Introduction
Social media can be defined as “Web 2.0 platforms that allow users to share experience and knowledge related [...] through active participation”. This report will focus on how social media and fashion interact, as well as an overview of the functionality of social media itself. In today’s digital age, there are a wide number of social media platforms, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat. This exploration of social media and fashion will focus on the Instagram platform as it is one of the most widespread and visually based of the social media in use today.
A Summary of Instagram
Launched in 2010, Instagram has 800 million users, and 500 million of those users open the app on a daily basis. An in-depth report on the content and demographics of Instagram was produced in 2018 by a media monitoring company named Mention. The study was done on 110 million posts made by 1.7 million Instagram users. The largest demographic of users is 25 to 34 year olds, who make up 25.2% of the user base.
Figure 1: The distribution of Instagram users by number of followers
The majority of Instagram users (69.6% or 1.18 million from the study) have under 1,000 followers. As the number of followers go up, the number of users in that category decreases dramatically. In the study 416,500 or 24.5% of users have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. Only 3.7% (62,900 in the study) have between 100,000 and 1 million followers. The ‘Micro-influencers’ as defined by the study are those who straddle the line around 100,000 followers. The smallest group by far was the ‘Mega-celebrities’, the study sample only contained only 56 users (0.003%) with more than 10 million followers. Everyone between micro-influencers and mega-celebrities fall into the larger category of influencers. Many of them have social media as their primary source of fame as well as their primary source of income. These are “people with a strong relationship to an audience who” are targeted by advertisers for partnerships because they “can heavily sway decisions like purchasing habits”.
Social Media Algorithms
In 2016 Instagram switched its post feed from being purely chronological to be as Instagram said, “ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most”. The algorithm that Instagram uses has changed much over its existence, but it has always been complex and relatively secret from the public. “Platform owners, like Instagram, engage in ‘visibility management’ in which they strategically make certain information about their algorithms visible (or invisible)”. This secrecy keeps users in the dark about what content they are seeing and what they aren’t. For the most part these algorithms are invisible to the users of a platform, but they exert a lot of control over the user’s ‘social reality’. While these systems are often referred to and seen as impartial robots, they are strongly influenced by “extant social, cultural, economic, and political forces” of the engineers who created them. The bias of the engineers means that Instagram feeds are not what you think you should be seeing, but rather what they think you should be seeing.
This is an issue when it comes to rumors of ‘shadowbanning’ and other manipulations of Instagram feeds by those creating the algorithm. Shadowbanning “refers to the (perceived) suppression of one’s post(s), such that a user becomes virtually invisible to others” and it is often thought to be a response to users using too many tags or using the same tags too often. While this type of ban has not been confirmed by Instagram’s developers, users have reported a dramatic drop in post engagement after tagging their posts in one of the above manners. This has big consequences for those whose careers rely on social media engagement, whether through being an influencer or managing a brand’s account, those engagement dips are a real issue. If an influencer’s sponsored post doesn’t get the engagement the sponsor expected, they might not get paid, or might lose that or future sponsorships. This is a big deal as influencers can make between a few thousand dollars (for influencers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers) up to $100,000 to $250,000 (for influencers with over a million followers) per post. If they can’t deliver consistent engagement rates influencers cannot market themselves to sponsors. Social media managers face a similar problem, but they face losing their job rather than individual sponsorships. For anyone who's jobs rely on consistent post engagement, there are real financial consequences to the alleged shadowbanning. The lack of information about how Instagram orders posts is frustrating to users who rely on the platform to earn a living. This results in these people trying their hardest to get an understanding of how Instagram’s algorithm works.
One of the few sources of what the Instagram feed algorithm currently is, is from a 2018 interview with Instagram product lead Julian Gutman, the first one of its kind that Instagram has done. He spoke about three main factors, and three additional factors that are considered in the order of an Instagram feed. The first is Interest, defined from the interview as:
“How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post, with higher ranking for what matters to you, determined by past behavior on similar content and potentially machine vision analyzing the actual content of the post.”
The second is Recency, or:
“How recently the post was shared, with prioritization for timely posts over weeks-old ones.”
The third is Relationship, which considers:
“How close you are to the person who shared it, with higher ranking for people you’ve interacted with a lot in the past on Instagram, such as by commenting on their posts or being tagged together in photos.”
