CHEERS TO…LARA BINGLE
There are few Australian women who have been more publicly projected onto than Lara Bingle.
The bronzed Bondi beauty (actually - she's a Shire gal).
The “where the bloody hell are you?” poster-girl (which, IMO - is still one of the best pieces of Destination Marketing to come out of Tourism Australia).
The former cricket WAG.
The ditzy reality-TV victim.
The tabloid cautionary tale.
Australia spent the better part of a decade building her up, pulling her apart, then acting shocked when she quietly excluded herself from the narrative and disappeared from the circus - and yet Lara Bingle is having the last laugh.
These days she exists mostly as a sort of impossibly chic internet apparition - living somewhere between her New York penthouse, Copenhagen Fashion Week and a bottle of $94 olive oil - while posting TikToks that suggest she is deeply unserious about all of it.
She honestly just looks like she's living her best life and (bloody) good for her.
Soft-launching absurd wealth with the energy of someone who genuinely finds the whole performance hilarious is what makes her more compelling than most influencers trying desperately to appear “relatable" #authenticity
She's opted out of needing public approval while still having fun online and menacing us with that ridiculous bone structure, stunning fashion sense and excellent lighting.
One of my forever it-girls (and current favourite corner of the internet).
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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