Aureta Thomollari, better known simply as @aureta on Instagram, is that rare breed of mysterious “personality” in the vain of Citizen Kane of Howard Hughes (minus the part where she engages in creepy white male behavior and eccentricities that are psychologically damaging to others). Details of who she truly is and how she managed to finagle all this dough to simply travel wherever she wants and make the rest of us covet her lifestyle feel nebulous at best. She’s a “businesswoman” who “helped establish” Daniel Espinosa Jewelry in L.A. She’s a creative director (if the price is right). She’s of Albanian descent. But who the fuck is she, really? Almost like the fake socialite Anna Delvey but with better aesthetic taste, Aureta has convinced us all of her fabulousness.
With @aureta being an extension of the blog she started in 2009 (when blogs were still more powerful than Instagram accounts), the glamor puss has also gained further traction by joining forces with art consultant Jordan “Watts” Watson of @love.watts after the two met at a party in L.A. (isn’t that always the way people with any clout decide to collaborate?). Together, they’ve also created the lifestyle-oriented @watts.on and the interior design-oriented @green.couch. But being a star of Instagram isn’t as simple click, two, hashtag. Aureta’s meticulousness is best summed up in her process for posting: “I like all of my posts to be on a straight plane, clearly shot and look good next to the last picture posted. Totally OCD.” She also despises when people wield “selfies, party pictures, ignorant comments.” So gauche.
While Aureta claims she never intended on setting down the path of being an “Instagram influencer” (a job/concept recently parodied in Brooklyn with a sign that insisted you must have 25,000 followers to participate), she has suddenly found herself at the forefront of being a representation of how “brands have realized how important an influencer’s voice is and that’s where the monetization has come into play.” And though many will try to emulate and capitalize on the trend of “sharing their inspirations”–mostly sponsored inspirations, that is–few will succeed as Aureta has. Because even despite the democratization of tools available for achieving fame–ranging from Instagram to GarageBand–there is still one thing people fail to realize, or rather, choose to ignore, about the ladder of ascension: you have to be just a little bit rich from the outset in order to have the stamina and patience to succeed/stick out from the other riffraff only posting photos of their acrylic nails holding some bullshit item like a piece of fruit. Please, fruit is only a sign of luxury if you’re in the exotic milieus of Santorini, Dubai or Tangier. For some reason, however, Lindsay Lohan still hasn’t been able to make influencer status work for her (even though she “flits from” Mykonos to Dubai all the time…when the jank private plane isn’t rerouted in between).
In any event, Aureta’s fastidious style–both sartorially and photographically–continues to hit its stride in 2018, with the “star” of this twenty-first century medium claiming that if there was no Instagram, she would likely “do so much of what I’m doing now: investing in and consulting different companies.” And therein lies the key to what separates Aureta from other would-be “influencers”: the entrepreneurial sensibility that keeps her in head-to-toe designer labels whilst every other girl in their early twenties seems to think that showing their ass is showing their highbrow taste on the “culturally cognizant” road to viral fame.
