Video dinner parties, spa days, stuffed animals, favorite hoodies and cozy, colorful fleece blankets. Cole Brauer’s Instagram feed hardly feels like the work of someone racing a 40-foot sailboat around the world in the Global Solo Challenge. But Ms. Brauer, 29, is not an average ocean racer.

In 2022, Ms. Brauer had tried out for another competition, the Ocean Race, which is considered the pinnacle of professional ocean racing. Sailors in that race are highly trained, wear matching foul weather gear and have corporate sponsors. And most of them are men. Ms. Brauer, who had sailed thousands of miles on high performance ocean racing boats, felt she was ready to join their ranks.

But after competing in trials in France, Ms. Brauer was told she was “too short for the Southern Ocean” and was sent on her way.

In spite of her small stature — she stands 5 feet 1 inch — Ms. Brauer rounded Cape Horn, Chile, on Jan. 26, the last of the three great capes of her journey to finish the Global Solo Challenge. It is a feat most of the Ocean Race sailors picked instead of her have never even attempted. And despite being the youngest competitor in the race, she is ranked second overall, just days away from reaching the finish line in A Coruña, Spain.

Along the way, her tearful reports of breakages and failures, awe-struck moments during fiery sunrises, dance parties and “shakas” signs at the end of each video have garnered her a following that has eclipsed any sailor’s or sailing event’s online, even the Ocean Race and the America’s Cup, a prestigious race that is more well known by mainstream audiences.

“I’m so happy to have rounded the Horn,” Ms. Brauer said in a video call from her boat, First Light, after a morning spent sponging out endless condensation and mildew from its bilges. “It feels like Day 1. I feel reborn knowing I’ll be in warmer weather. The depression you feel that no one in the world can fix that. Your house is trying to sink and you can’t stop it.”

Shifting gears, she added, “It’s all getting better.”

Ms. Brauer’s rise in popularity — she has more than 400,000 followers on Instagram — has come as a surprise to her, but her achievements, combined with her bright personality, have struck a chord. And she has set a goal of using her platform to change the image of professional ocean sailing.

“Cole wants to prove you can go around the world and watch Netflix every once in a while and wear your pajamas,” said Lydia Mullan, Ms. Brauer’s media manager. “As for her mental health, she’s really creating a space in her routine for herself, to create that joy she hasn’t seen in other sailors.”

Four months after she began the Global Solo Challenge, a solo, nonstop race around the world featuring sailboats of different sizes, Ms. Brauer is holding strong. Sixteen sailors began the journey and only eight remain on the ocean, with the Frenchman Philippe Delamare having finished first on Feb. 24 after 147 days at sea.

Ms. Brauer, who was more than a week ahead of her next closest competitor as of Thursday morning, is on track to set a speed record for her boat class, and to be the first American woman to complete a solo, nonstop sailing race around the world.

Her Authentic Self

Ms. Brauer has been happy to turn the image of a professional sailor on its head. Competitors in the Ocean Race and the America’s Cup tend to pose for static social media posts with their arms crossed high on their chests, throwing stern glares. Ms. Brauer would rather be more comfortable.

She brought objects like fleece blankets on her journey, despite the additional weight, and said solo sailing has helped give her the freedom to be herself.

“Without those things I would be homesick and miserable,” she said of her supply list. “We need comfort to be human. Doing my nails. Flossing. It’s hard for the general public to reach pro sailors. People stop watching. If you treat people below you, people stop watching.”

Other female sailors have noticed the same disconnect. “The year I did the Vendée Globe, Michel Desjoyeaux didn’t mention that anything went wrong,” Dee Caffari, a mentor of Ms. Brauer’s who has sailed around the world six times, said of that race’s winner. “Then we saw his jobs list after the finish and we realized he was human.”

Ms. Brauer, as her social media followers can attest, is decidedly human.

They have gotten used to her “hangout” clothes and rock-out sessions. Her team produces “Tracker Tuesdays,” where a weather forecaster explains the routes Ms. Brauer chooses and why she uses different sails, and “Shore Team Sunday,” where team members are introduced.

“In the beginning I looked at what she was doing, posting about washing her knickers in bucket and I was like, ‘No! What are you doing?’” Ms. Caffari said. “I’ve been so professional and corporate in my career. She’s been so authentic and taken everyone around the world with her. Cole is that next generation of sailor. They tell their story in a different way and it’s working.”

Finding a Purpose

Ms. Brauer was introduced to sailing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Those days of casual racing on the turquoise waters of Kaneohe Bay informed her vision of an inclusive sailing community. That image was shattered when she came to the mainland to try her hand at professional sailing.

“When I came to the East Coast it was so closed off,” she said of those early experiences. “I couldn’t get a job in the industry. Pro sailors were jaded. They didn’t want anyone to take their job. It’s a gig-based economy. Competition, we’re pinned against each other, especially women in high-performance sailing since there are fewer of us.”

