Emma Chamberlain has lived a hundred lives on the internet—YouTube icon, fashion fixture, podcast host…the list goes on. But after years of existential whiplash, she’s finally figured out who she wants to be. Wonderland presents our Spring 25 issue.

Without the screen separating us, Emma Chamberlain’s spit might have hit me squarely in the face. 

The famously expressive 23-year-old is impassioned. Emma is talking boundaries, a subject with which she has only recently become familiar, her saliva pooling as she soliloquises at a breathless crescendo. 

“The audience is always going to say, ‘You owe us an explanation, you owe us exactly what happened.’ The truth is that’s not true,” she says. “I’m, by nature, a people pleaser…I just want to do what people ask of me. And unfortunately, you cannot be like that on the internet, because you’ll get bulldozed.” 

She swallows, hard. It’s a tough pill. 

Were I even slightly saliva-phobic, there would be 15 million others thirsting to take my place. For context: that’s a fanbase nearly five times the population of Los Angeles—the adopted hometown of the native Californian—accrued over seven years of making the ordinary extraordinary. For nearly a decade, they have watched Emma Chamberlain shower. They have watched her shop. They have watched her paint, bake, drum, decorate. They have eaten alongside her, fallen asleep next to her, grown up with her. 

“There is an art to making the mundane interesting,” Emma says now. But when even everything in content, when do you put the camera down? 

That was the multi-million dollar question two years ago, when I first interviewed Emma Chamberlain. She was just 21, and immensely admired. The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz had written that Emma was “the Most Important YouTuber Today,” and The New York Timesopined her “the funniest person” on the platform. Cosmopolitan declared her “the most popular girl in the world,” on a 2020 cover. 

Back then, Emma admitted to me that she was already jaded. With little distinction between which parts of her life were up for mass consumption and which were hers to own, Emma’s days took on a distinct Truman Show-quality. And so she retreated—seeking refuge, perhaps counterintuitively, in the trappings of traditional celebrity culture. 

“I was so overwhelmed. I was so exhausted. I was so chronically burnt out. I was so scared. I was like, all [my creative] stuff is not working, but I need to maintain my career one way or another—I need to try to immerse myself into celebrity culture. Also, too, isn’t this the northern star? Isn’t this what we’re all striving for in this industry?”

Overnight, Emma Chamberlain was more visible than ever before—this time, though, through someone else’s lens. She graced more red carpets than fans could keep up with; creating viral vignettes on the Met Gala red carpet one week, and front row at fashion week in Milan or Paris the next. The incoming opportunities became overwhelming. She designed her own collections for Levis and Warby Parker, fronted campaigns for Cartier, Canon and Beats by Dre’s cosmic-colored earbuds. Luxury and legacy brands alike cosied up to Emma Chamberlain as ultimate conduit to the youth. The problem was, the higher she flew, the further she drifted from her old life. 

“I was doing all this stuff that I feel like I should be doing, [but] it left me no time to actually create output for my audience, and I felt it slipping, but I was like, ‘There’s nothing I can do’. My job is to be an entertainer, not to be a billboard.”

The dissonance between her projected persona and authentic self began to seep into her creative output. Her now-deleted YouTube videos took on a slow, melancholic rhythm—gone were her stream-of-conscious monologues, and signature sense of humor; there were no quick Zooms or hot takes that had endeared her to millions. Instead, they documented a sombre Emma moving through her daily life in silence.

“I was going through a tough time,” she says, reflecting on her creative output. “My relationship to YouTube has been very challenging because the foundation of my career was built on an output that I could not sustain. I was not making those videos for the sake of entertainment.”This content also seemed intentionally non-provocative—palatable to just about any audience. Emma acknowledges that during this time, she may have been creatively stifled by cancel culture, watching with unease as the comment section turned into a bloodbath, pitchforks raised against so many of her peers.

“[Cancel culture] changed my brain chemistry. For so long, I just did not know what to do,” Emma explains. “I was completely paralysed, becoming more of a perfectionist than I’ve ever been before—having panic attacks all the time, just being tortured by this.”

On her solo podcast, Anything Goes, Emma is newly confident. Several years ago, she couldn’t imagine being as “controversial” as she is now—recently, for example, launching into a diatribe on the celebrity landscape (her thoughts: we’re overstimulated by our over access to the elite on social media). The show, currently her favourite creative project, recently surpassed 100 million Spotify streams. Clearly, the candour is resonating. 

“I still have a lot of experimenting to do, but I feel back and I think the podcast is the perfect example of that,” she says. “I think it was really hard for me to see for a minute, which was also hard for me to talk about because I knew I sounded like a douchebag. ‘Emma, you’re making great money. You can support yourself. Shut the fuck up. What are you talking about, you’re unhappy?’ But it was true. And all I know how to do is tell the truth.” “I think she is deeply delusional and has extreme imposter syndrome,” says her longtime best friend, actor, comedian and fellow podcaster Owen Thiele, half-joking. “It’s what makes her so charming and relatable but she needs to seek help. Immediately.”

On the rare occasions Emma pauses, she chews pensively on a mint-flavoured toothpick. It’s her latest “oral fixation,” she says—something Dr. Google claims can help to regulate one’s emotions. 

