Visits: 28
BENNINGTON, Vt. — Caitlin Covington was having a bad hair day. For many people, Ms. Covington’s dense, brown hair, curled into long, loose ringlets, would probably be considered an enviable hair day. But for Ms. Covington, a lifestyle blogger and influencer who is best known as the face — and the hair — of the internet meme “Christian Girl Autumn,” this wasn’t cutting it.
It was Day 3 of Ms. Covington’s annual pilgrimage to Vermont, where she would spend a week posing in front of as much foliage as her daughter, Kennedy, would permit without tears. (Kennedy, 1, was currently experiencing the particular pain of cutting her first tooth.)
“Christian Girl Autumn” is a years-old, seasonal meme created to lightly mock a certain type of, usually white, woman who is obsessed with all things fall, from knitwear to hot beverages. It originated on Twitter, where Ms. Covington, 32, became a niche celebrity as the unwitting leader of the movement when a user discovered and tweeted a picture of her found though a Google image search. Since then, the meme has resurfaced annually as summer fades away and temperatures begin to drop.
On Instagram earlier this month, where Ms. Covington has 1.3 million followers, obsessives clamored, anxiously awaiting this year’s autumnal content, leaving comments that seemed to confirm Ms. Covington’s status as, to quote a few commenters, an “autumnal queen,” the “president of fall,” and a representative of “basic white girl core.”
“Hope you know you’re the beacon that stops the earth from collapsing on itself entirely,” one particularly dramatic commenter wrote.
Ms. Covington was already a full-time social media creator when she became the poster child for apple cider and knitted wool, but since then she has doubled down on making fall central to her brand. It’s a strategy that has paid off. During her time in Vermont, Ms. Covington said she will be paid tens of thousands of dollars for just two sponsored posts on Instagram.
Getting the right photos for those posts was the entire point of her trip, better known in the influencer community as a content trip. With the windy roads and quaint old houses of Vermont as her backdrop, Ms. Covington would spend the week making autumnal photos and videos she’d later post on Instagram. She also runs a blog, Southern Curls and Pearls, from her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., which she started as an undergraduate in 2011 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ms. Covington traveled to Vermont with a small entourage, including her daughter, her assistant, her daughter’s nanny and her brother, who has been her full-time photographer for the last four years.
The trunk of her rented S.U.V. overflowed with neutral-toned clothing and shoes for Ms. Covington to shimmy into as the group shuttled from location to location. A camel coat, a pair of Ugg boots, a chunky brown knit cardigan with the tag still on it, heeled suede bootees and a pair of sneakers with a sizable Chanel logo poked out the car.
“I am a seasoned car changer,” Ms. Covington, who is nearly six months pregnant, said, stepping out of the vehicle in a pair of stiletto-heeled boots and pumpkin orange, off-the-shoulder knit dress.
It was 9 a.m. and Ms. Covington and her team had selected the Old First Church in Bennington as the site for their first photo shoot of the day. Patrice Nolan-Fox, a docent at the church, said the spot is frequented by leaf-peeping tourists. “Pictures are very welcome and popular,” Ms. Nolan-Fox, 67, said, noting that the church encourages visitors to take all the photos they’d like as long as they are respectful of the property.
But Ms. Covington wasn’t interested in the church itself. Across the street, she posed “Abbey Road”-style in a crosswalk flanked by piles of downed, crunchy leaves, holding a phantom hand where her daughter’s would go once she and her brother planned the shot. She liked the look of the white fence surrounding the church’s cemetery but decided the lighting wasn’t quite right. (Somewhere, just beyond the fence, is the grave of the poet Robert Frost.)
Ms. Covington said she’d been monitoring foliage reports for weeks before the trip, crossing her fingers that the leaves in the area reached peak color. On past trips, she’d sometimes arrived either too early or too late to see the yellows, reds and oranges in all their splendor.
‘I’m literally as basic as people think I am.’
In 2019, Ms. Covington woke up one day in August and discovered she had become a Twitter meme. “Hot Girl Summer is coming to an end, get ready for Christian Girl Autumn,” Isabella Markel tweeted, from a now-suspended account, referring to the song by Megan Thee Stallion.
Ms. Markel, who is now a TikTok creator with more than 200,000 followers, also included an old photo of Ms. Covington with another influencer, Emily Gemma, on a content trip in 2016. (Ms. Covington said in the years before her daughter was born she’d typically take three content trips per month, traveling everywhere from Aspen to Aruba.)
“I was at home, and I was so bored,” Ms. Markel, 22, said recently in a phone interview. “I was literally just, like, looking up ‘Christian girl outfit’ on Google and saving the random photos.” In the photo, the two women are wearing blanket scarves, skinny jeans and heeled bootees. Their long tresses are styled in gentle, barrel curls. Ms. Markel’s intent was to make a “silly” meme to entertain her fellow Twitter trolls, she said.
The tweet took off. Ms. Covington gained thousands of followers. While some people enjoyed the meme, others used it as an opportunity to criticize Ms. Covington and Ms. Gemma, judging them based on their appearances. “The Women In The ‘Christian Girl Autumn’ Meme Want You To Know Something,” read the headline on a BuzzFeed News interview where the pair set the record straight.
“I’m a nice person and I love everyone and I’m accepting of everyone,” Ms. Covington said at the time.
Three years later, Ms. Covington, who is a Christian, specifically Methodist, has embraced her status as fall royalty. She has also stayed in touch with Ms. Markel over the years, donating $500 to a GoFundMe campaign that Ms. Markel, who is transgender, started in 2020 to help pay for her transition.
