Caroline Calloway’s Final Days in Her West Village Studio

Caroline and her cat Matisse.
Photo: Lily Burgess

“This is my whole 20s,” Caroline Calloway tells me wistfully, gesturing around her messy burnt-sage-scented West Village apartment, littered with plant dirt, wine bottles, flower petals, dozens of matchboxes inscribed with her name, and, in an odd gesture toward conventional orderliness, a color-coded closet. Caroline turned 30 in December, and, like many manically charismatic young people who schmooze and shitshow their way through New York right out of college, she has decided it’s time to pull back, take stock, and — at least for now — leave town. In other words, good-bye to all that clout-chasing. As such, she was hosting a series of not-quite-dinner parties in her studio apartment, the seat of her reign of shamelessness for the past decade (for as long as she’s had an Instagram), and mostly inviting other members of the status-thirsty-monde, many of whom, like her, are young women without boundaries.

Maybe you know this apartment, which is in an unremarkable 55-unit 1960’s building, from her social media, or have been invited to one of these “salons” yourself. For years she has DM’d writers, artists, influencers and anyone with something to offer to come over so she could hold forth.

Calloway is, of course, internet famous for being internet famous. (Her Wikipedia entry describes her this way: “Caroline Gotschall Calloway is an American internet celebrity known for posting Instagram photos with long captions.”) Then she became even more famous for being betrayed — or possibly just described — by her ex-best friend Natalie Beach, who wrote a tell-all essay in 2019 about their relationship for the Cut, taking partial credit for her influencer success. At the time Beach’s piece came out, I was new to New York and didn’t understand why I was supposed to care about these two Instagram girls and their melodramatic friendship meltdown. But soon enough, her mess roped me in too. That she became an object of trollish fixation on Reddit seemed to prove she was for some reason significant culturally and therefore worthy of my attention, if for no better reason than that she was attracting that of so many others. Or so I told myself. But she was undeniably entertaining.

I first met Caroline in person last summer, when I followed her around for a story at a party at Russian Samovar. Unsurprisingly, she was an excellent person to party with — determined to have a good time, she brought genuine smiles to the faces of those around her. That party (and her being in New York again) was…