Recently, a pattern has emerged in pop culture where comebacks now feel more like homecomings. The final track from Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Weeknd’s first project in five years, blends seamlessly into the first song from the artist’s debut mixtape, House of Balloons. Beyoncé, a Houston girl, finally won Album of the Year at the Grammys—not for Pop or R&B, but a Country album. Two decades after The Simple Life concluded, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie have reunited on screen. Eternally on-trend, Emma Chamberlain has also returned to roots with renewed fervour. Anything Goes is now on YouTube—Emma speaking to camera like the early days, prompted only by her own thoughts. She’s also overhauled her vlogging output, inviting voyeurism via intimate show-and-tell style videos that feel new and nostalgic, all at once. 

The pivot is an example of her innate drive to create, nurtured by her father, Michael. “I remember telling her to always be authentic, and keep going,” he says. “That was my advice, then and now.” 

South of San Francisco, where Emma grew up, the pair spent their days drawing on a magna doodle board together and making up dance routines. Later on, Michael noticed her unique understanding of timing and storytelling, encouraging her to experiment with video as a creative outlet in high school. By her senior year, Emma had left her all-girls Catholic to move to Los Angeles and pursue YouTube full-time (she ultimately received her high school diploma with the Class of 2024). “Her sudden fame was exciting but extremely difficult in the beginning,” Michael remembers. “As parents, her mom and I were concerned for her mental and physical well being first and foremost. There isn’t a lot of information out there on how to navigate fame in a healthy way.”

On a recent episode of Anything Goes, Emma unraveled her first heartbreak during that era, sending not only fans, but fellow YouTubers rummaging for the red string. “I’m not going to elaborate,” she says. “I give you the amount of information I’m going to give you, and that’s what you get.” (Cue: spit).

Whenever Emma feels the end is nigh, she thinks of Kim Kardashian, who continues to reinvent herself and “raise the bar” despite relentless critique. Now, Emma Chamberlain rivals Kim in professional titles: creator, podcast host, influencer, designer, red carpet reporter, founder and co-CEO of Chamberlain Coffee—opening its first brick-and-mortar location in Century City this month. The café has had lines out the door morning and night since opening. She has been approached to produce an album (she politely declined), and has been auditioning for acting roles for the past year. 

“I have been sort of working on it over the last year, so I do feel like it wouldn’t be completely irresponsible for me to step on set. I actually do think I’m ready. But trust me, that shit happens. I will literally tell the fucking director on day one, ‘If I suck, fire me…No hard feelings.’”

Initially, Emma worried she would experience what she describes as ‘self-nepotism’ benefits—that is, her parents don’t have any connection to the entertainment industry, but she certainly does. 

“No one’s hired me, so we’re good,” she laughs, invoking third person: “Emma has not gotten a role yet.” “I’ve always encouraged her to give herself a break and not be so hard on herself,” adds Michael. “It’s just who she is.”

But holding herself to impossibly high standards is Chamberlain’s raison d’etre. The last time we spoke, the entertainer intimated she’d become obsessed with perfection: moral, physical, emotional. Coming close seems to have called for some trial and error. Her hair colour has oscillated chiaro-scuro more times than anyone can count, eventually settling into a cropped blonde mop that vaguely resembles her baby picture (homecoming theory at play?). Her style has alloyed androgyny with sensuality for a more mature look. And an essential edit to her support system, means it’s now smaller and more solid than ever before. “Emma is the internet’s best friend—she’s always been so honest and open in every aspect of her career that, when it came to her social life, I think she swung the opposite way,” says Owen Thiele.

Emma Chamberlain’s most significant evolution may be breaking free from the shackles of her own relatability. Most of her audience will never don new-season Miu Miu or mingle with the Kardashians, but she’s done marinating in their imagined resentment for her for doing so. It’s been Emma vs. Emma for too long, and she’s tired of being her own adversary. “I felt a lot of guilt,” she says. “[Like] I’m betraying my audience because they built me up because I was this normal girl and then I became not really as much of a normal girl, and I probably shouldn’t enjoy this. But now I’m like, that’s ridiculous. I can enjoy it. I should enjoy it. No one wants to see you hate your lovely life.”

In lieu of perfection, the multihyphenate is now prioritising positivity. It may sound trite, but the entertainer has become significantly more earnest recently.

Still, Emma hasn’t lost her edge. In fact, she’s rediscovered it—approaching content, collaborations, red carpets, hell, coffee, even, with the same singularity that made her famous. Everyone say welcome back to Emma Chamberlain, the spitfire. 

“What drives me is when I’m entertaining people and I’m telling stories and I’m being honest in one way or another…It’s such a fucking relief to update you in a positive light. It’s a joy.” 

There’s a screen separating us, but I don’t notice. For a moment, I abandon all cynicism and buy into the same belief as 15 million others. It’s just her and I—and I’m friends with Emma Chamberlain.

Don’t miss our video with Emma where she roasts her past looks and eras:

Photography by Ellen von Unwerth
Styling by Jared Ellner
Interview by Beatrice Hazlehurst
Words by Beatrice Hazlehurst
Hair by Sami Knight at A-Frame Agency
Make-up by Loftjet at Forward Artists using MCoBeauty
Nails by Thuy Nguyen at A-Frame Agency
Set Design by Walter Barnett 
Creative Producer for EVU Erica Cornwall
Digitech Äremis
Photography Assistants Todd Weaver, Ian Cush 
Fashion Assistant Brooke Figler
Hair Assistants Allie Ellis, Walter Macklin
Make-up Assistant Vittoria Naify 
Post Production Ovidiu Oltean 
Videography by Robert Marerro
Videography Assistant Drake Hackney
Location Milk Studios