“This whole process of being a pro sailor over the past five years, I feel mentally punched in the face and my legs kicked out from under me,” she added. “I screamed and I cried. Without those experiences I wouldn’t be as mentally tough. It made me callused.”

A big break happened when she landed a gig as boat captain for Michael Hennessy’s successful Class40 Dragon. The boat was a perfect platform to hone her ocean sailing skills as she ripped up and down the East Coast delivering it to races, often alone, pushing Dragon to its limits. Her Instagram posts of those adventures drew attention, and she was invited to tryout for the Ocean Race, a fully crewed race around the world in powerful 65-footers.

“I was crushed,” Ms. Brauer said of being rejected after the trials.

Ms. Brauer, though, found a new purpose. After months of living in her van and working on Dragon, she found a benefactor in F.K. Day, the president of World Bicycle Relief and the executive vice president of SRAM Corporation, who, along with his brother Lincoln, agreed to buy a boat and fund a massive refit for the Global Solo Challenge, which was only three months away.

Conducting the hurricane of activity last summer in Newport, R.I., Ms. Brauer knew this was her moment to shine. But her new sponsors had reservations about her bold social media experiment.

“I got a massive pushback: ‘How can you be so vain. This isn’t important. We don’t want to pay for this,’” she said. “I said none of this is going to matter if the world can’t see it.”

Her boat was covered with cameras her shore team could monitor, with technology allowing for constant recording that could be used to capture unexpected twists. Ms. Brauer got some immediate traction, but nothing prepared her for the numbers she would hit once the race began.

“We were taking bets in Spain,” said Ms. Brauer, who had to sail First Light nearly 3,000 miles from Newport to Spain as a qualifier for the race. “There was a photo of me excited we hit 10,000 followers. Ten thousand for a little race? That’s massive.”

A few months later she has 40 times that count.

A Dangerous Journey

Only a handful of solo ocean racers have been American, all of whom being male. Now Ms. Brauer has a larger following than any of them, pushing far beyond the typical reach of her sport.

“This is a really good case study,” says Marcus Hutchinson, a project manager for ocean racing teams. For me she’s an influencer. She’s a Kardashian. People will be looking for her to promote a product. She doesn’t need to worry about what the American sailors think. That’s parochial. She has to split with the American environment.”

Unlike her peers, Ms. Brauer is happy to do some extracurricular work along the way toward goals like competing in the prestigious Vendée Globe. “I’m part of the social media generation,” she said. “It’s not a burden to me.”

The playful videos and colorful backdrop, though, can make it easy for her followers to forget that she is in the middle of a dangerous race. Half her competitors in the Global Solo Challenge have pulled out, and ocean races still claim lives, particularly in the violent, frigid storms of the Southern Ocean.

“She was apprehensive,” Ms. Caffari said of Ms. Brauer’s rounding Cape Horn. “I told her: ‘You were devastated that you didn’t get on the Ocean Race. Now look at you. Those sailors didn’t even get to go to the Southern Ocean.’”

The question now is how Ms. Brauer will retain her followers’ desire for content after the race is over.

“She will be unaware of the transition she went through,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “She’s become a celebrity and hasn’t really realized it.”

Ms. Brauer, however, said she received as much from her followers as she gave them.

“They are so loving,” she said. “I send a photo of a sunset, and they paint watercolors of the scene to sell and raise money for the campaign. When I start to feel down, they let me stand on their shoulders.”

Cat Janice, a singer and songwriter who released a buoyant pop track from hospice that galvanized her thousands of supporters online to sway, and even groove, in the face of tragedy, died on Wednesday at her family home in Annandale, Va. She was 31.

The cause was sarcoma, according to William Ipsan, her brother.

The singer and multi-instrumentalist, whose legal name was Catherine Ipsan, started writing music as a teenager and released it throughout her 20s. But “Dance You Outta My Head,” which she shared on social media alongside candid discussion of her grueling cancer treatments, quickly became the biggest hit of her career. Over disco-inflected guitar and exuberant strings, she sang about “dancing on the edge of disaster.”

Ms. Ipsan released the song on Jan. 19, a few days after entering hospice care. The song caught fire as her health outlook darkened, with social media users — including celebrities like Jason Derulo — leaving messages of support.

It became a common soundtrack on TikTok after Ms. Ipsan encouraged her followers to stream the song as a way of supporting her 7-year-old son, Loren, after her death. “I am leaving this song behind for my son,” she wrote on TikTok. In another post, she said she had “changed all the rights from my songs so every presave and every stream goes to Loren.”

The song has been used in more than two million TikTok videos and became the singer’s first song to enter the Billboard charts.

“I’m praying my story isn’t over yet,” she wrote in a post on her birthday, the day after the song’s release. “But if it is, this is a pretty incredible way to say goodbye.”

