#MillennialProblems: The Politics Of Posting Outfits On Instagram

A style guide I read recently claimed that if you’re not sure of an outfit, then you should just take a selfie of it. Personally, I find it hard to understand that logic. Excuse my stone age mindset, but what kind of selfie can provide a better representation of how a dress fits than an actual mirror? How you look in a selfie is never how you look IRL – hold it too high and you look too fabulous, all boobs and cheekbones; hold it too low and you look like you’re melting. Those are the only two variations of outfit selfie (it’s biologically impossible to get a picture of your whole outfit just by holding your camera straight out in front of you unless you have the arm-span of Slender Man).

As you can probably tell, I’m not keen on this whole selfie thing – hence why I’m a little confused on the logistics of it. I just didn’t think it would be this hard. I was always convinced that I didn’t need tips on how to take a good selfie – a literal monkey can do it pretty well, after all – but scouring the annals of Google, I see I stand to be corrected. Thousands of articles profess to have the key to a good selfie, most reducing it down to surgery or science. And while science can be applied to many things, taking a snap of my new T-shirt seems a bit of a stretch.

Turns out, I’m wrong about everything – there is an exact science to selfie-taking. Researchers have determined you need to look up, lean in, lit your chin, put your left cheek on show, keep the camera five feet away, and Clarendon the sh*t out of it. And voila! You’ve got yourself the perfect Insta shot.

Honestly? It sounds like a little too much effort for me. But for some, the Insta selfie is changing the way they brand themselves and run their businesses. Instagram has become increasingly vital to the fashion industry – ASOS is one such company that has reaped the rewards of its Insta campaigns, revealing that by utilising Instagram’s Stories function, it doubled the number of people viewing its content in only six months. 

So, good for ASOS, but bad for sustainability. Pre-Insta selfie, women wouldn’t think twice about wearing an outfit to more than one social event, especially when different friends were in attendance. But now – and I can attest to this – you could wear your new dress to something on Tuesday and to something else the following Thursday, but once those pictures hit the ‘gram, you look like the person who’s too obsessed with that damn dress.

And so ‘wear it once’ culture was born, and the fashion industry changed forever. Research by charity Barnardo’s found that one-third of women find clothes old after wearing them two or three times, and one in seven cited social media platforms like Instagram as the main influence for their shopping habits, noting they were uncomfortable being seen in the same outfit more than once.