Image courtesy of itplive.com
Fashion has always been about much more than the clothes we wear. It’s also about who gets to dictate what we wear, when, and why it matters. For decades, those decision makers were fashion magazine editors, designers, and models. Now, that power has shifted, and is now placed in the hands of anyone with a smart phone and an audience big enough to notice.
For the influencer-fashion landscape/relationship to change, social media and fashion must first be examined on their own/individually. The art of “influencing” in fashion is no novel concept. The first “influencers” we know today were not as accessible to us as the influencers we now know. We didn’t know the inner lives of the likes of Anna Wintour, Diana Vreeland, Grace Mirabella, Audrey Smaltz, and Kate Moss, in the ways we are invited into the lives of Alix Earle, the Jenners, and more.
The early 2000s were a much smaller group of fashion influencers than the thousands-even millions of users across popular apps Instagram, TikTok, and beyond. Instead of going from being “influenced” by an insular group of people somewhere in a tall building in a city you can’t afford, influencing can happen at micro levels. Now, “Momfluencers” in the Midwest are selling you the next best workout set from the comfort of their homes.
At the same time, brand budgets are booming. Tarte, a 26-year-old beauty brand flies a select group of influencers out on an all-expenses paid trip three to five times a year. The top influencers are flown out, put up in luxury accommodations, and the entire endeavor becomes a spectacle from lifestyle to beauty to fashion.
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Coachella is a perfect case study for the relationship between fashion, influencing, and consumerism. For years Coachella has felt like an influencer birthplace. A weekend designated for Insta-worthy photo ops, and curated outfits, YouTubers like Eva Gutowski helped popularize the Coachella “get ready with me” style videos with fashion hauls and makeup tutorials. What felt like a home-grown operation now feels like more of a brand strategy than ever, and it’s growing every year. This past month at Coachella, slews of influencers were flown out and paid by companies to stay in branded “houses” near the festival. There was the Poppi House, Alix Earle’s Reale Actives House, the Lola Blanket house, and more. Moreover, influencers are no longer styling themselves like Eva Gutowski was styling herself, they are hiring stylists and having full-on fittings leading up to their trip to the desert. What was once a post-worthy festival is now a highly engineered marketing strategy where every outfit, post, and moment is part of a larger consumer-based ecosystem.
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than on TikTok. Once a place for viral videos, TikTok has become more of a marketplace than ever, turning scrolling into profiting; a large-scale audit of TikTok feeds found that roughly 1 in 3 videos can be considered some form of advertising. Quite literally everything on the app is shoppable. Click the screen on ANY video, regardless, if it’s an app or not, and it identifies, finds a duplicate, and tries to sell you every identifiable product in the video. See a video of a funny cat playing with a toy? Click the video to shop the cat’s collar, toy, and the rug it is sitting on. TikTok is engineered so that influencing doesn’t feel like influencing, when it very much is.
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Ordinary clothing items are being marketed as “viral”, with micro influencers describing them as something to obsess over. For instance, a boys basic white Hanes tee shirt actually went viral for being “the perfect top to throw over a workout set”.
Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
shift comes at an opportune time for films like “Devil Wears Prada 2.” There is an iconic scene in the original 2006 film that explains the trickle-down effect in fashion in a simple yet perfect way. “It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room … from a pile of “stuff,” explained Miranda Priestly in a scene from “Devil Wears Prada.” It will be interesting to see how the second film might incorporate influencer marketing as it would be out of touch not to reference in a world where it is so rampant.
In modern media, there is no fashion without the influencer landscape now; like it or not. The power shift of what influences our fashion decisions is now partly in the hands of influencers. All of this to say, there is no time like the present to pare down one’s own personal taste and sense of self in a time where we are inundated with being told what to like.
Marley Gifford
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