Catherine Janice Ipsan was born on Jan. 20, 1993, one of four children in a musical family outside Washington, D.C. She played violin and piano, while her brother sometimes accompanied her on drums. Their mother was a radio D.J. who instilled a love of music in her kids, Mr. Ipsan, 27, said in an interview this month: “We’d be singing every lyric to the Eagles and the Beatles and all the oldies.”

According to her brother, Ms. Ipsan was also a science nerd, who studied geology at George Mason University before going to work as a geospatial analyst. But writing songs remained her outlet, he said. “If she’s stressed or anything, she’ll go do music.”

In 2022 she was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that she first noticed as a lump in her neck. She underwent surgery and more than a dozen rounds of chemotherapy, her brother said. She posted personal updates on TikTok, including videos of shaving her head and writing music while undergoing treatment. She released an album, “Modern Medicine,” in July 2023.

“Cat’s always sharing what she’s got going on,” said her husband, Kyle Higginbotham, 36, also a musician. “It just happened to be that cancer was what she had going on her last year.”

She continued to perform at venues in the Washington area during treatment, sometimes alongside Mr. Higginbotham, who recalled taking his wife to rounds of chemo, then playing a show with her the very next day. They got engaged onstage in August, at her album release show, and married in December.

She started writing “Dance You Outta My Head” over the summer, while in the car with Loren, Mr. Ipsan said. She sent a demo to Austin Bello, a producer she had worked with for more than seven years, and asked him to mix the track.

“What always impressed me was the clarity with which her edits would come,” Mr. Bello said, offering as an example of one of her notes, “At one minute and 22 seconds, turn down the harmonies 2.2 dB.”

The success of “Dance You Outta My Head” was gratifying but also painful, Mr. Ipsan said. “She’s happy that she’s been doing music for so long and it’s getting the appreciation she deserves,” he said. But the outpouring of supportive messages from fans did not erase her disappointment that she probably would never get to go on a headlining tour or attend the Grammy Awards.

She spent her final weeks at her family home in Annandale, baking bread and getting matching tattoos with family members. Mr. Higginbotham and Loren often sat by her side, making beats on electronic drum pads. When she was feeling strong enough, she hummed.

Mr. Higginbotham said he hoped his wife’s music career would be remembered as more than a “sob story.”

“It’s not just, some girl made a song because she’s dying of cancer,” he said. “Cat’s a real-deal artist and poured every minute of her life into it, right up until the end.”

About four years ago, the D.J.s Malinder Tooray, Omar Ahmed and Bianca Maieli hosted a night of music and dancing in Los Angeles.

They were living in the city and loved attending dance parties that played rhythmic genres from around the world, like Afrobeats, reggaeton, and Brazilian baile funk, but they wanted to hear more sounds from Asia, including the Indian music of their formative years.

Their show, “No Nazar,” attracted a wide following and filled in what many saw as a gap in the music and nightlife scene.

“Nazar” is an Arabic word borrowed by many languages and cultures. It invokes the concept of “evil eye” — that is, an envious glance that can cause harm to those it falls on. The event created by Ms. Tooray, Mr. Ahmed and Ms. Maieli reflected a mood the trio was trying to create — that of an inviting and affirming environment that encourages cultural exchange through music.

“As all of us found what we liked at different parties, we also realized what we had as a gift to offer,” Ms. Tooray said.

The party has since expanded to other cities and, on Saturday night, it returned to New York at the Brooklyn Monarch. Many of the 1,500-some partygoers wore kaffiyehs and gold Indian jewelry.

Throughout the night, a lineup of five D.J.s played Amapiano, a jazzy, loungey style of house music that originated in South Africa, and mixed it with the flutes, tabla and buttery high-pitched vocals of Bollywood classics.

They blended Reggaeton hits like Bad Bunny, J Balvin and Mr. Eazi’s “Como Un Bebé” with Indian songs like “Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai.” They played Arabic pop songs, old-school hip-hop and raucous Jamaican dancehall before segueing into tracks by the Nigerian artist Asake.

“Enjoy the experience tonight, because look around you,” Ms. Tooray said, addressing the crowd. “It is every color. Every race. Every gender.”

During the event, the D.J.s and guests discussed their outfits, their inspirations and what brought them out to the party.

Interviews have been edited.

Malinder Tooray

D.J. at No Nazar

Tell me about your outfit. My outfit is made by a friend of ours named Rahman. He is Bengali. He started his line called Rah Drip. He upcycles sari fabric and turns them into oversized tees.

What’s inspiring your set tonight? I love my Bollywood music. But as a queer woman, I think I’m trying to portray these Bollywood songs to be seen as queer love instead of straight love.

Why did you come out tonight? I’m a big supporter of the No Nazar community and crew. I’m a D.J. who’s played their parties a few times. The movement that they’ve created, the space that they’ve created for people of color, for brown people, for marginalized people — it’s amazing, it’s beautiful and it’s grown so much.

