WHAT THE F*&$ IS HRH COLLECTION?
by Sam Ellefson
If you engage with or are a part of stan or gay Twitter, you most likely have seen a reaction video of Alexandra Peirce griping about the woes of life.
Peirce, known ubiquitously by her jewelry brand’s name, HRH Collection, has plagued my timeline for ages, and admittedly, I’ve used some of her clips for my own amusement. One video where she rants to her phone about being shamed for eating a plain potato is one of my favorites.
These assorted clips originate from her Youtube channel, which has over 175,000 subscribers. Videos habitually feature Peirce incessantly talking to herself in her plush car or lavish home for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Some recent titles include “GET OFF MY CHANNEL,” and “THIS BAG MAKES YOU LOOK FAT.”
When I first saw Peirce being used as a meme, I was intrigued both by her sardonic persona and contrarian tendencies (she’s infamously an ardent anti-masker, among other grievances, some racist). When you Google her name, the first search result is an article aptly titled “Anti-Mask, Pro-Swastika: Is This The Most Unhinged Influencer On The Internet?”
Firstly, I wanted to know where Peirce got her collection started and secondly, whether her antics were harmless internet fun or if they had subliminal IRL consequences.
Poring over Peirce’s “About” section on her website gave me a few answers yet additional questions.
She says that in 2007, she got her undergraduate degree in political science. Two years later she got her master’s in international business, but not before devoting time to studying abroad in Shanghai and subsequently falling “in love with all things Asian.” One video that got Peirce some flack in 2017 was a Korean beauty product haul titled “IM DYING TO BE ASIAN.”
According to her site, Peirce moved back in with her parents following the completion of her degree because “the economy had just tanked.” During this time at home Peirce started her Youtube channel and got an accounting job “even though [she’s] so terrible at math.”
The birth of her jewelry collection remains murky to me, however; she jumps around to eventually recount quitting her job and devoting all of her time to HRH.
Peirce’s collection is notorious for ripping off or blatantly copying other jewelry brands, which is primarily what makes her elusive storytelling intriguing yet eye-roll inducing.
The collection has a 1.25/5 rating on the Better Business Bureau’s website, with reviewers claiming they’ve seen identical products on Amazon and warning prospective buyers of cheap product quality. It’s quite clear that Peirce’s jewelry collection is an elaborate scam propped up by her glamorous Youtube persona.
Without getting too psychoanalytic, there’s something abnormally perverse in detaching one’s online persona from their reality. We do this constantly with the exhibitionism of Instagram and our attempts at relaying the perfect quip on Twitter, but these are both different experiences from someone who is made into a meme that denies their true existence.
Most people recognize that social media is a performance, but it feels easier to reckon with that in retrospect. Watching 20 second clips of Peirce on my Twitter timeline is enjoyable, especially when she’s being deliberately crass, but the allure fades away when I start thinking about her as a living entity with racist tendencies and a scam business, rather than the 2D enigma bobbing around on my screen.
Peirce’s Youtube vlogs seem to be an attempt at obfuscating the fact that she’s a stranger performing for other strangers with their long run times and informal conversations. Her standard introduction of “Hey, you guys,” feels like a friend greeting a group at lunch, and the vlog format can trick a viewer into thinking they're getting a glimpse of authenticity.
Pulling hilarious segments from these long videos and disseminating them on Twitter deteriorates this pseudo-authenticity and turns Peirce into a meme of reflection; rather than who she really is, we see her as parts of ourselves that we relish in. The bitchiness, exuberant mannerisms and chicness is something that I think a lot of gay people like to cultivate, be it knowingly or not.
As the internet continues to boom with influencers perfecting their persona, it may be more critical to interrogate how online performance affects real world situations, especially when they pertain to politics, the market and race.