Sydney Gifford
Appearances
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Sydney Gifford is 24. She lives outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and she is incredibly successful at this job. She has hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok. She makes videos that get millions of views, tons of people commenting, saving, presumably buying things from her clips.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And this is how she makes a living. This is pretty much her only job. And she's specifically an Amazon influencer because she told me that she really doesn't do other brand deals that much. She just has this partnership with Amazon.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
She's part of their influencer program where every time you make a purchase from one of her special links with sort of tracking information in, an affiliate link, every time you make a purchase from her links, she earns a little bit of money back.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And now think about scaling that to millions and millions of viewers who are looking for whatever crap to buy. And it's a pretty sweet job.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Sydney says that Alyssa is copying her vibe, basically. That's what it really boils down to, her vibe, her look, her feel, aesthetic. And there are a couple different prongs of the sort of copying allegations. One is Sydney says that Alyssa has copied what her videos and photos look like, the aesthetic. The sort of look and feel, the pacing, maybe the editing. You've copied my videos.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
You keep making the same videos that I just made a few days ago or a few weeks ago. So that's one thing. The other thing is you keep promoting the same Amazon stuff as I do. Oh.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
The additional allegation is that not only did you copy what my content looks like, you copied what I look like. You changed your appearance and people are getting us confused. Oh, my God.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Okay, so imagine a house that is black, white, cream, beige only. You look around, there is literally not a single thing in your sight that is a color other than that. Everything is like this. Everything is smooth, clean, sort of it almost feels like a dream, like a cloud. These are both of their homes. I went to both of their houses.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And I visited Alyssa first, and I was struck by the neighborhood that she lived in because it was all, like, tan. Then I stepped into her home, and it was silent and completely white. Just everything was beige and cream and white and a little bit of black. And it is this aesthetic that has come to be known online as, quote-unquote, clean girl style.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
There's a lot of things going on in the actual suit, but what it boils down to really is one of the women, Sydney Gifford, says that the other woman, Alyssa Scheel, just won't stop copying her.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Clean girls have these beautiful, long, sort of smooth hair.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Sometimes it's down. Sometimes it's in a tight bun, slicked back bun. They wear gold jewelry.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
They wear also beige, cream, white, black clothing. They wear chunky sweaters or oversized sweatsuits. They have beautifully manicured nails. This is the sort of vision of luxury that a lot of people look up to right now.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Yeah, and it pays for their life. And what Sidney's claim is that the copying wasn't just, like, annoying, which maybe a lot of people would feel that's where it ends. It also cut into her earnings. She says that she didn't sell as many Amazon products as Alyssa was copying her, allegedly.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
She says that she didn't gain the same amount of followers that she would have because perhaps they were following Alyssa instead. And they sort of claim about, you know, you copied what I look like. That feeds into that where Sidney claims that because Alyssa copied how she looks, people were getting the two women confused.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
People were thinking that Alyssa was Sidney and then perhaps buying things from her links instead of Sidney's links. Does that make sense?
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
So that's the crazy thing. They do. They have met each other. Right. Sydney used to live in Austin, where Alyssa currently resides. And in 2022 and 2023, the two women, along with a third influencer friend of Sydney's, all met up in person twice. And the meetings were kind of supposed to be like, how can we support each other? How can we support our businesses? You know, we work in the same field.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
We make the same kind of videos. So maybe we can just be friends or be friendly.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And after the second meetup, Alyssa told me that she felt kind of excluded from the other women, like they were maybe making passive aggressive comments to her. One thing she says was they were quizzing me on my strategies on social media. Huh. And... Alyssa ends up blocking Sydney on social media.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Now, Sydney was surprised and kind of confused by this because she thought the outings had been great, right? She thought everyone was on good terms. Everyone was friendly. But she kind of, you know, took a moment and wasn't too offended by the blocking because, as she told me, living your life online is not easy. Sometimes you compare yourself to other people and it can be mentally draining.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
So she was like, you know what? Whatever. I'm just going to keep doing my job. And something like 10 months after the blocking, followers of Sydney's started to come to her and say, hey, there's a woman who's making content just like yours. And I actually thought she was you until I looked at the name.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And that woman was Alyssa, this person that she had met a few times and had had this encounter with.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
So first, Sidney takes all of her social media posts and registers them with the copyright office, which is a pretty rare thing for influencers to do. It's not really a normal thing. So now she has all of her posts. She can start sending cease and desist letters to Alyssa. She hires an attorney and says, basically, you know, your content is infringing on my copyright. Like, you need to stop this.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And this goes on for a little bit before the actual suit is filed. That happened last spring. And the suit has a lot of different things in it. There's obviously what we just talked about, the claim that you making similar videos and photos, though not identical, similar content is infringing on my copyright. That's a novel claim. What does Alyssa say in response to this?
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Is she taking it seriously? Absolutely. I think she was shocked when she learned she was being sued. She denies ever copying Sidney. She says, I didn't even think about this person until I had started getting these cease and desist. I was not copying her on the claim that they look alike. I should note that Sydney is a white Hispanic woman and Alyssa is a black Latina woman.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And so Alyssa's legal response to this claim is, well, we don't look alike. We are two different races and nobody could confuse us. So there's a whole different, you know, Alyssa basically is saying like everything that I'm doing is totally legal and fine. And moreover, this is just the way that influencer content looks. This is the genre of clean girl. These are sort of the tropes of that genre.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And nothing either of us are doing is unique. I thought that was a really funny response. Like both of us are basic. Yeah.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
So if Sydney were to win, it would be a pretty significant expansion of copyright law. Because suddenly it's not just about these images being identical. It's that you ripped off the vibe, the feel of my photos and videos. The reason the story was so interesting to me is that it's actually like truly unclear to me what is happening here, what the truth is. I don't know.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
And I have gone through the process of reporting and writing it. I've sort of landed in different places. But one thing I keep coming back to is that it's really hard right now in our media ecosystem to understand how we are implicitly being influenced by algorithms that we don't understand, that we don't have insight into.
Today, Explained
Beige, don't kill my vibe
Who's to say that Alyssa wasn't just pushed towards this content because this is the type of content that she sees on her feed all the time. And that is what she's emulating. So there's a lot of interesting questions around really like the artistic nature of influencer content and also how algorithms mediate all of the things that we post on the Internet.