What do you like hearing at No Nazar? I think that No Nazar truly represents the rise of global music in the nightlife world, while creating a bridge between nostalgia and what’s new. It’s a perfect blend of everything that I love right now.

How did you get dressed tonight? Every show I do, I wear something made in Pakistan or India. This shirt is by Aomi.

Why is it important to you to include a piece from India or Pakistan? I’m South Indian, I really try to represent where I come from. Also, how do I be different? I had a moment two years ago, where I needed an outfit for a show. So I went to Zara, bought a shirt and wore it to the show. Then I ran into someone at the show wearing the same shirt. And I was like: “This will never happen again.” I retired the shirt.

Tell me about how you got dressed tonight and your outfit. I’m from Brooklyn, I just like to look fly!

What inspires your style? My culture. I’m Guyanese, I’m Caribbean. I like my colors to be vibrant. I don’t like to be too dark. Green is my favorite color.

Dani Brissett

Guest D.J.

Tell me about how you got dressed tonight. I was stressing. But when it comes to my D.J. sets, I always want to have a look. DJing has helped me hone in on my personal style.

What’s the vibe for tonight? Definitely a fun and youthful energy.

Jazzmine Hawthorne and Tia Holmes

Leasing consultant; and director of product and solution management

What inspires your style?

TIA HOLMES It depends on my mood. Some days I want to be edgier, some days I feel more sophisticated. It depends on how I’m feeling that day. Today, I wanted to pretend like I was Carrie Bradshaw.

Sundeep Singh Boparai

Health care administrator

Tell me about how you got dressed tonight. I’m a queer Sikh man, and I dress androgynously. I don’t really like to fit into a masculine or feminine box. I like to just mix and match and have fun with it. I’m wearing leather pants tonight with some black heels, a crop top and a fur coat, ’cause it’s cold outside.

Omar Ahmed

D.J. at No Nazar

What inspires your style? I’ve been inspired by the cities I’ve lived in, like Atlanta and L.A. Definitely, street culture is big for me, which is why I love Rastah, because Rastah was one of the first brands I saw that was streetwear inspired by India.

Which parties or D.J.s are you inspired by? Soulection, Everyday People and Boiler Room.

Shahzad Ahsan

Business owner

Why did you come out tonight? I came out for a diaspora banger party.

Tell me about your outfit. I make clothes in Karachi using traditional South Asian textiles. So I brought out my favorite, beautiful mirror fabric blazer for this community.

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died this month in an Arctic prison, has vowed to continue her husband’s work.

Ms. Navalnaya, 47, has been less public than Mr. Navalny, seen at his side and in his documentary, but mostly steering clear of the spotlight. She was, though, an important half of a global power couple: A telegenic duo who expressed unfaltering passion for each other and for their vision of a free and democratic future for Russia. “Everyone wanted a love like theirs,” wrote Julia Ioffe in a 2021 Vanity Fair profile.

Mr. Navalny galvanized millions with his combination of intellect, good looks and a breezy, ironic wit that, even in the grimmest of circumstances, offered a primer in resisting fear and intimidation. Although terrible things happened to him, Mr. Navalny somehow managed to survive, which lent him an aura of indestructibility.

Ms. Navalnaya’s presence enhanced that aura, providing a humanizing and protective context for her husband, even when his imprisonment separated them by thousands of miles. Mr. Navalny’s public affection and frequent photo postings of his wife on Instagram were highly unusual for a politician in Russia, where wives and children have traditionally been relegated to near-invisible status. (Few ever saw the former Mrs. Putin, for example.)

By contrast, Yulia was Mr. Navalny’s obvious home base, anchoring him and embodying his hope for the future — his own personal future, and that of his native Russia. “If those in power see families as a weakness, they are mistaken,” Ms. Navalnaya once declared in a speech. “Family is the strength of any normal person — especially any real politician.”

Now, everything has changed. Mr. Navalny’s death represents not just the loss of one man, but the destruction of the couple — and by extension, the shattering of the hope and reassuring, organic wholeness that couple symbolized for many Russians.

To take up her husband’s mantle, Ms. Navalnaya has to forge a new, solo public image. What will it look like? She has already given us some clues.

Ms. Navalnaya has long been as instantly recognizable as her husband, maintaining a very consistent visual style, simple and unadorned. In nearly all photographs, her white-blond hair is pulled tightly back into a small chignon. She wears little visible jewelry aside from a tiny chain necklace, and very minimal makeup. Her clothes tend to be simply cut basics in solid, neutral colors, with tops and jackets that often feature wide, open boat neck collars.

It’s a no frills, pared-down, almost severe look, in keeping with the seriousness of her life. Yet, at the same time, it conveys an “I have nothing to hide” message — a visual analog to the Navalnys’ demand for a transparent and uncorrupt Russian government. The sweptback hair and limited makeup offer up her face completely to scrutiny, exposing every angle of it to the gaze of others. The open necklines have a similar effect, creating a wide zone of clear, uninterrupted space around her head and shoulders, allowing an unimpeded view. There’s also something faintly regal about it: Those necklines frame Ms. Navalnaya dramatically, as if she were already existing in a future portrait of herself as a queen or first lady.

