey97 »

Derpina123 wrote:
Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:32 pm
freshtodef wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 7:22 pm
watched her "loft tour" she posted today. came up on my feed and i checked it out bc i hadn't watched anything of hers since the video she made about moving out/the breakup almost a year ago. while watching it, all i could think was that it must be absolutely exhausting to be her... to have to turn every. little. thing. into an aesthetic or "vibe." i can't even take her spiritual woo-woo, eco-friendly, "thrifting and reusing your old takeout containers is healthy for the environment and saves money" stuff seriously bc it all feels ingenuine and just an extension of her "aesthetic" and crafted persona.

i sometimes wonder if she has long breaks between uploads on youtube and instagram bc it's tiring for her to keep up the perfectly imperfect cool girl facade.
I agree. But how do you portray yourself as "authentic" or "genuine" anyway? Because crafting a persona/character to promote a certain worldview/lifestyle is part of the job. It's as "ingenuine" as setting up a subject and painting it. Even if you were being completely "raw", "authentic", "genuine" – whatever these things mean – you would have to carefully record and curate everything to make a good YouTube video. And people would still find something to complain about it. What "gurus" would you consider "authentic" and "genuine"?
I totally agree. A lot of the criticism here is repetitive and we can all honestly say that no one is « authentic » or « raw » or whatever buzz word wants to be thrown around here. It’s YouTube and at this point what do we expect? Some people are just better at acting. Rachel isn’t the best and at times feeds into her delusions but idk... who isn’t at this point?

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by paranoiaa »

Looks like Rachel has a new bf!

I do like her videos so I'm excited for the 2 weeks of daily vlogs, but I find them to be so short sometimes.

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by pintsize »

babybear wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:45 am
So apparently she’s gonna do vlog for the 2 weeks... and within the first one she’s reading us her diary and performatively crying lol...
have to say i disagree/think this is unfair. i find rachel fake in a lot of ways but hearing her reflecting about being asian american in a time of heightened racism and violence against asian americans was not one of them

however 2 vlogs later when she was like 'haven't really been working lately' like it's normal to be able to chose to just lounge around in your house all day... that bothered me lol

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by babybear »

pintsize wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:46 am
babybear wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:45 am
So apparently she’s gonna do vlog for the 2 weeks... and within the first one she’s reading us her diary and performatively crying lol...
have to say i disagree/think this is unfair. i find rachel fake in a lot of ways but hearing her reflecting about being asian american in a time of heightened racism and violence against asian americans was not one of them

however 2 vlogs later when she was like 'haven't really been working lately' like it's normal to be able to chose to just lounge around in your house all day... that bothered me lol
maybe so, but i still feel like it was more for clicks than anything! also it might just be BEC for me...

the NYT has released an article about her and warde. interestingly enough the comment section is now closed after only one comment was left. i'm just going to copy and paste the comment here, because i don't know how to attach a screenshot (sorry :( ).

Speaking as someone who was a Moderator of the #relationships channel for over a year, I find that things stated in this article are misleading to what it was actually like. There may be 7000 members but the active members is roughly 200. The hierarchal structure hides under the guise of the term “community” and manipulates young people into believing just that. On several different occasions Rachel stole and took credit for my ideas simply because she wanted the admiration. Attached to warde there is a discord server, where Rachel stared a sub-channel called “club bathroom.” Through the lens of “body positivity” of women, Rachel and others would openly objectify photos of men’s, and potentially boys, penis’s. Several other mods who had been there longer than I also recently left because of the toxic environment cultivated around suppressing concerns for minors safety. Rachel means well but she creates large dissonance by her behavior not aligning with the intentions she sets. She publicly denies therapy but promotes psychic alien readings to her members with the incentive of “healing” for a fee. She also provides false hope of financial compensation to mods to the point of them burning out and leaving. During a pandemic, it felt like she was preying on people’s desperation. I worry that through this interview young people might get inadvertently lured into a seemingly fun but actually toxic environment. (I have evidence of everything mentioned)

i have to say i was briefly on warde and it's not how the article makes it out to be at all. it reminds me more of twitter than of an old forum. everyone just talks over each other and only the threads of super popular users get lots of traction. it's really no different from any other social media and people do kind of put rachel on a pedestal there. it's like a wannabe 'cool girl' bubble and the NYT commenter is right, it's more like 200ish people that are active not 1000s of them. i actually deleted my account after a month or so because i didn't feel like it added anything to my life. never joined the discord channel so i can't comment on that.

i feel like my main gripe with rachel is that i love her artistic vision and her videos but i find her just deeply unlikeable. she just seems to be so performative and comes across as really fake. and not in that authentic and raw vs put on way that you guys are discussing above but more in a ... just put on way, do you know what i mean? like i don't feel like she is the way she presents herself on camera and something about that makes it feel really weird when people in the youtube comments worship her.

