Cast your mind back to the hazy summer of 2017. Fyre Festival – everybody’s favourite disaster – was a special kind of shit show, unfolding like a delicious soap opera packed with schadenfreude and breathtaking accounts of hubris, bedraggled supermodels and tragic catering [see: sad sandwich]. Last year saw two (TWO) feature-length documentaries released by Amazon and Hulu respectively, each charting the rise and fall of shifty entrepreneur Billy McFarland and his spectacularly over-promised Bahamas music festival. It’s safe to say the debacle was well documented – but it isn’t over yet. The latest rumblings report that Kendall Jenner, Emily Ratajkowski and others are being ‘officially sued’ for their involvement in promoting the best/worst festival of all time.
Ratajkowski and Jenner are among those named in documents filed by the event’s trustee Gregory Messer with New York’s Bankruptcy Courts this week, ‘seeking to recover money paid to talent agencies, performers, vendors and other entities involved in the marketing and failed execution of Fyre Festival.’ So: Messer’s alleging that Jenner – who, by the way, was paid $275,000 for a single insta post – mislead members of the public in a couple of sticky ways. First, the caption for the (now deleted) pic referenced her ‘G.O.O.D. Music Family’, conceivably leading the public to believe she was hinting at a Fyre performance from Kanye West. Second, Messer’s claiming that Jenner’s post didn’t make it clear that she was being paid to make it – and it turns out, that’s actually illegal as well as being Bad Vibes. Emily R is similarly accused of fudging her transaction with Fyre Festival organisers by allegedly veiling the fact that she was also being paid – a cool $299,000, just FYI, to her agency DNA Model Management. Meanwhile, music acts who were slated to perform at Fyre, including Migos, Blink-182, Lily Yachty, and Pusha T, have also been ‘hit with complaints.’
We were never talking small, with Fyre Festival, and the event had an influencer line up big enough to match its eye-watering claims (keywords included ‘Pablo Escobar’ and ‘Hidden Treasure’). Hailey Baldwin. Bella Hadid, and Ratajkowski. All frolicked in the azure waters for our delectation and the festival’s remarkable promo video, selling vague-but-powerful ideas of luxury and leisure (as well as cute swimming pigs). And so, as we know, Fyre died on the hill it was made – hype. It’s like the organisers were so into their extravagant marketing strategy that they forgot to arrange the actual event, and if you were as obsessed as I was you’ll remember the various waves of outrage issuing from the flooded building site (sorry, rustic festival village!) as confused attendees realised they’d been sold a series of pups.
In a world whose fabric is increasingly woven from digital content, is there something infantiliasing about the idea that consumers can’t see through the carefully manicured hype? Shouldn’t we have learnt to smell rats by now, especially ones so shiny and enormous? Perhaps – but on the other hand, maybe the buck stops higher up the food chain. Surely, celebrities have a responsibility to check out whatever they’re putting their name to, especially considering the fact that we jump like lemmings to their every cliff edge. Fyre Festival is such a compelling story because it has the ingredients of a fable (The Emperor’s New Clothes, and the Tortoise and the Hare, both spring to mind), and all the hallmarks of a peculiarly twenty-teens tale. We’ll watch with bated breath, and perhaps some popcorn, to see how this modern day fairy tale resolves itself.
[READ MORE: Fyre Festival Reportedly Investigated by the FBI](http://Fyre Festival Is Reportedly Being Investigated By The FBI)
READ MORE: The Fyre Festival Fandango Is A Parable For How We Live Our Lives In The Instagram Age