In the wake of her husband’s death, Ms. Navalnaya posted a YouTube video announcing her intention to take over his work and accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of murder. You can hear her grief and anger, yet her tone remains composed. As ever, her style is spare: hair pulled back, a barely perceptible chain at her neck (its pendant tucked under her dress collar) and a dark navy dress stopping just short of black, the color of mourning. Her manicure in red offers the only visual hint at emotion below the surface.

With this, we see clearly how well Ms. Navalnaya’s style serves an additional purpose now: It helps her to smooth down any potential jagged edges that come with grief. She may be torn to shreds on the inside, but on the outside, she looks supremely self-contained. Her hair is smooth; her clothes are smooth; her color palette is uniform.

On Thursday, Ms. Navalnaya met with President Biden in San Francisco to discuss sanctions against Russia, and photos of the occasion yielded further hints about the image she may cultivate for herself going forward. At this meeting, Ms. Navalnaya looked very much the way she does in her video.

This time, though, she was not alone, but accompanied by her daughter, Dasha, a student at Stanford. Dasha looks remarkably like her mother — tall, blond and slim. Her hair, too, was pulled back, nearly exactly like her mother’s. She wore what appeared to be a navy skirt suit or dress.

From the back, the two women were virtually indistinguishable. There could be a special power in this resemblance. Yulia Navalnaya’s marriage may have been ripped from her, but she still has her children, who represent the next generation of Russia. Seeing her alongside her look-alike daughter offers a powerful reminder that Ms. Navalnaya’s struggle does not end with her or her husband.

Cherri Gervais got her first gray hairs as a teenager.

“It’s genetic,” she said.

Her hair color, a striking shade of silver, is the first thing people on TikTok noticed when she asked them to tell her how old she looked in a recent video.

The guesses ranged wildly. Many were correct, or close enough, Ms. Gervais said. (She turned 34 this month.) Other suggested she was in her 60s or 70s.

Ms. Gervais, who lives in Kansas and works for a part-time beauty company, said she had decided to post her video after coming upon similar TikToks.

“I saw someone Gen Z do it because they were saying Gen Z is aging faster,” she said, referring to a recent online theory arguing that teenagers and young adults are aging more rapidly and more visibly than their millennial counterparts.

Her video is part of a trend in which users, mostly women, ask strangers to comment on their appearances. Ms. Gervais said that many of the comments she had received were unkind.

“People told me to dye my hair, told me to get lashes, to fix my eyebrows,” she said. Several suggested that she looked like a “middle-aged mom.” “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Ms. Gervais added. “But I’m not a mom.”

Jalisa Silva-Toney, a 21-year-old social work student who lives in Point Pleasant, W.Va., also took part. “I was just curious,” she said, noting that people often get her age wrong.

Part of the reason she wanted to post her video, she said, was that she hadn’t seen many other Black women participating. She added that TikTok’s culture of constant comparison could be fueling the trend and the larger debate over her generation’s frown lines and skin elasticity.

Pri Maha, a business analyst in Atlanta, said she had asked people to guess her age in a recent TikTok video mostly out of curiosity.

“I do see content from big-time influencers who are only, like, 23, getting Botox,” Ms. Maha, 27, said. “Sometimes it does make me think, ‘Oh, should I be doing that, since I am older?’”

She added, “I feel like there is definitely a push where I see younger girls getting work done, or just trying to look as young as possible, when they are still super young.”

Not everyone was in it just for curiosity’s sake, though.

“I have pretty thick skin, and not a lot of things hurt my feelings,” said Morgan Driscoll, who works in communications at a tech company and lives in Weymouth, Mass. “I knew it was worth posting for the views.”

Because she is someone who aspires to have a large number of TikTok followers, Ms. Driscoll, 30, saw participating in the trend as a kind of business opportunity.

“I didn’t post it because I was looking for validation,” she said. “I posted it because I knew it would get engagement.”

She was right: Her video has been viewed over 100,000 times.

Most of the comments were about her eyebrows. “I have very millennial eyebrows,” Ms. Driscoll said, meaning her eyebrows are thin. She was going to get them “fixed” this week, she added, based on the TikTok feedback.

“I think the worst I got was a comment saying that my neck is getting a gobbler, which is crazy,” she added. “I mean, I just turned 30!”

But for many TikTokers, any engagement is good engagement.

“A comment is a comment,” Ms. Driscoll said. “I don’t care if they are trolls. I don’t care if they tell me I look like a toad. I just want the comments.”

Tianna James used to love looking at the photographs Dronme Davis posted of herself on Instagram. Ms. Davis, a plus-size model, included pictures from her modeling campaigns alongside selfies of her stretch-marked stomach with captions like “fat belly saggy tits Sunday.”

