Inside the social
Hype House is a Hollywood mansion where TikTok stars go to live, swap ideas and create new videos. Harriet Walker reports on the Gen Z A-list who no longer care about the big screen. It’s the little one in their hands that counts.
If you thought curating an Instagram account full of avocados was enough to keep up with the kids, you’re already lagging far behind. Forget millennials, with their basic bitches and their brunch pics.
For the Gen Z cool crowd, the only social media login worth having is the Chinese platform TikTok, and the most exclusive place to hang out there is the Hype House.
Hollywood hopefuls used to arrive in Los Angeles to make their fortune on the big screen but these days they come to find fame on a much smaller one. That light — the crisp, bright, Beverly Hills sunlight and Laurel Canyon gleam that first encouraged film-makers to set up at Burbank in the early 20th century — is now inspiring a new generation of cameramen and women. Only now we call them “content creators” — stars not of the silver screen, but of an all-new phenomenon, the Hype House.
Charli D’Amelio is 15, has more than 40 million followers and is estimated to be worth almost NZ$732,000 from her work on TikTok — not bad for a Connecticut schoolgirl who is neither pop star nor reality TV celeb. She drops into Hype House as her schoolwork and schedule allow, while 17-year-old Chase Hudson, who has 17 million followers and an impossibly square jaw, lives there full-time. He founded the collective with YouTuber and fellow TikTok personality Alex
Warren (age 19; 7.6 million followers).
Imagine, if you can bear to, the Big Brother house combined with a trendy ad agency, filled entirely with people so young they can’t remember the war in Iraq; this is Hype House, one of LA’s most successful social media collaboratives. A sort of sanitised frat house meets unthreatening model agency (wholesome looks reign on TikTok, not angular catwalk faces), collabs are collectives of Gen Z influencers who bunk together in Bel Air mansions, making the most of the natural light, outdoor pools and lavish marble bathrooms to produce 100 or so
15-second viral videos every day. It might sound like a party — if Gen X were involved, it would probably turn into an orgy — but this is a serious job.
“You can’t come and stay for a week and not make any videos,”
21-year-old Hype Houser Thomas Petrou tells The New York Times. “This house is designed for productivity – you can’t do that if you’re going out on the weekends.”
Each of the 19 influencers who lives or keeps rooms at Hype House is between 15 and 21.
They’re towards the older end of the generation just below millennials that takes in everyone between 23 and 8 years old.
Depending on your own age, you were dancing either to D:Ream or Uptown Funk as this cohort took its first breath — Gen Z was born between 1995 and 2015.
Collab houses are the latest method brands have found to market to this generation — too savvy for billboards, too digitally native for ad breaks and, it seems, not materialistic enough to be interested in traditional consumer baubles. The NYT dubbed the new phenomenon “the TikTok mansion gold rush”, after the platform these influencers all broadcast to and the palatial West Coast properties they upload from.
As well as Hype House, there’s a Melanin Mansion for black influencers; the LGBT collective Cabin Six; and the Council House, an all-British gang. Earlier this month, Rihanna opened a TikTok house
devoted to making content around her Fenty Beauty product range. Inside, there is a “Make-Up Pantry” and several beauty stations, so the tenants can combine the internet’s two beauty obsessions: haul videos, in which shoppers show off their new cosmetic loot; and tutorials, in which they demonstrate how to get the perfect brow, say, or eyeliner flick.
“I just wanted to create a platform for the next wave of content creators,” Rihanna said at its opening party. “I think our generation is the sickest, the illest, the most creative.”
Born in 1988, the 32-year-old Barbadian singer is squarely millennial. I am too, although born slightly nearer the top of the bracket (millennial births range from 1981-1996), which means I am neither good with computers nor the owner of a giant house in London. What I do have in abundance, though, is the millennial capacity for social anxiety and a desperate need to fit in — these are what have brought us to minutely adjusting the light and shade on a photo of a sandwich.
This year marks a decade of Instagram and, with it, the apparent decline of a tribe wholly invented on that platform. In 2018, brands spent about $2.8 billion on courting Insta influencers to shoot and promote their wares. As engagement rates on these paid-for posts sink, however, the hunt is on for the next most efficient channel. One that is already host to not only the world’s largest demographic but its most advertaverse: TikTok.
THE REASON for the Insta exodus? It stopped feeling Insta-nt enough: its original thumbnail diary format has become a contrivance of ideal backgrounds and delayed holiday pics uploaded when the people in them are sitting in an office as grey as yours but want to maintain a fiction of constant jet-setting. A third of influencer accounts now have more than 15,000 followers, and inflated numbers are counterproductive to the trust needed to make convincingly personal recommendations. Although the mainstream has been slow to realise this, Generation Z has known for some time. “Avocado toasts and posts on the beach are so generic and played out at this point,” says 15-year-old Claire.
“[Gen Z] are tired of curated images where someone has spent hours in front of the mirror getting ready,” says Emma Shuldham of the digital brand and talent agency ITB Worldwide. “They want to look at content that lives in the moment — that isn’t as staged and feels more raw.”
To put it another way, teenagers these days see photos as capturing a moment rather than preserving a memory, more like the disposable cameras that accompanied students on nights out in the 90s than the extravagantly posed selfies of recent years. There are other ways in which Gen Z is happily fogey-fied before its time too: the 25-year-old sitcom
Friends is one of Netflix’s most bingewatched series thanks to a newly obsessed tranche of viewers, although many of them reputedly thought it was a modern-made period piece when it debuted on the platform. The age bracket is also thought to account for a quarter of all gardening sales, such is its interest in pot plants and mindfully culturing offcuts.
Hardly surprising, then, that trend forecasters also refer to this bracket as the New Old-Fashioneds. In contrast to the parental fear that anyone born after 1995 is permanently glued to a screen, Gen Z members use tech to facilitate time spent connected to the physical world, or to buy tactile things they can appreciate offline — vinyl records, for example, and cross-stitch patterns.
“Unlike millennials, Generation Z are swapping self-promotion for selfawareness,” claims foresight consultancy the Future Laboratory in its Paradox Personas report on this age group’s tastes and habits. “[They’re] using the digital world to enrich but not define their offline selves.”
These kids seem rather more immune to the idea of cool than their forebears. This is the demographic that finally turned climate angst into climate activism and has forsworn drugs and alcohol –— in 2014, 38 per cent of 11 to 15-year-olds in England said they had tried alcohol, compared with a roughly consistent 60 per cent in years past. Instead, they spend 18 more minutes a day doing exercise than teenagers did 10 years ago; they make up 41 per cent of poetry sales according to Nielsen BookScan, and 45 per cent of them told Scala Radio they stream classical music.
“Outside school, I like to paint and write stories,” says Grace, 18. “Cool is the art of not caring what other people think of you — and not taking yourself too seriously.”
That’s one of TikTok and the Hype House’s great strengths. Unlike Instagram posts, a TikTok video is rated on its entertainment value rather than the popularity of its creator, so dance routines, comedy and useful tips or tricks play well, and the hours spent finely honing them in one’s bedroom can pay off. That makes for a certain democratic reprioritising of personality over pouts — although Gen Z is already known for its lip-filler habit.
“[Gen Z] are tired of curated images where someone has spent hours in front of the mirror getting ready. They want to look at content that lives in the moment – that isn’t as staged and feels more raw.
Emma Shuldham, ITB Worldwide.