It’s March 2015 and a bombshell has hit the world of pop: Zayn Malik is leaving One Direction. Fans, everywhere, are in crisis. Within an hour of the announcement #AlwaysInOurHeartsZaynMalik is trending worldwide on Twitter. Some claim to be in despair, crying at school, in cars, in toilets. What will happen to their favourite band now?
Although Yve Blake, who was 22 at the time, never identified as a Directioner, she remembers Malik’s departure from the band feeling cataclysmic. “It penetrated everything,” she says. She followed the story closely, watching the outcries of trauma and upset from a distance. She soon started to notice something else, however. “Even the mainstream news outlets were using really specific kinds of adjectives to describe the fans, who were obviously assumed to be young women,” she recalls. “They were ‘crazy’ and ‘over the top’, ‘desperate’, ‘psycho’, ‘pathetic’, ‘a bit much’.”