The first additional factor is the Frequency at which the user opens Instagram, with the algorithm prioritizing “the best posts since your last visit”. Another additional factor is who the user is Following. If they follow a large number of people, they will see fewer posts from any one person. And the last additional factor is Usage, or how long the users spends on Instagram. This determines if they are seeing just the top posts in a short time frame, or a larger variety for a longer time frame. These factors create tailored feeds for each user of the application. For example:
“Feed ranking does not favor the photo or video format universally, but people’s feeds are tuned based on what kind of content they engage with, so if you never stop to watch videos you might see fewer of them.”
Due to the extremely large number of posts on any social media platform these algorithms become necessary to curate the posts shown, but it is often unclear how much influence they really have over what users see.
Even after the information given in this interview there is significant mystery to how the Instagram algorithm really works. This, combined with people’s livelihoods depending on post engagement, has lead to a huge number of companies, blogs and marketers advertising themselves as having the secret to hacking the algorithm and how exactly to get the most engagement and the most followers (and thus the most money). Learning how to work in and around the algorithm has become an industry of its own.
Fashion on Instagram
Figure 2: Top 20 most popular Instagram hashtags 2018
Fashion is an immensely popular topic on Instagram. As of the writing of this paper there are 683 million posts that have been tagged with #fashion, and that is merely one of many tags used to identify fashion posts on the site. The previously mentioned study also calculated the top 20 hashtags used on Instagram (shown in the graph below). Of these top hashtags, five of them are fashion related.
Growing from the popularity of fashion on Instagram and fashion inspiration posts especially, a recent addition to the Instagram app was shopping integration. This allows shops to link products directly to the pictures of them posted on the site. Over 130 million Instagram accounts tap on a shopping post to learn more about products every month.
Figure 3: Examples of the Instagram shopping feature
Even before the launch of the Instagram shopping feature, fashion brands used Instagram to their fullest advantage. In 2018, 98% of fashion brands had a presence on Instagram. This importance of social media in fashion brands is so great that it has an influence over the design of the clothes themselves. To bring attention to a brand and help a garment sell, “the photogenic dimension of a dress has become more important than its tactile, material quality”. As so much of shopping is done online, through sites like Instagram, if a dress does not photograph well, even if it is beautiful in person, it is not worth making. This mindset means that details invisible to the camera lense often get ignored in clothing design.
Considerations of things like texture, the backs of garments, movement and comfort of wear get left out because they won’t show up online. This design of fashion in two dimensions is also influenced by new ways fashion is posted on social media. Fashion flat lays are a recent Instagram trend where outfits are posted laid out flat or folded neatly. At the time of this paper, there were 6.7 million posts tagged with #flatlay on Instagram. These images are a prime example of how the wear of the garment and the holistic design of the garment does not really matter online, only how it looks in a photograph.
Figure 4: A Fashion Flat Lay
This focus on the ability of a garment to be photographed is beneficial in some ways. An analysis of interactions of users with brand Instagram posts “revealed the positive influence of perceived creativity on positive emotions (H1: β=.24, p<.01), affective commitment (H2: β=.40, p<.01) and interaction intentions (H3: β=.60, p<.01)”. The effectiveness of the combination of items that photograph well and are (or are shown) creatively encourages fashion designers to be creative and innovative in the style they create.
Beyond the design of the clothing themselves, “having a runway show has become so much about the creation of imagery for online and social media”. Some brands have even moved away from fashion shows to showing new collections exclusively on social media. One example of this is that “Vetements has stated that they will stop producing fashion shows for a while, after which they presented their entire SS18 collection on Instagram”. Fashion collections being shown exclusively online will only serve to further push the importance of the image of the clothing over the clothing itself.
Conclusion
Instagram and fashion are heavily interlinked. The basic format of Instagram, as well as the features that have been introduced, make it a prime platform for fashion. Despite the secretive and confusing algorithms that keep Instagram running, influencers rely on the platform to reach their audience. Both Instagram and the fashion shown on it depend on curiated perspective to draw an audience. The clothing has been flattened to fit into a single post while the content of feeds as a whole is allegedly filtered by shadowbanning exclusively emphasizing the visual appeal over the overall quality and integrity. As visual interest is what draws engagement on Instagram designers and influencers will continue to focus on the visual appearance of their posts, rather than the quality of what is within them.
Sources
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