How Instagram is changing fashion—for better and for worse.
While Instagram cannot confirm which image was first affixed with the hashtag ‘#fashion’, there are a few contenders. Shortly after the social media platform’s launch in October 2010, photographer Courtney Roxanne posted a street view in California featuring a hacienda-style house covered in bougainvillea. Scott Goodwill, a creative director and colourist, snapped an image of a blonde woman in a white T-shirt. An early adopter of the sharing platform, Goodwill was quick to maximise his reach. His image is accompanied by a volley of hashtags, including #girl, #girls, #tagforlikes, #sexy, #swag and #fashion. To date, he has claimed 3,130 followers. At about the same time, user @jxffb posted a blurry picture of some beads using the same tag. The beads looked kind of stylish, despite their likeness to a string of Maltesers.
Today, some 615 million posts can be found under #fashion. And millions more can be traced to the morass of subjects that fashion inspires. Search under #streetstyle and you will find 60.5 million images of people, mostly women, peacocking in urban landscapes across the world. The tag #redcarpet delivers 5.2 million pictures of celebrities swaggering their way to awards ceremonies in otherworldly designer ensembles. Fans of Gucci can join the 31.2 million users who follow the brand’s main account, or track the further 51 tags that have been dedicated to its name—an astonishing 141,577 tags have been created, for example, to honour the ‘Gucci flip-flop’. But while the Gucci diaspora is deep, it is not the most followed fashion brand on the Facebook-owned platform. That honour goes to Chanel, with 32.2 million followers.
Visually led, surface orientated, much improved by filters, it’s no surprise that fashion and Instagram have come to share a symbiotic relationship.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of Esquire Singapore.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of Esquire Singapore.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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