Arielle Charnas, the New York City fashion influencer who inspired thousands of Reddit snark posts, has broken her silence after a wild few recent years, when her apparel brand failed and rumors about the state of her marriage spread widely online.
If you need a refresher, Charnas is one of the most successful examples of the first wave of fashion bloggers. She started Something Navy on Blogspot in 2009 and over the next decade built a loyal and dedicated audience of more than 1 million Instagram followers who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the leggings and sweaters she recommended. In 2018, she made the dream influencer turn — shifting from promoting other brands to selling her own, when she became one of the first influencers to launch a licensed clothing collection with Nordstrom. The line was so popular that in 2019, she spun it out from Nordstrom, raised money, and hired a CEO to expand the line and open stores.
But her bougie mom brand soon became a magnet for critics. In the early months of the pandemic, Charnas became a Daily Mail character when she posted about leaving Manhattan for the Hamptons after managing to secure a then-rare COVID-19 test. She later apologized “to those we have offended for not appearing to [take] this grave crisis seriously.” But the incident tainted her reputation and introduced her to a wider audience eager to call out privileged digital celebrities. Then Charnas faced rumors that her marriage with Brandon Charnas, who was also her business partner in Something Navy, was in jeopardy. In 2022, online commenters speculated that Brandon had embezzled money from Something Navy and that the couple were headed for divorce. It didn’t help that he was investigated for possible insider trading last year.
Then there were the growing problems within Something Navy. After what seemed like a strong launch, it struggled to live up to its sky-high expectations. Reports emerged that the company was burning cash. In 2023, Something Navy closed stores and laid off staff, and Charnas stopped wearing the clothes on Instagram. When the brand finally shut down in August, she described the pause as a “mini-hiatus” as she looked for new partners.
Charnas never fully left social media during this tumultuous period, posting frequently about her outfits and her Upper East Side life as a mom of three small kids. (Her third daughter, born in 2021, is named Navy.) Still, Charnas declined interview requests from the press and did not address her future career plans. That is, until last week, when she launched a Substack and started sending daily missives to what is already more than 8,000 subscribers. “I’m here today because my focus is not to rebuild a clothing brand but to go back to my grassroots,” she wrote in her first entry. “To go back to where I started to remember why I started. Because that was and is the only time I feel happy doing what I ‘do.’” Charnas said her brand “was eventually run into the ground” by her CEO, Naadam founder Matt Scanlan, whom she did not name. “I’m left alone to pick up the pieces of this special brand I’ve built over the last 15 years because of the mistakes I’ve made and the people I’ve let in to my world,” she wrote.
When reached for comment, Scanlan wrote in an email, “I am happy to see Arielle doing well, I think she will be successful at whatever she chooses to do and I wish her nothing but the best for all future endeavors.”
In another one of her recent newsletters, Charnas denied any and all rumors about her marriage woes. She also accused various unnamed publications of sharing “lies upon lies” about her family for “clicks” and implied that she may never speak to a journalist again. “I’ve come to realize over the years that no where is safe to share publicly,” she wrote. “I was told yesterday that me starting a substack is buzzing around. And then all of a sudden I started getting inbound inquiries from all the publications that trashed me and my family over the years asking to profile and feature me. Share my story. I think they think I’m dumb.” (Still, I asked her to comment for this article, as we always do, and will update if she responds. I first reached out to her in February, when I heard she no longer had a publicist, which should have been my first clue she had sworn off talking to the press.)
In joining Substack, Charnas follows a number of other influencers who, after years of ambitiously exploring ways to turn their online fame into stable, lucrative businesses, have scaled down and launched personal newsletters that free them from the whims of Instagram’s algorithm and weed out online critics. Former Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine started a Substack on personal style in 2021 that now counts more than 100,000 subscribers. Like Charnas, Medine was a successful early blogger turned influencer who, in the 2010s, expanded her personal brand into product lines and an influential mini-media company. In 2020, she stepped down from Man Repeller after former employees described the company as a toxic workplace, particularly for people of color. But even before that reckoning, Medine struggled to build a business that was larger than herself. By contrast, today’s successful newsletters can be relatively simple — they don’t require fancy photoshoots or large support teams. Charnas writes that for the first time in years, she doesn’t have an assistant at the moment, so she relies on her husband to take pictures of her outfits.
Charnas’s first week of Substack posts was free to read, but her most recent release on Monday requires a paid subscription to access ($5 a month). “I have put up a paywall in order to keep it a tighter community that feels safer,” Charnas wrote on Instagram on Monday, explaining that she is “setting some boundaries” to ensure her personal essays reach only “my most loyal and dedicated followers in that world.”