However, the “starter pack” meme and the accounts that post them are a powerful accompaniment to the influencer, achieving a mark on popular culture through viral marketing and cultural ingraining. Accounts that have made a following from the “starter pack” meme and similar formats that feature similarly heavy-handed product placement have proved to be a distinct cultural force this decade, writing an underhanded manifesto with a sly cut-and-paste of youthful urban trends.
A lot of things about this genre of meme come across as dated; they’ve been around for so long that they’re almost representative of a target audience old enough to feel like they have aged out of being on the cutting edge of internet innovation. Yet, that same audience is still young enough to extract meaning from an identity defined solely by conspicuous consumption habits. These meme accounts mainly thrive on the OG influencer social media platform of choice, Instagram, and if we’re being generous, the meme format they heavily rely on peaked in popularity in 2016.
What brings these accounts and the content they’re posting into the current moment is highlighting an element that has always underpinned the success of the starter pack meme: brands. The self-described “Post-restaurant ceramicist” described on @hipstersofny, for example, sports a Carhartt jacket and Birkenstock clogs.
Meanwhile, the British-based account @socks_house_meeting deconstructs the likes of “knitted bally [balaclava] baddies” who drink Ozone specialty coffee and use Aesop skincare. The more broad-brushstroke selections allow the audience to feel informed by pinning an established trend to a type of person, while the more niche picks act as a signpost for those coveting the lifestyle being represented to them through this outpost of internet humor.
Location is also a crucial part of the branding that this type of content is soaked in. The backdrop to these accounts is always a major influential city that carries the stereotype of being full of people who hope to be important and influential by living there.
Some amp up the feeling of an exclusive club of mere hundreds of thousands of followers by purporting to focus on specific neighborhoods, although their scope is usually wider. This includes London’s @real_housewives_of_clapton or New York’s @nolitadirtbag, the latter using the likes of The Roxy cinema and Elizabeth Street Garden as reference points for lifestyle-centric jokes.
The medium of the message makes an explicit suggestion that these accounts are mocking the middle-to-upper-class city-dwelling subjects that they focus on. However, the presentation of this can leave some viewers skeptical of that idea. “I don’t understand how this is a meme format, it’s a shopping list,” summarized TikToker @superficialsharon earlier this year, ridiculing the target audience of these updated starter pack memes as those who “revere the fact they are deep into their overdraft from buying s*** to impress people they don’t like.”
The meme makers themselves often consider their objectives to be greater than the sum of these parts. In a profile from Tatler magazine in 2023, naming him “The social satirist of the moment”, the man behind Socks House Meeting reflected on the authority the medium allowed as an anonymous observer. “People forget that you’re human and they think you’re a voice, a voice of reason.”
Writer Evie Delaney noted how he had “gone so far down the rabbit hole of anonymity” that he had “created [his] own shorthand, a vernacular comprised of words that know their own silliness.” It is a feature of the account that makes it stand out in the crowded field of aspirational social commentary memes, identifying women like the “litty lengy thotty moddy Soho lenger” whose main traits involve wearing certain boots and sunglasses and having a “skin grenade” of a boyfriend with a sportswear line (“just smother adhd term I use to describe someone sort of annoying,” explained Socks House in the comments). It is the nonsensical endpoint of the endless classification that this genre engages in, masquerading as critique and at the same time creating another entry into the gentrifier etiquette guide.
This facilitates what writer Mark Greif identifies as “the skills of hanging on” in his 2010 New York Magazine article, “What Was The Hipster?”. While the word “hipster” may come across as somewhat of a millennial relic in the present day, the definition he provides remains eerily relevant to those who make and engage with the namedropping-as-punchline prevalent in this offshoot of starter packs.
Greif reasons that it is the pattern of consumption as opposed to creative production that confirms the identity of the hipster to both themselves and the outside world. While this can’t offer true counterculture, it does create a “community of status” where knowing about things before the average person asserts a refined attitude worthy of respect.
The popularity of this kind of meme lies in validating much of what their audience has observed and coveted in a more disparate way than an Instagram slide, while also promoting further insecurity about being too closely aligned with a subject, or not closely enough. The vapidity of chronically online communication has finally caught up to what Greif identified nearly fifteen years ago as the hipster’s “guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption.”
The ways in which memes can act as propaganda can be more diverse than they are given credit for, not least because people don’t complain when it comes in a form that they enjoy. Just like many bemoaned the hipster for appropriating aesthetics without properly honoring the spirit behind them, this genre of content repurposes the relatability and ridiculousness that attracts many to memes to indicate belonging with a particular class of people and their tastes.
They shift with a trend cycle that is local in its focus but international in its communication of the in-crowd. A feeling of camaraderie may be lacking in this ever-shifting hierarchy of styles and stereotypes, but it can be performed with consumerist tendencies—and consolidated with an efficient way to broadcast their importance.
