In recent weeks, Bethenny Frankel has been talking a lot about Dior bags on TikTok. The topic itself is not unusual: As a reality TV star and entrepreneur, she regularly posts about fashion topics for her 2.4 million followers, including in an article Ms. Frankel calls “Handbag University,” where she offers reviews and tutorials .
But the tone of Ms. Frankel’s posts about Dior is strikingly different from that of a typical conversation about luxury goods. Less Vogue and more Jason Bourne.
In a message on Mondaysuggested to Ms. Frankel that there was a cover-up at play.
“I have received several Dior bag videos and reports of sightings that are clearly not being reported in the mainstream media,” she said.
The day before, Ms. Frankel said she had spoken to an unnamed source about the Dior bag situation, and that this person — the father of someone Ms. Frankel knows — had passed along top secret intelligence.
“If our government is trying to tell us that they come from China, that these bags come from China, that we have a problem,” Ms. Frankel said cryptically, repeating what her source had told her, “it would be. very alarming.”
Confusion would be understandable for someone who only comes across one of the videos, but if you watch enough of them, you’ll realize that “Dior bags” aren’t always Dior bags. In this case, Ms. Frankel uses the term to refer to the drones that have been reported flying in the skies over the eastern United States and elsewhere.
Who else but a fashion obsessive would use a French luxury label as a code word?
“It happened right now — it wasn’t planned at all,” Ms. Frankel said in a telephone interview. “I was like, ‘The Dior bags are real, they’re in the closet and management doesn’t want us to know about them.'”
Several government agencies have said that the sightings are largely not drones, and a visual analysis by The New York Times indicated that most of the sightings over New Jersey were aircraft rather than drones.
That hasn’t been enough to convince Ms. Frankel.
She said she initially had only marginal interest in the story. Then someone she knows whose father has access to some sort of inside information — and whom she refers to only as “Waterhammer” — contacted her with a theory explaining the drone sightings. Ms. Frankel posted about it on TikTok in the days before Christmas. But while her posts typically get millions of views, she said, the handful of posts where she talked about drones got “500 views.”
TikTok creators have long complained that the reach of videos has been limited because they touched on topics the platform didn’t like: “shadow banning,” as the alleged practice has become known. It is difficult to prove that TikTok is suppressing content, but Ms. Frankel started talking about Dior bags instead of drones in an attempt to circumvent algorithms and strict content moderation. Such a distraction technique is called ‘algospeech’.
Ms. Frankel’s fashionable way of talking in code has caught on. The reality TV star, her followers and others who want to discuss and theorize the drone phenomenon on social media have created an alternative lexicon around shopping terminology. “Store management” for this group is the US government; Oscar de la Renta’s products are the shiny objects that some claim have been spotted in the sky; and Prada items are plasmoids, or structures made of plasma and magnetic fields.
Oddly enough, the largely male audience that listens to podcasters like Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, have also adopted the term and used the hashtag #diorbags in their own videos.
“There were truck drivers in skull caps and guys on oil rigs talking about Dior bags,” Ms. Frankel laughed.
One group that apparently doesn’t talk about it is Christian Dior SE, the French company behind the Dior brand. Her representatives did not return a request for comment.
Ms. Frankel hasn’t heard from Dior either, although she wouldn’t be surprised if that happened, as the company may not want its name associated with an online community sharing wild theories about the drones.
“I can’t believe the Dior company hasn’t called me at this point,” Ms. Frankel said. She clarified: “We are not angry with Dior. This is exactly what I used.”
The conversation around ‘Dior bags’ is taking place at a time when another discussion about handbags is dominating social media: the look-alike Birkin bag sold at Walmart.
For anyone unfamiliar with algospeak, a conversation about real handbags can suddenly lead to confusion. Recently, Ms. Frankel posted about “why the Walmart Birkin is fascinating.” She quickly clarified: “And this is rightly about bags – it’s not code.”
