What is Instagram killing today? (SWWC, vol 4, issue 6)
Hello!
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When I was in line for a flight last month, the woman standing next to me had a full face of look-I-am-wearing-makeup makeup -- her skin looked as smoothly poreless as a Barbie's face, her eyebrows that looked as if they had been stamped on, and her lips were lavender ombre. I was fascinated. I had so many questions about the lip paint: Did it take a while to put on? How long would it last? Could you eat or drink while wearing it?
What I found equally interesting: That makeup had a slightly distancing effect in real life -- I felt as if I weren't looking at a person but at a robot start-up's approximation of what human women looked like. But it photographed well, and this young woman was going to Insta the hell out of her look.
I fully own the fact that my reaction is a result of being confronted with the reality that Gen-X generational norms -- born from the circumstances of our youth -- are in no way relevant to the world today. And those lovely lavender lips were a useful reminder that every generation's aesthetics reinvent both commerce and culture.
So what? The rise of Instagram-friendly makeup on real-world faces points to two separate ideas: There is no dividing line between "offline" and "online" life, and Instagram is the wild west of aesthetics.
It's already being strip-mined for commerce, and it's already influencing bricks-and-mortar outlets to appeal to an Insta audience. A recent Digg long-form piece on fitness studios building aspirational audiences via Instagram influencers had the CEO of one high-end gym chain saying, "At this point, I would say [we design for Instagram] 100% … We think about how the studio will look and feel while you're there, but also about opportunities to capture and share via your camera. What is shareable in the space?"
Who cares? Industry sectors devoted to defining trends or separating consumers from their money are f-r-e-a-k-i-n-g out. As Eliza Brooke wrote earlier this year:
Thanks to the stranglehold that Instagram, that beautiful black hole, has on the creation and consumption of images, trends blossom simultaneously and spread rapidly, one on top of another. The idea of certain styles being “in” or “out” was never particularly helpful, and now it’s practically obsolete. Chokers and deconstructed shirts erupt across fast-fashion sites almost as soon as you’ve registered their existence. Lifestyle startups are nearing a branding singularity. Kinfolk’s minimalist vision of bougie living is everywhere you turn.
It's notable that women's magazines are shutting down their print operations or shifting to an online-first format. This past week, Business of Fashion credited Instagram with killing fashion magazines. The death blow was more like a light tap. Gatekeeper culture began dissolving in the 1990s when the physical obstacles to being part of a subculture's in-crowd -- the samizdat of 'zines, the conspicuous consumption of time spent pawing through longboxes at cons to get the back issues of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing -- went away with websites and eBay.
The last vestiges of old-school gatekeeper culture, glossy media where advertisers share a great relationship with editorial staffers, are going now. Just as Web 1.0 disintermediated the middlemen industries that trafficked in services and access to information, so will this iteration provide opportunities for new players in some businesses while squeezing others out. And it provides new opportunities for payola coverage. Plus ça Change, Plus C'est La Même.
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Your pop culture recommendation: My younger nephew, born five months before Friends ended, had a summer-vacation obsession with that show and watched the entire run on Netflix twice. There are worse ways to spend a summer but I admit to being baffled with the allure -- until I realized that it must be wild for someone who's been raised in the 2000s to see what idealized adulthood was like in the 1990s.
I plan on casually dropping my DVD boxed set of Spaced -- which Simon Pegg basically made in reaction to Friends -- on my nephew to see whether that show lands with him too. Spaced is also very much of its time -- but I'm so pleased to have found the spiritual successors in the "twentysomethings discover being an adult is a mixed bag" British comedy genre. And as someone who is well out of her twenties, I appreciated seeing how global economic instability, ubiquitous mobile phones, and still-under-negotiation notions about gender and sexuality are shaping those shows now.
So go binge on the Irish dramedy Can't Cope, Won't Cope (two UK seasons, so only 2 episodes, available on U.S. Netflix) and all six episodes of Crashing (also available on U.S. Netflix). Both shows give marvelously nuanced takes on friendship, love, and the lies we tell ourselves about these relationships.
And to go back to Friends for a minute: I have been so lucky to have become Twitter pals with Adam G., who recently alerted me to the existence of The Prophet Chandler, a Tumblr that mashes up Angels in America quotes with screencaps from Friends.
This Tumblr has the feel of a joke someone started when they were supposed to be writing a 40-page paper for a junior-level literature seminar instead, and it's super-funny if you have recently read The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America by Dan Kois and Isaac Butler, then watched the HBO series (now available to stream on Amazon Prime, in case you've got a spare six hours), like I may have done earlier this year.
And if you haven't read The World Only Spins Forward, fix that. There are a lot of lessons in that book -- how long it can take to bring a labor of love into the world, how nobody does it alone, how art can make sense of evil and tragedy. Reading that book and re-watching Angels in America might be my own version of my nephew's binge-watching: Staring at a moment that closed one era of American pop culture and thinking about all we chose to leave behind as we moved forward.