Her own social distancing bubble is a 12-foot-wide dress
This wasn’t the first time Shay Rose went viral. But it was the biggest.
In her 21 years, the social media star – Shay Rose is a pseudonym – has built a mammoth following on TikTok and Instagram with handmade whimsical costumes that recreate looks from Disney princesses to Lady Gaga.
When the pandemic began, Rose moved from the UCLA dorms back in with her family in Orange County. As cases climbed in September, she wondered: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own social distancing bubble?”
She had plenty of pink tulle on hand, and besides, wouldn’t it be fun to make a dress with a 6-foot radius?
By the end of November, the finished project had racked up 3.9 million likes and 16.8 million views on the social media platform TikTok. It took two months and more than 350 feet of tulle but, as Rose speculated on Instagram, sometimes creating is rewarding. Other times, it can be exhausting. And sometimes it’s both.
“Virality is really just what people want to see,” Rose told The Times. “For me, it’s making the stuff that I’m curious about
and the stuff that I want to make. Usually people want to see it too.”
Of course, she qualified, there’s a lot more to a viral secret sauce than that, including the behind-the-scenes technicalities, formatting and editing of content. Rose joins a wave of teens and 20-somethings who dedicate themselves to creating – content, clothes or both.
“But in the end, it’s just like: If you make stuff that you’re curious about, there’s usually a niche for it,” Rose said. “Other people are curious about it too.”
Luckily, she lives in sunny Orange County, because the dress was so enormous (12 feet
in diameter with a 113-foot surface area) that she had to work on it outside. The design breaks down into two pieces, the bodice and the base; the latter includes a PVC grid for the dress to sit on, complete with wheels.
“There’s no way it can fit through a door, so it’s in no way ever going to be practical,” Rose said. “But my idea behind it was just that question of, ‘Oh, what if? Would this even work? What would it look like?’”
Rose documented the process from start to finish on her social media accounts. That translates to two TikToks, three Instagram Reels, seven Instagram posts and no fewer than 72 Instagram Stories, carefully curated in a
Highlight.
The communication studies major is a digital native. While the debate over the Gen Z/ millennial cusp rages on TikTok, Rose falls solidly into the first camp. She’s spending quarantine at home, where she balanced part of her last year of school with a six-month internship at TikTok, which she recently finished during finals week. In other words, she understands the ins and outs of the internet.
Her first cosplay was a happy accident: In eighth grade, she dressed as a character from the novel series “The Lunar Chronicles” to attend a book signing – without realizing that it was “cosplay,” or performance art through dressing as a character. In 2015, she re-created Anna’s coronation dress from “Frozen” using what she had around the house: her brother’s old curtains and gold Christmas ribbon.
“It was basically like a puzzle … to figure out: ‘How do I make this thing work?’” her mom said. (The mother did not want to be identified, an effort to help her daughter maintain a bit more anonymity on the internet.)
From there, Rose grew a following first on cosplay forums, then on Instagram dressing as everyone from Deku (“My Hero Academia”) and White Diamond (“Steven Universe”) to Disney princess Belle and 20th Century Fox’s Anastasia.
She amassed a sizable following, mostly among the cosplay community she came up through. Then she joined TikTok, and her first viral project – “Beauty and the Beast”-inspired shoes – took off “when TikTok was a baby,” Rose said. “It was before TikTok was cool.”
Those “Disney shoes” feature tiny clay roses encased in clear heels. Inspired by the brand Irregular Choice, known for its ornate embellished heels, the project blew up in September 2019, reaching 1.5 million likes and 8.9 million views on TikTok.
“I had been doing this whole crafting thing online for a while, but it had never really taken off in the mainstream,” Rose said. “And then all of a sudden, it wasn’t just me and my cosplay friends watching my stuff; it was everyone.”
AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT WASN’T JUST ME AND MY COSPLAY FRIENDS WATCHING MY STUFF; IT WAS EVERYONE. Shay Rose