For Ms. James, 22, Ms. Davis’s feed was a revelation. “I wanted to feel comfortable in my body, and she was like me in so many ways, so it made it easier to be myself,” Ms. James said. “If I could find this person so beautiful, and she was bigger, I could find myself beautiful, too.”

Ms. Davis gained a following through posts that criticized diet culture as she built a career as a curve model — she wore up to a size 16 or XXL — most prominently for Dôen, a California fashion brand known for floral prairie dresses typically worn by more willowy women. Her feed was a running commentary on the unrealistic expectation to conform to a thin ideal: “A flat stomach won’t change your life” and “It’s so exhausting being afraid and ashamed of parts of ur body.”

Then, over just a few months, Ms. Davis shrank.

She still posted the artsy selfies Ms. James loved, but photos of soft belly rolls were replaced by sharp cheekbones and clavicles. She continued to write in her confessional style, sharing her feelings about everything from constipation to career insecurities. But Ms. Davis stopped posting her habitual rants against fatphobia, and she didn’t explain why or how she had lost so much weight.

To Ms. James, Ms. Davis’s silence felt like a betrayal.

“It made me feel like she was being dishonest with her community,” Ms. James said. “I don’t want to say it was owed to us, but it was such a drastic change.”

The body positive movement has recently faltered in a cultural moment where thin is back in (though some argue it never really left), thanks in part to the rise of new drugs like Ozempic that are being used for weight loss. Celebrities, models and influencers like Ms. Davis who once celebrated their curves are grappling with how to discuss their smaller bodies, while their followers feel as if they’ve abandoned the causes they used to champion: encouraging people to challenge weight stigma and to accept themselves as they are.

‘She Won’t Cop to It’

Ms. Davis said that she had long agonized over how to publicly address her weight loss. Despite what some of her followers suspected, she wasn’t on Ozempic. The truth — that she had relapsed into the disordered eating practices that she had struggled with throughout her life — was hard for her to admit, even to herself. How had she succumbed to the same pressures she had warned her nearly 100,000 followers about?

“The only thing people are going to be OK with is a very detailed explanation, which is not something I can write in a caption,” the 24-year-old said by Zoom from her bedroom in the woods in Mendocino, Calif., where she lives with her mother.

She didn’t want to beat herself up for relapsing, but she also empathized with followers like Ms. James.

“I gathered all these women to follow me because I was going to be inspiring and make them feel empowered,” Ms. Davis said. “How can I still expect their attention and support?”

Ms. Davis grew up in a small town in Northern California. She put herself on a diet by the time she was 10, after she began to develop breasts. Her weight fluctuated, but when she was thinner, she said, she could fit into the Abercrombie miniskirts that her friends wore, and teachers took her more seriously.

She was discovered through her Instagram shortly after she graduated from high school, and soon landed a job as Dôen’s first curve model. She has since modeled for much bigger brands, including Levi’s, Sephora and The North Face, but she became a familiar fixture on Dôen’s website: The designers have called her their “longtime muse” and named a pair of jeans that came in extended sizes after her.

As Ms. Davis grew up online, it felt natural to post about all the facets of her life — not just her modeling, but her racial justice activism, her artwork and her evolving relationship to her body. Looking back, she said, in her passion to share her own learning process, she unintentionally positioned herself as an expert on body acceptance when that was not the case. It was a humbling experience and part of the reason she has not yet broached her weight loss publicly.

“I’m scared of being judged or yelled at or letting people down,” she said. “Which is ironic, because I think my silence is letting people down more than me talking about it.”

Some of the people who left comments on Ms. Davis’s Instagram about her body were kind: “Worried about u … hope you are ok.” Some chastised her: “This sort of rapid and continued weight loss is concerning.” And others were cruel, calling her “sickly skinny.” When Ms. Davis started deleting comments, followers decamped to other online forums to speculate further.

“I figure it must be Ozempic like everyone else and she doesn’t want to talk about it, which is a little off brand because she’s so open about everything else,” a user wrote on Reddit.

That commenter told The New York Times that she loved Ms. Davis regardless of her size, but still expected answers. “She talks about everything,” she said. “Every pimple she has on her face, every rash she gets on her arm. So why hasn’t she mentioned this?”

“She completely altered her body, and she won’t cop to it,” said another Instagram follower in an interview. She purchased Dôen items because Ms. Davis modeled them, including her namesake jeans. “If you’re going to be out there using your body to make a living, and position yourself as a brand, and then you walk away from your brand, I think you can’t expect the community around you to not react,” she said.

‘Life Is Too Hard in This Body’

Right now, body-positive influencers who have decided to be open about losing weight have also had to navigate a community that is often disappointed and angry.

