When the pandemic began, Rose moved from her university dorms back in with her family in Orange County in the US state of California. As cases climbed in September, she wondered: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own social distancing bubble?”

She had plenty of pink tulle on hand, and besides, wouldn’t it be fun to make a dress with a six-foot (1.83 metre) radius?

“Virality is really just what people want to see,” Rose said. “For me, it’s making the stuff that I’m curious about and the stuff that I want to make. Usually people want to see it too.”

“But in the end, it’s just like: if you make stuff that you’re curious about, there’s usually a niche for it,” Rose said. “Other people are curious about it too.”

The dress was so enormous (3.7 metres in diameter) that she had to work on it outside. The design breaks down into two pieces, the bodice and the base; the latter includes a PVC grid for the dress to sit on, complete with wheels.

“There’s no way it can fit through a door, so it’s in no way ever going to be practical,” Rose said. “But my idea behind it was just that question of, ‘Oh, what if? Would this even work? What would it look like?’”

The short answer: yes. It would work, after countless attempts at making the base stable enough to stop caving in. And it would look like something out of a 2020 fairy tale, a billowing, bubble-gum-pink gown with a mask to match.

The communication studies major is a digital native. She’s spending quarantine at home, where she balanced part of her last year of school with a six-month internship at TikTok, which she recently finished during finals week. In other words, she understands the ins and outs of the internet.

“Whenever you know a platform and you love a platform,” she said, “it’s so easy to be passionate and love to go to work every day.”

Her first cosplay was a happy accident: in eighth grade, she dressed as a character from the novel series The Lunar Chronicles to attend a book signing – without realising that it was cosplay, or performance art through dressing as a character. In 2015, she re-created Anna’s coronation dress from Frozen using what she had around the house: her brother’s old curtains and gold Christmas ribbon.

“It was basically like a puzzle … to figure out: ‘How do I make this thing work?’” her mum said. (The mother did not want to be identified, an effort to help her daughter maintain a bit more anonymity on the internet.) “I kept telling her, ‘They have patterns. You could just buy a pattern; it’d be so easy.’ ‘No, Mum. No, Mum. This is not how I do it. I’m gonna figure it out myself.’ And she taught herself how to sew.”

From there, Rose grew a following first on cosplay forums, then on Instagram dressing as everyone from Deku (from manga series My Hero Academia) and White Diamond (from cartoon series Steven Universe) to Disney princess Belle.

“But I don’t consider my main account, @crescentshay, to be a cosplay account because there’s so much more to cosplay than just making a costume and putting it on,” Rose said. “It’s a really, really tight-knit community.” She amassed a sizeable following, mostly among the cosplay community she came up through. In August of last year, her main @crescentshay Instagram account had 41,500 followers.

Want to socially distance in style? This dress has a two-metre perimeter

Then she joined TikTok last summer, and her first viral project – Beauty and the Beast-inspired shoes – took off “when TikTok was a baby”, Rose said. “It was before TikTok was cool.”

“I had been doing this whole crafting thing online for a while, but it had never really taken off in the mainstream,” Rose said. “And then all of a sudden, it wasn’t just me and my cosplay friends watching my stuff; it was everyone.” After the Disney shoes, her following more than doubled in a month.

When she went viral on TikTok, she became the only cosplayer some users followed. They followed her expecting more mainstream design or crafting and were bewildered by her cosplay content. This sparked a “bit of a life crisis”. Between October 2019 and January 2020, she lost almost 10,000 followers.

After reaching more than half a million followers on Instagram and 2.7 million on TikTok, Rose has separated her main from her “side” account (which still boasts 11,800 followers). There, she posts more personal updates: herself, her friends, her aerial acrobatics hobby and her cosplay looks.

“That divide really helped me, because it’s hard to put yourself online,” Rose said. “And in this way, I have created a little bit of a separation between my art and myself. You try your best not to care. But numbers hurt. And it’s weird when it doesn’t just feel like people don’t like your work but they don’t like you.”

Rose leans perhaps the most heavily on the shoulder of her therapist. She “lucked out”, she said, by starting therapy about half a year before her first viral moment. In fact, she ducked out of this interview for a moment to reschedule an appointment.

“Every week, I would talk to my therapist and be like, ‘This is going viral. And I feel really terrible,’” Rose said. “It’s cool to have someone that you trust, that’s level-headed, to be like, ‘Why does this matter?’ And to ground you again.”

Now, with a handful of viral creations under her belt, Rose has built up a support system: friends, family, colleagues and connections in the digital media industry. Her No 1 supporter? Her mum, who also photographs most of Rose’s projects.

“I feel so much more comfortable doing the shoot with her, because behind the camera, she’s always like, ‘Go! You look beautiful!’” Rose said. “Like, ‘Oh, my gosh, stunning! Do a twirl!’ It’s so funny because I edit through all the audio of the video she takes, and it’s all her just shouting encouragement.”

Rose’s mother and father, who sometimes plays a supporting role in her work, approve of her side hustle. As a university senior, Rose’s last six months of classes have gone virtual, so – like many others in her situation – she has moved back in with her family, which is part Iranian, part Chinese and part Lithuanian.

Her parents also support her post-graduation plan: to try out being a full-time content creator and artist, at least for a year. Rose knows herself, she said, and knows she can hustle her way back into the corporate world if need be.

“I’m a realist enough to the point where I don’t know if this is going to be a forever thing,” she said. “And I’m always keeping my options open to come back to a more stable job. But I know I’d regret it if I didn’t try it.”