Unmasking the true identity of Instagram star Patti Pink Cake
She’s a social media sensation, known for her eclectic wardrobe choices and famous following. But who really is Patti Pink Cake?
Stellar
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With a smile as big as her sunnies (and that’s saying something), Instagram sensation Patti Pink Cake delivers a video report about her eclectic wardrobe choices each day, attracting famous fans and aspiring fashionistas alike. But is there more to this phenomenon than a gigantic collection of scarves, handbags and open-front blazers? Stellar sends intrepid journalist Joe Hildebrand on a cappuccino run to find out – while also arranging an exclusive photo shoot with the social-media superstar herself.
I have been asking questions my whole life. For the past quarter century, it has been my job. But never did I think I would have to ask this question: who is Patti Pink Cake? This is exactly what I asked my editor when he called me to do this story, and it is also exactly what many of you reading this are asking right now. And to be honest, I still don’t know the answer. All I know is that I love her.
Patti Pink Cake is a phenomenon, but even she is not sure why. She’s a retired lawyer who lives in a harbourside Sydney suburb so ridiculously luxe that half its news outlets are satirical – and who accidentally became a global sensation. It all started when a friend mentioned she’d taken a picture of her, and Patti asked how she could see it. The friend replied with perhaps the two most fateful words of her life: on Instagram.
“I’d never heard of Instagram,” Patti tells me as we take a seat at her local cafe. “So then I had to join Instagram and create a fake name because I didn’t use my own name for obvious reasons.” And so Patti Pink Cake was born. “I had 4000 followers at the beginning of last year and I would post pictures of my handbags, my scarves, my hydrangeas, my camellias, a kookaburra,” she explains. “And then I was down at the park during all that rain and I pulled out a raincoat that my late mother had and I thought, I’ll see what I look like.”
The raincoat video Patti posted, and the ones that followed, would turn her 4000 followers into 40,000, and while that’s hardly phenomenal in Insta-land, what is phenomenal is how, well, un-phenomenal these posts are. Each one simply shows Patti wearing a new outfit for another day of shopping or cafe hopping (she infamously seeks out cappuccinos). Or, just as likely, she is checking out the weather while hanging out at the park (she really likes the park).
Curiously, as endless as her designer wardrobe appears to be, Patti doesn’t seem to follow any trends, mixing and matching vintage and current pieces. She relishes pops of colour, florals and patterns, which is why her Stellar photo shoot is so striking in its subtlety. “Anyone who knows me knows I love fashion,” Patti says. “Every outfit is a deliberate consideration. What fun to put myself in the hands of the Stellar team and experience how they interpret my style.”
That style has attracted fans all over the world, including Kylie Minogue, Sam Smith, Saturday Night Live comedian Chloe Fineman, and British TV stars Alan Carr and Amanda Holden (whose video impersonation of Patti went stratospheric). They all can’t get enough of Patti’s sartorial stories, perhaps because there is something about the posts that is utterly hypnotic.
Patti Pink Cake is so Sydney, she is almost too Sydney to be true. She says such incredibly banal things with such a devilish twinkle in her eye that it is impossible to gauge what she is thinking. Is she serious? Is she satire? Are we meant to laugh at her? Is she laughing at us? She is like suburban Australia’s answer to the Mona Lisa.
And so, finally, I get to ask her: who is Patti Pink Cake? “That’s really difficult,” she says. “It’s not me … and it is.” So far, so obscure. She hasn’t even ordered a cappuccino, and instead opted for a pot of tea. But it’s not deliberate obfuscation, and it’s also clear that Patti Pink Cake isn’t just an act. “I’ve always loved fashion and I’ve been shopping forever. I love the beautiful clothes and beautiful things and I’ve amassed a very large collection of stuff,” she says.
Fair enough. But the Patti on Instagram is the personification of superficial vapidity (sun = good, rain = bad, pink = happy) while the Patti in front of me is one of the smartest and funniest people I’ve met. She even tells me off for following her: “It’s not for you!”
So it is here that I have to pull the curtain back on Patti Pink Cake, which I really don’t want to do because it’s a big and beautiful curtain that probably has fuchsias on it. But I have to because I think she wants me to. I suspect the reason she is doing this interview is in response to a message she got from a wealthy woman in WA: “It’s a shame,” it said tartly, “that someone your age doesn’t do more good in the world.” This clearly pissed her off, because the woman before me seems to have devoted so much of her life to doing good.
Yes, she is a retired lawyer, but what I didn’t say is that her whole career was spent working for Legal Aid and other efforts to defend the homeless, poor and unsupported. She fumes – with great poise – as she recounts holding the hand of someone withdrawing from heroin; paying for a woman living in a toilet block to get back to her family; getting pulled over by the cops for driving a client home to the badlands in her Mercedes-Benz. She sums it up neatly, “Thirty-six years of working for refugees, the Indigenous, the mentally ill, the poorest of the poor, for money and no money.”
And that’s when I realise that Patti Pink Cake isn’t an act: it’s an alter ego. She’s a superhero with two opposite identities that make up the whole. “If you’ve come from a world of being rung up at 7.30am by a schizophrenic wanting bail because he’s done 18 break-and-enters, and then you want to talk about a Gucci scarf, there’s a bit of a difference,” she says.
The truth is, the whole time I’ve been talking to Patti Pink Cake, I’ve also been talking to Patricia Lyden, a veteran legal gun who trained herself to memorise entire legal briefs so she could stand before a judge and never look down, and then leaves people awestruck when she can enumerate the qualities of a lipstick. The truth is that most of our conversation has been about the machinations of politics and the primacy of service to the poor and disenfranchised. “You do it. It’s your job. It’s what you’re here for,” she says with the conviction of a firebrand preacher.
We could talk forever, but the problem is I’ve already got too much. Besides, she needs to nip over to Max Mara to buy a woollen weekend coat in peony. Rest assured, Patti Pink Cake is very, very real.
Originally published as Unmasking the true identity of Instagram star Patti Pink Cake
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