The longtime curve model Gabriella Lascano filmed a TikTok video last year about her decision to lose weight, explaining that she felt “guilty” for being part of the body-positive movement. She told The Times she hadn’t been honest about “the trials and tribulations of gaining weight and getting older.” People accused her of equating thinness with health and of producing content that could be used to “justify fatphobia.” The outrage was so intense that she removed the video.

“I think it’s strange to be so hurt when someone chooses something for themselves,” Ms. Lascano said about the criticism she received.

But influencers’ personal choices affect the community they’ve cultivated, often leaving followers, especially vulnerable young people, feeling disillusioned and adrift. Those who appear to flip-flop can cause “intense feelings of betrayal,” said Sally A. Theran, a clinical psychologist and professor at Wellesley College who has researched parasocial relationships — the one-sided ties people form with media figures and influencers — and disordered eating in adolescence.

“I think if you’re going to put yourself out there, and if you’re going to earn money, then you’re positioning yourself as a leader in this domain, and you should take responsibility for the repercussions,” Ms. Theran said.

On a recent episode of the Burnt Toast podcast covering the rise of fat influencers losing weight, Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who writes about diet culture and who has contributed to The Times, said that influencers who once promoted fat acceptance but now claim they feel healthier when they are thinner are “throwing everyone else under the bus.”

“You used the hashtags in order to grow your following in order to post your affiliate links, get your sponsor deals, all of that,” Ms. Sole-Smith said. “So now what you’re basically telling us is you co-opted all that rhetoric and you don’t believe it at all, and that is pretty gross.”

Her co-host Corinne Fay said she thought it was better for influencers to be upfront if they were using weight-loss drugs instead of vaguely claiming to be “pursuing health.”

“They don’t want to call it a diet, so it’s called a health and fitness journey,” Ms. Sole-Smith said. “That’s pretty exasperating.”

With Weight Loss Came Affirmation

Few people, if any, become body positive proponents without struggling with the same societal standards they speak out against. “I’ve seen creators say things like, ‘It’s just too hard, life is too hard, in this body,’” said Katie Sturino, a body acceptance advocate. “It can feel like betrayal, but it’s a symptom of our culture and how in our society it is still the worst thing to be fat. People are still terrified of being in a bigger body.”

Ms. Davis acknowledged that with her weight loss came affirmation — more party invitations, more attention from men. “I so badly want to be like, ‘What you look like doesn’t matter,’” she said. “But it sure does change how people treat you.”

When she relapsed, Ms. Davis convinced herself she was just trying to eat healthier and be more active. Soon though, she said, she was subsisting on rice cakes and Red Bull. When she ran into friends from the modeling world, she was forced to explain herself. (She pretended she was vegan.) Online, she could evade every question.

“Part of me was embarrassed and felt really guilty,” Ms. Davis said. “All I ever wanted to do on the internet was make women feel OK about themselves.”

Ms. Davis recently posted an Instagram video of herself posing in a bandanna top and cargo pants for a partnership with Free People. As always, she looks quirkily chic. She also looks thin.

She says she has good days and bad, but that she is trying to be more honest in conversations with friends. She often thinks of how her mother and her grandmother have also struggled with body image their entire lives.

She wants her followers to know that she meant it when she told them to reject fatphobia. “It was always coming from a place that was genuine,” she said.

But given that she is still working on her own issues — and given that she’s no longer plus size — she doesn’t feel it’s her place to advocate body positivity online.

“There was a time when I was in a body where I was experiencing fatphobia,” she said. “Now that I’m not in that body currently, I don’t think my voice is needed.”

When Ms. James first noticed that Ms. Davis had lost weight, she unfollowed her. “I just didn’t think that was good for me,” she said. But then she noticed her feeds were full of people posting their exercise and diet routines. Ms. Davis was just one of many women who were no longer proudly plus size. Ms. James re-followed her. And recently, she said, she started working out and shedding pounds herself.

“I guess weight is just as much of a trend as anything else,” Ms. James said.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett.

On Friday, just outside Palm Springs, Calif., you might have thought a strange mirage had appeared: One or two zillion tweens descended upon an arena, all wearing platform Doc Martens.

Had some official communiqué been issued, at a frequency undetectable to those older than 25? Had everyone been subconsciously nudged to pair boots with fishnets and leg warmers?

No one seemed to care that it was hot out. What did matter was that the boots, punky symbols of past musical rebellions, were central to the unofficial-but-conspicuously-official uniform of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour, which began that night.

Each recent tour by a major pop star has seemingly birthed an aesthetic microclimate that follows the artist from show to show, usually evaporating when the tour is over. Dressing up for concerts is not new — see Grateful Dead fans in their tie-dye, the ’90s Madonna fans in their regalia — but last summer’s blockbuster tours have upped the ante. Imagine showing up to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour without a cowboy hat or attending Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour without looking at least a little bit like a shimmery disco ball.

