A dispute between the Belgian fashion designer Benjamin Voortmans and K-pop star Jisoo of Blackpink over loaned clothes for a photo shoot magnified what happens when fandoms support their celebrities.

The designer behind the Judassime label called out the 31-year-old musician earlier this week due to designs that her team had borrowed several months ago had not yet been returned. Voortmans said he flagged her name initially “because she was the boss of the whole thing. Of course, I did not know everybody on the team. And the response was not clear for months and months. A lot of designers were part of it.”

Voortmans soon backpedaled the situation with a video post explaining that he had named her to get a reaction from her team and that he “never intended to attack her.”

The Antwerp-based designer, who started his company in 2020, initially agreed to interview with WWD on Tuesday, but then declined, saying that the situation was being resolved.

He said via Instagram that he wanted “to make clear that I like Jisoo,” and that he does not “condone any hate online whatsoever.” Voortmans told his followers that Jisoo’s team had gotten back to him and “everything was getting fixed. So we are happy about that. In the first place, I don’t think that I ever wanted to have hate for her whatsoever. I love what she does and what she stands for. I would never be here to just hate on someone and just try to get clout.”

With 80 million followers on Instagram alone, Jisoo inevitably has millions of ardent fans. Voortmans said on social media, “This is just a really big misunderstanding between me or the fans, online, I guess.”

Media requests to Andrew Mukamal, Kim Youngjin, and representatives for Jeong Yun Kee, three stylists who have each worked with the K-pop star, were not returned.

The backlash that Voortmans faced was not a shock to Susan Kresnicka, founder and president of KR&I and its specialty division, The Fandom Institute. She said, “This a very powerful case of understanding the power of fans and fandom. There’s no doubt in my mind, especially these days, that fans are aware of the power that they hold and they will wield it to defend their beloveds.”

Parasocial relationships — one-sided devotion that fans have for celebrities and other public figures — are also driving consumer spending in some circles. In addition, 75 percent of fans said engaging in fan culture is just as fun as, if not more fun than, engaging with the content itself, according to a 2025 study by Carat US and the platform Fandom.

“Fans will always give the objects of their fandom the benefit of the doubt and see the best in them, until you are truly forced to accept something that is difficult to accept,” she said.

The Fandom Institute cautions clients that “this is not necessarily going to be predictable. You have to appreciate the complexity, the depth of attachment and what these things mean to people, before you think it’s just an easy business play. You don’t easily monetize it. Fans are very resistant to that.”

While brands are eager to monetize fandoms, they need to be “very careful, because fans are very sensitive to over commercialization, and to having their power questioned or clipped,” Kresnicka said. “If fandom is part of your strategy, don’t think just because you get the fans, you get all of the good stuff. You’re actually talking about something quite complicated.”

While fandoms vary drastically, ones like those of K-pop groups or Taylor Swift‘s have vast communities. Emory University marketing professor Michael Lewis said, “It’s the ‘BTS Army’ and Taylor’s are ‘Swifties.’ Those are essentially collectives. If you have a dispute with someone, who is part of the fans’ identities and a core part of who they are, you are triggering all kinds of threat reflexes. They’re going to respond. When you add in social media, a little bit of dispute that goes viral can create a wave.”

Lewis pointed to how “Swifties” dove into the discourse that followed Scooter Braun’s purchase of Big Machine Label Group and Taylor Swift’s songbook in 2019. (Last year the Grammy winner reacquired the rights to her first six albums via a reported $360 million deal with Shamrock Capital.) 

Smaller players like fashion designers don’t have such financial backing, though. Lewis said, “While major brands are sophisticated enough to know not to tread on anything that could generate a viral grassroots response from fans, a fashion designer that is not part of the “Chanel or Louis Vuitton empires might not think it all the way through.”