[imagesource: YouTube / VICE]

Have you ever heard of the so-called Leeds 13?

Likely not, but for a brief period, they were the talk of the United Kingdom and eventually further afield.

Pretending to lead a glamorous life on social media is basically par for the course these days but it was a different story in 1998.

If you wanted to pull the wool over people’s eyes and make it appear as though you had enjoyed a foreign holiday while actually sitting at home, you needed to be creative.

The Leeds 13 were just that and their story is now being revisited by VICE:

It was the story that outraged Middle England. 13 art students claimed they took a grant, spent it on holiday in Spain, and then had the audacity to call their escapade ‘art’.

As planned, the press went after the students – writing column inches after column inches of righteous indignation. The students’ sunny snaps were printed in nearly every newspaper, and their motivations were interrogated on the evening news.

Except, this is exactly what the students wanted: the media-feeding frenzy was, in fact, the result of an elaborate and skillfully executed hoax.

They had actually been in hiding for a week, faking photos and postcards and making props.

When that part of the tale emerged, the story only grew bigger and the all-powerful British tabloid media was left red-faced.

Multiple influencers have been accused of faking their travel images and lying to their followers. Long before the term ‘influencer’ was popularised, these students turned the table on the press:

[source:vice]