Still, Ms. Covington really does love fall as much as the memes insinuate. “I’m literally as basic as people think I am. Like, pumpkin spice, fall leaves, cardigan sweaters, blanket scarves,” Ms. Covington said. “I think at the root of it, it might have something to do with my anxiety. I have a lot of anxiety and fall is just all about, like, finding comfort in the small things, you know? Like making a cup of coffee and enjoying it or wrapping up in a snugly sweater next to a fireplace.”
Ms. Covington prefers her pumpkin spice lattes slightly toned down, just two pumps of flavored syrup instead of six.
The ‘mother’ of autumn
At the beginning of October, Ms. Covington teased her trip to Vermont by posting pictures from past trips on Instagram and announcing that it was almost time for her to head north. “You are to fall what Mariah Carey is to Christmas,” one user wrote in a comment on the post.
A tweet from the pop culture news account Pop Crave announcing the upcoming trip received more than 100,000 likes. “Mother,” the Twitter account for the gay dating app Grindr wrote in a reply. People frequently refer to Ms. Covington as “mother” in comments on her posts. “I think that they are referring to mother of autumn,” Ms. Covington said. “I’m only guessing.”
In that teaser post, Ms. Covington also included a link to an affiliate platform, LTK, where she shared links to all the clothing, and similar pieces, she is wearing in her photos. She’ll make a commission on each piece bought through those links and regularly includes LTK links with her posts. “I could buy like a $30 top and end up making, like, $1,000,” Ms. Covington said. Her most popular linked item of all time is her curling iron, she added. (It’s from the brand T3 and has interchangeable barrels. Ms. Covington favors the one-inch size.)
The Vermont scenery is also part of Ms. Covington’s business strategy. She estimated the trip cost $6,000 to $7,000 for her team. It’s a worthwhile investment, though. Her outfits sell “a lot better” when staged in quintessential New England scenes, she said. She posted one photo a day while still on the trip and banked enough content for another week’s worth of posts the following week. “People get bored if you drag it out too long,” she said.
“The engagement rate on a picture with fall leaves versus, like, some green trees, it’s just insane. It’s so different,” Ms. Covington said. “I can visibly see a difference when I’m on a trip,” she added, noting her Instagram stories’ views had doubled since she arrived in Vermont.
Instagram’s prioritization of videos over static content hit creators hard this year, Ms. Covington included. “I’ve definitely had to shift and adapt to a new medium,” she said. “I never really took much video content before, so it’s been kind of a learning curve as we try out reels and it’s been fun, but it’s not my preferred type of content.”
She estimated she now gets about half as many views on her photos and videos as she had in the past on the app. She also has had to shift her content style somewhat as the Instagram aesthetic of a perfect feed has fallen out of vogue.
“I will always love the curated feed and the pretty pictures, but I think that it’s not a bad thing to be more real and kind of raw with your followers,” she said.
At the second shoot location of the day, a nearby covered bridge, Ms. Covington and her brother, Christopher Covington, consulted a document of inspiration photos on her phone trying to figure out how to shoot the bridge so the tops of the yellow trees behind it would pop.
“Before we come, I try on all the outfits. I have Kennedy’s outfits planned out and mine,” Ms. Covington said. “We have specific places that we plan to go. Like, I have the pumpkin patch and the address and then I have the apple cider spot and the address of that, and it’s all in this big document. So when we get there, we can be like, ‘OK, this outfit will look great in this location. Let’s shoot it here.’”
The yellow leaf vision was not totally coming together. Ms. Covington, who had changed into a cream sweater dress and an oatmeal colored scarf on the drive between locations, decided the bridge might instead be best for some content for Instagram reels, shooting video clips of her and her daughter strolling in front of it.
Alyssa Emmel, Ms. Covington’s nanny, and Ms. Covington’s assistant, Chelsea Baskin, sang a special song to the tune of the nursery rhyme Frère Jacques by way of both instruction and encouragement for Kennedy. “Walking, walking, walking, walking, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, running, running, running, running, running, running, now we stop, now we stop,” they sang. Kennedy, laughing, seemed more interested in sticking her tongue out than cheesing for photos.
Ms. Covington said she has always preferred to be called a blogger, rather than an influencer or content creator. While platform algorithms are fickle and beyond her control, she consistently posts three times per week on her blog, in addition to posting content on TikTok and Instagram.
That control is critical when posting is a full-time job — one that, for someone with an audience like Ms. Covington’s, can be quite lucrative. During her week in Vermont, she shared two sponsored posts: one for Saks Off 5th, which featured Ms. Covington wearing an outfit she purchased at the discount department store, and an ad for a designer handbag rental company. In that post, Ms. Covington is seated on a park bench sipping coffee with a Chanel crossbody bag resting in her lap. Ms. Covington said she was paid $10,000 to $15,000 for each of these posts.
After finishing at the covered bridge, Ms. Covington and her team decided they wanted to go to Starbucks, both to get coffee and to get a cup to use as a prop. The green logo would match nicely with an outfit she planned to wear in a photo later on in the trip, Ms. Covington said.
There are fewer than a dozen Starbucks in the state of Vermont, most of them clustered near Burlington, a nearly three-hour drive north from where Ms. Covington was shooting. In something of a “Christian Girl Autumn” miracle, there was a Starbucks, tucked inside a Price Chopper grocery store, just 15 minutes away. You already know what Ms. Covington ordered.