These uniforms grow out of fans’ desire to emulate their favorite artists and to visually identify with one another. Now social media gives people a chance to share and see what everyone else has been wearing. And it doesn’t hurt that e-commerce sites like Amazon and Shein make it easy to order and receive a pair of sequined, thigh-high boots in the time it takes for Beyoncé to fly from Vancouver to Seattle.

For fans of Ms. Rodrigo, the current poet laureate of adolescent vulnerability, what was the look going to be? They arrived at the first stop on her worldwide Guts Tour already dressed in startling unison.

In the parking lot before the concert, fans waited in long lines in every direction — for the merchandise truck, for V.I.P. tickets, for porta-potties — each one a slow-moving runway show. Purple was everywhere. Butterflies, too. Many followed the singer’s lead in drawing from riot grrrl and grunge fashion from the ’90s, like Lucy Elfelt, 14, who had some pointers for her mother on dressing to emulate a decade that only one of them had actually lived through.

“She was like, ‘Mom, you’re not grunge enough,’” Alicia Elfelt, 49, said. “I’m like, my hair’s purple.”

The uniform evoked femininity laced into combat boots, as if to outfit its wearer for the rugged territory of emotional catharsis. There were plenty of girlish details like bows, corsets and spangly miniskirts, but not without a chunky shoe or a swipe of sludgy eyeliner.

For some, maybe it was a reflection of Ms. Rodrigo’s ability to refashion the humiliations of adolescence into lethal songwriting weapons. “It’s like she read my diary,” Bridget Lee, 20, said of the artist’s songs about feeling naïve, embarrassed, vengeful, insecure. “Every song is literally me,” Diego Soriano, 19, said. Others say they relate to her because she is a Pisces, because she is of Filipino descent or because she gets angry about the same things they do.

“I love the way she screams,” Val Mok, 28, added. “Like, story of my life.”

Ms. Lee wore a tiered Betsey Johnson dress that she had found on the secondhand clothing app Depop, simply by searching for “Olivia Rodrigo.” She and a group of nine other superfans had been planning their outfits in a group chat for months. Did they follow those social media accounts that posted breathless updates on each new piece of tour merch? They giggled. “We are the accounts,” one said.

Many fans see Ms. Rodrigo’s fashion sense as flatteringly emblematic of Generation Z. But Tegan Astani, 18, said that some students at her arts high school thought Ms. Rodrigo was “basic.” Whose music do they listen to instead? They prefer less well-known artists, Ms. Astani said: “Have you ever heard of Led Zeppelin?”

When doors opened at 6 p.m., a parade of purple bows filtered into the arena. Natalia Adams, 20, settled into a seat between her parents, who were marveling at the youth of the crowd. Her father, Matt Adams, 58, remarked that there had been a long line for snow cones but no line to buy beer.

A few days earlier, when Ms. Rodrigo had released commemorative shot glasses for her 21st birthday, a user on X, formerly known as Twitter, responded that they had never seen an Olivia Rodrigo fan of legal drinking age: “What are they gonna take shots of…juice???” It was not too much of an exaggeration: A 7-year-old sat in the back row with her ears covered by massive purple headphones.

When fans dress alike, how does one stand out? Ms. Mok had constructed an entire outfit around the artist’s lyric “Coca-Cola bottles that I only use to curl my hair.” Ms. Astani had sewed a cheerleader outfit based on a costume in Ms. Rodrigo’s music video for “good 4 u.”

Others were perfectly happy to be dressed like everybody else, to slip into a sense of belonging that both a fandom and a dress code can afford. Sometimes the nudge comes from the top: Beyoncé went so far as to encourage fans to wear silver items on her tour. If Ms. Rodrigo did not offer such specific instructions, her Instagram posts and her pale purple merch offered hints of the kind of look she was going for.

Her fans turned out to have interpreted those clues correctly. When Ms. Rodrigo took the stage, she was wearing the same platform Doc Martens as everybody else.

“Did anybody dress up?” she asked a screaming crowd.

“The Independent Spirit Awards, where the dress code is, get dressed,” said John Mulaney during his bit at the 2018 show, which he co-hosted along with comedian Nick Kroll.

This year, “Saturday Night Live” alum Aidy Bryant is hosting the Indie Spirit’s 39th annual show, which is being live-streamed, with a presenter list that included Joel Kim Booster, Greta Lee, Jude Law, Colman Domingo and Emma Corrin. There are substantial differences between these awards and the rest of the seasonal intake of trophies this time of year — including, for the second year, all acting categories are gender-neutral — but last year “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won best picture awards at both the Oscars and the Indie Spirits.

Held in broad daylight in a tent on a beach in Santa Monica, the show has always been presented as the looser, hipper distant cousin of the Oscars — the outfits could also be somewhat described the same way. Due to the time of day it’s held (2 p.m. PST), this is one place during awards season when the industry can kick off its heels, leave the evening gowns at home and show off its casual wares, which has the potential for interesting style choices. Here are some of the best ones.