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by Rosebud2002 »

babybear wrote:
Fri Apr 02, 2021 5:14 am
pintsize wrote:
Thu Apr 01, 2021 4:46 am


have to say i disagree/think this is unfair. i find rachel fake in a lot of ways but hearing her reflecting about being asian american in a time of heightened racism and violence against asian americans was not one of them

however 2 vlogs later when she was like 'haven't really been working lately' like it's normal to be able to chose to just lounge around in your house all day... that bothered me lol
maybe so, but i still feel like it was more for clicks than anything! also it might just be BEC for me...

the NYT has released an article about her and warde. interestingly enough the comment section is now closed after only one comment was left. i'm just going to copy and paste the comment here, because i don't know how to attach a screenshot (sorry :( ).

Speaking as someone who was a Moderator of the #relationships channel for over a year, I find that things stated in this article are misleading to what it was actually like. There may be 7000 members but the active members is roughly 200. The hierarchal structure hides under the guise of the term “community” and manipulates young people into believing just that. On several different occasions Rachel stole and took credit for my ideas simply because she wanted the admiration. Attached to warde there is a [404 TEXT NOT FOUND] server, where Rachel stared a sub-channel called “club bathroom.” Through the lens of “body positivity” of women, Rachel and others would openly objectify photos of men’s, and potentially boys, penis’s. Several other mods who had been there longer than I also recently left because of the toxic environment cultivated around suppressing concerns for minors safety. Rachel means well but she creates large dissonance by her behavior not aligning with the intentions she sets. She publicly denies therapy but promotes psychic alien readings to her members with the incentive of “healing” for a fee. She also provides false hope of financial compensation to mods to the point of them burning out and leaving. During a pandemic, it felt like she was preying on people’s desperation. I worry that through this interview young people might get inadvertently lured into a seemingly fun but actually toxic environment. (I have evidence of everything mentioned)

i have to say i was briefly on warde and it's not how the article makes it out to be at all. it reminds me more of twitter than of an old forum. everyone just talks over each other and only the threads of super popular users get lots of traction. it's really no different from any other social media and people do kind of put rachel on a pedestal there. it's like a wannabe 'cool girl' bubble and the NYT commenter is right, it's more like 200ish people that are active not 1000s of them. i actually deleted my account after a month or so because i didn't feel like it added anything to my life. never joined the [404 TEXT NOT FOUND] channel so i can't comment on that.

i feel like my main gripe with rachel is that i love her artistic vision and her videos but i find her just deeply unlikeable. she just seems to be so performative and comes across as really fake. and not in that authentic and raw vs put on way that you guys are discussing above but more in a ... just put on way, do you know what i mean? like i don't feel like she is the way she presents herself on camera and something about that makes it feel really weird when people in the youtube comments worship her.
Wow it sucks that comment was deleted. That’s pretty messed up. Her latest video is getting a lot of valid criticism finally. The consumption/sustainability one where she’s literally doing an ad for a car. Face palm. But I’m glad people really cut through the BS on that one. It’s so out of touch and the cognitive dissonance she displays is really funny sometimes. She reminds
Me if itsblitzzz who is another out of touch sustainability influencer.

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Re: That's Chic / Rachel Nguyen

Post by rarepepi7777 »

As someone who has been a part of Warde, I have mixed feelings about it. It can feel like a popularity contest sometimes, or who gets to have "Rachel's stamp of approval." Not to mention, some people on it can come across as snarky, cliquish, and full of inside jokes that feel exclusionary (this is evident in the Discord). I want to throw a pity party at myself that I can't be as 'cool' or as 'interesting', or as socially adept according to how some Wardians define or experience it, but I'm not going to lie that I've made good friends in that space, and that I've learned a lot of things in terms of processing and experiencing it.

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