What’s the Difference Between Going Viral and Having Cultural Currency?
Metrics fade, but authority endures - why the internet’s favourite moments rarely survive the feed.
Fashion media has developed a lazy habit of treating “viral” and “culturally relevant” as interchangeable terms, when they describe two entirely different relationships between a creative and an audience. Virality is a number, measurable and finite, the kind of thing that appears in a screenshot and gets quoted in a press release. Cultural currency is something closer to a position, the kind of standing that exists whether or not anyone is currently watching. Confusing the two has real consequences for who gets remembered a year later, who gets funded for the next idea, and who gets taken seriously once the initial noise has settled.
In 2022, Heidi Klum hosted her annual Halloween party dressed as a giant worm - a costume so unexpected and elaborately constructed that it dominated fashion and entertainment coverage for weeks. She described it as one of the proudest, strangest creations of her career. Three years on, the costume rarely surfaces in fashion conversation. Nobody studies it as a creative choice or returns to it as a reference point for anything. It achieved enormous visibility, then disappeared from cultural memory at almost the same speed it arrived - a number with nothing built underneath it to hold the weight once attention moved on.
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