Are you dressing for Instagram? A feature in favour of timeless style
In this article I will explore a thought about fashion trends in the age of social media. But first, let me blow your mind with a couple of statistics:
- 800 million people uses Instagram every month, 500 million of them uses the app daily.
- 95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram a day on average (2016).
- 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook a day on average.
- InfoTrend forecasts that consumers will take 1.2 trillion digital photos in 2017, a number that is considered conservative. (Yep thats trillion with a T!)
- 24 billion selfies were uploaded in 2015 and who knows what that number will be in 2017?
These mind-boggling numbers indicate a lot of things about todays culture, but the one point I'm interested in here are this: We have never in history been photographed, by ourselves or others, as much as we are right now.
When we go through our parents and grandparents' photoalbums – you know, from before photoalbums were folders on your Facebook profile – we primarily find pictures of special occasions that they felt the need to document, such as birthdays, Christmas, New Years Eve, first school days, etc.
Today, at the other hand, we have photos of everything, from our coffeeshop visits documented on Instagram to group selfies with the gang on Facebook. Nothing goes on undocumented, no occasion is too insignificant to capture and share online.
Where older generations got dressed up to go to the photographer and mainly was photographed for special occasions, we are literally photographed every day.
SoMe and fast fashion
Another trend that seems to coincide with the the ever expanding domain of social media, is the emergence of fast fashion. The two things feed of each other, causing the unfolding and disappearance of trends to escalate at an ever faster pace.
While fast fashion brands like H&M and Zara becomes ever more efficient at dropping new designs faster than Tom Ford can draw a bath, Instagram spreads new trends at an instant, to replace those old dated ones from two weeks ago.
While trends evolve faster than ever, by help of SoMe, it's ironically those same platforms that keeps all the pictures of you in those dated by-gone trends alive and online.
The internet never forgets
If pictures are taken of us every day, documenting us jump on all the latest trends and adopting all the styles dictated by the "micro seasons" brought forth by fast evolving fashion. Are we not forced to be more conscious of the way we dress, as our Instagram and Facebook profiles get more and more crowded with dated pictures?
Does not the endurance of our sartorial expressions online, demand a change in the way we think about the concept 'time' when it comes to fashion and trends?
The discipline of crafting the perfect image through SoMe is being perfected by an army of influencers and trend setters in these years. SoMe and blogging is turning into big business, and building a coherent brand is becoming increasingly more important.
If the outfit we choose for the day used to have to situate us in the specific context we are entering that day, today we do not only dress for the day. We simultaneously dress for the pictures that will be accessible to anyone anywhere from here on forward.
In other words, maybe it's time to cease dressing for the 'now'. Maybe we should start dressing, not for current trends, but for the future. An outfit is no longer just an expression of oneself for a day, but for a very long time online too.
Timeless style vs. current trends
If you were quick to jump on the athleasure look or any other trend that reigned supreme just months ago, you probably have that documented all over your Instagram account and a lot of the current pictures on your Facebook page, of moments you want to remember, now already show you dressed in an outdated style. And the next time you jump on a trend like that, this whole process will repeat itself again and again. – Is that really how you want to present yourself on Social Media?
In a time when branding yourself on Social Media is all about creating a consistent stream of pictures or content, why do we keep insisting that certain styles, cuts and items are in fashion while others are outdated?
Doesn't the fact that the photos on our SoMe profiles stay there for a long time, mean that the moment they are uploaded, they are already simultaneously in style and out of style, depending on when they are viewed by those who scroll through our profiles?
Does the argument that fuller cut trousers or three button blazers and suit jackets are out of style, fade in the perspective that sometime very soon those styles will come back and we will look back at skinny jeans and slim suits with contempt?
If we instead opt to go for tested and proved timeless looks and pieces; your navy blazers, solid coloured shirts, non-distressed jeans, etc., we could build a much more coherent and consistent image on our SoMe profiles. All our Instagram pictures would add to the image we portray of ourselves, season after season.
Isn't that the logical response to social media?
Will Instagram put an end to consumerism and fast fashion?
I guess the conclusion would be that even though social media at the moment contribute to the acceleration of trends, it might also be the cure.
There is something to be said i favour of a return to more traditional approaches to dressing. A return to a time before clothing became something cheap and disposable and trends simple couldn't evolve with the speed they do today.
At this blog I take the perspective of how your personal style and how you present yourself affect they way others perceive you – and how you perceive yourself.
In this context, it simpler is no longer, in the age of SoMe, enough to think about how you present yourself at this very moment right now. But how you present yourself at this specific moment right now will endure into the future.
It is no secret that employers and recruitment agents browse through your SoMe profiles before inviting you to interviews. As they see new and old pictures of you alike, it is worth considering how you dress right now in the light of how that will let you be perceived in 2, 5 or 10 years from now.