Don’t Mistake Expensive Clothing for Good Taste
Influencers: You’re Giving Clothes to People who don’t Know how to Dress
Social media and more specifically influencers on social media are ruining the fashion community (you may think this is a tired take, but I’ll be going into more depth than just “instagram bad”). For those of you who are living under a rock and don’t know what an influencer is, influencers are essentially celebrities that are trying to sell you on a certain lifestyle through posts on social media. Sometimes these posts are sponsored and sometimes they’re not, but either way they’re still selling you that same luxurious lifestyle.
One of the main problems with these influencers is that the content they are putting out is style without substance and this is because influencers are mostly individuals that have acquired wealth later on in life such as rappers, athletes, Instagram models, etc. So, these are individuals who never really had a knowledge of fashion to begin with, but then come into contact with money, enormous amounts of it, and now they can afford to buy these luxurious clothes and want everyone to know that they can buy them. So, the more ostentatious the clothes are, the better. Don’t believe me? Just look at @leaguefits on Instagram. As a result many ordinary people will follow suit and buy these clothes because as consumers they feed into that, they think “oh these people have access to it, so they’re fashionable”, and that’s not always the case.
With the influx of these influencers there has been a rise of a certain type of a fashion designer who traffics in the ostentatious, cringe-worthy, and yet commercially successful fashion that used to be the stuff of jokes about the nouveau riche. The designers run the gamut from streetwear-inspired to luxury houses that are starting to conform to easy fashion. Some examples – Heron Preston, Jerry Lorenzo of Fear of God, Henri Alexander of Enfants Riches Deprimes, and Francesco Ragazzi of Palm Angels. Higher up, Philipp Plein. Yet higher, Balmain.
It’s not about design anymore, it’s about accessibility and making it accessible and recognizable to a nouveau-riche consumer. More than ever, what today’s fashion consumer is interested in is the right image, the right brand, the right Instagram fit pic. They want to stand out and fit in at the same time. They want to be cool and socially accepted at the same time. They want to be an individual who is a part of the mass. It’s more about being apart of something or having people perceive that you are apart of something rather than it is about the actual fashion, the design, what we like in it, it’s the image that is the most important part now. In fashion terms this amounts to the right hoodie, the right pair of jeans, the right T-shirt, just look at the outfits on @grailedfits.
And now the “smart” brands who have jumped on the influencer bandwagon are realizing this and are scrambling to reset their storied houses. In an effort to make their brands more inclusive, it would appear that influencers, who represent “the people,” just might harbor values that are not so all-encompassing, after all.
Some people would say “don’t mistake brands for victims,” I’m not one of those people. They are effectively giving the keys to Ferraris to people who’ve never seen a stick shift and that’s entirely their fault. Where journalists are educated about international ethics at university, where models, sports, and culture personalities are protected by major agencies who follow universal rules of good governance, most influencers, are governed by themselves, friends, family, and boutique agencies.
Furthermore, not only do these influencers have poor style, there’s also way too many of them. There is a ridiculous amount of them and there’s also non-influencers now pretending to sell products in the hopes of one day getting an endorsement deal, not to mention the “nano-influencers,” who sell goods like bootleg supreme LV Juul wraps to fewer than 1,000 followers.
As a result, this is changing our patterns of visual consumption. More and more fashion content gets churned out to feed the endless scroll, with less and less appreciation. What once may have stopped our gaze in its tracks we now glaze over. What once we may have torn out and pasted on our walls for inspiration, we now save to a rarely visible folder, if we save it at all. Which leads to another Insta-issue: homogenization.
Do you ever notice that everything is starting to look the same? All of a sudden every model in every image is wearing those shoes. Every influencer is carrying that same bag. Every background is the same colour. It becomes eerie, or worse, boring. I wouldn’t cast blame on anyone in particular and I’m certainly not immune, but I think it’s something that deserves attention. It makes sense to keep posting what people respond to, especially in the case of designers and brands because we’re all caught up in the tyranny of likes and followers. It’s enticing to only post the things that people are indicating they like and to keep buying more of these clothes, especially if the bottom line is partly dependent upon it. But it can lead to a vicious cycle of sameness and a lack of experimentation and when everybody does the same thing, nothing evolves, there’s no movement there’s no progress.
The main problem I see that has come from influencers and social media is the way some of these people see clothing as disposable, it creates this mindset of breaking away from the idea of style built on a foundation of meaningful pieces and focusing on likes and followers. If things on the internet are just come and go, it begins to seep into our every day style. Once we begin to truly value significant style choices again we can move away from over saturation to true quality. That's not to say that it is truly inspiring to see such a breadth of individuality on social media, we just have so much more to pull from in terms of what we want to add to our own personal identity which in turn can distract from what we find actually meaningful.
I’m not saying don’t wear what you want to wear, I’m saying wear what you want to wear, but wear it well and refine it.
