‘Christian Girl Autumn’ goes back to basic
After becoming viral meme, blogger embracing being ‘autumnal queen’
Caitlin Covington was having a bad hair day. For many people, Covington’s dense, brown hair, curled into long, loose ringlets, would probably be considered an enviable hair day. But for Covington, a lifestyle blogger and influencer who is best known as the face — and the hair — of the internet meme “Christian Girl Autumn,” this wasn’t cutting it.
It was day 3 of Covington’s annual pilgrimage to Vermont, where she would spend a week posing in front of as much foliage as her daughter, Kennedy, would permit without tears. (Kennedy, 1, was currently experiencing the particular pain of cutting her first tooth.)
“Christian Girl Autumn” is a years-old, seasonal meme created to lightly mock a certain type of, usually white, woman who is obsessed with all things fall, from knitwear to hot beverages. It originated on Twitter, where Covington, 32, became a niche celebrity as the unwitting leader of the movement when a user discovered and tweeted a picture of her found though a Google image search. Since then, the meme has resurfaced annually as summer fades away and temperatures begin to drop.
On Instagram, where Covington has 1.3 million followers, obsessives clamored, anxiously awaiting this year’s autumnal content, leaving comments that seemed to confirm Covington’s status as, to quote a few commenters, an “autumnal queen,” the “president of fall,” and a representative of “basic white girl core.”
Covington was already a full-time social media creator when she became the poster child for apple cider and knitted wool, but since then she has doubled down on making fall central to her brand.
It’s a strategy that has paid off. During her time in Vermont, Covington said she will be paid tens of thousands of dollars for just two sponsored posts on Instagram.
Getting the right photos for those posts was the entire point of her trip. With the windy roads and quaint old houses of Vermont as her backdrop, Covington would spend the week making autumnal photos and videos she’d later post on Instagram.
She also runs a blog, Southern Curls and Pearls, from her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which she started as an undergraduate in 2011 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Covington traveled to Vermont with a small entourage, including her daughter, her assistant, her daughter’s nanny and her brother, who has been her full-time photographer for the past four years.
It was 9 a.m. and Covington and her team had selected the Old First Church in Bennington as the site for their first photo shoot of the day.
But Covington wasn’t
interested in the church itself. Across the street, she posed “Abbey Road”-style in a crosswalk flanked by piles of downed, crunchy leaves, holding a phantom hand where her daughter’s would go once she and her brother planned the shot. She liked the look of the white fence surrounding the church’s cemetery but decided the lighting wasn’t quite right.
‘I’m literally as basic as people think I am.’
In 2019, Covington woke up one day in August and discovered she had become a Twitter meme. “Hot Girl Summer is coming to an end, get ready for Christian Girl Autumn,” Isabella Markel tweeted, from a now-suspended account, referring to the song by Megan Thee Stallion. Markel also included an old photo of Covington with another influencer, Emily
Gemma, on a content trip in 2016 wearing blanket scarves, skinny jeans and heeled booties. Their long tresses are styled in gentle, barrel curls.
The tweet took off. Covington gained thousands of followers. While some people enjoyed the meme, others used it as an opportunity to criticize Covington and Gemma, judging them based on their appearances.
Three years later, Covington, who is a Christian, specifically Methodist, has embraced her status as fall royalty. Still, Covington really does love fall as much as the memes insinuate. “I’m literally as basic as people think I am. Like, pumpkin spice, fall leaves, cardigan sweaters, blanket scarves,” Covington said.
The ‘mother’ of autumn
At the beginning of October, Covington teased her
trip to Vermont by posting pictures from past trips on Instagram and announcing that it was almost time for her to head north. In that teaser post, Covington also included a link to an affiliate platform, LTK, where she shared links to all the clothing, and similar pieces, she is wearing in her photos. She’ll make a commission on each piece bought through those links and regularly includes
LTK links with her posts. “I could buy like a $30 top and end up making, like, $1,000,” Covington said.
The Vermont scenery is also part of Covington’s business strategy. She estimated the trip cost $6,000 to $7,000 for her team. It’s a worthwhile investment, though. Her outfits sell “a lot better” when staged in quintessential New England scenes, she said.
“The engagement rate on a picture with fall leaves versus, like, some green trees, it’s just insane. It’s so different,” Covington said. “I can visibly see a difference when I’m on a trip,” she added, noting her Instagram stories’ views had doubled since she arrived in Vermont.
At the second shoot location of the day, a nearby covered bridge, Covington and her brother, Christopher Covington, consulted a document of inspiration photos on her phone trying to figure out how to shoot the bridge so the tops of the yellow trees behind it would pop.
“Before we come, I try on all the outfits. I have Kennedy’s outfits planned out and mine,” Caitlin Covington said. “We have specific places that we plan to go. Like, I have the pumpkin patch and the address and then I have the apple cider spot and the address of that, and it’s all in this big document. So when we get there, we can be like, ‘OK, this outfit will look great in this location. Let’s shoot it here.’ ”
During her week in Vermont, she shared two sponsored posts: one for Saks Off 5th, which featured Covington wearing an outfit she purchased at the discount department store, and an ad for a designer handbag rental company. In that post, Covington is seated on a park bench sipping coffee with a Chanel crossbody bag resting in her lap. Covington said she was paid $10,000 to $15,000 for each of these posts.
After finishing at the covered bridge, Covington and her team decided they wanted to go to Starbucks.
There are fewer than a dozen Starbucks in the state of Vermont, most of them clustered near Burlington, a nearly three-hour drive north from where Covington was shooting. In something of a “Christian Girl Autumn” miracle, there was a Starbucks, tucked inside a Price Chopper grocery store, just 15 minutes away. You already know what Covington ordered.