It's turned us all into a bunch of self-promotional robots who are sapping the meaning from the word “style.” Maybe it's time to pull back from our tweets and our Instagrams and our pins and, you know — OURSELVES.
The Ralph Lauren show.
Image by Lucas Jackson / Reuters
New York Fashion Week just ended — and it might have been the weirdest one yet thanks to social media. Of course social media has been a great way to get the masses fired up about fashion, give talented people who don't work at magazines a voice in the industry, and allow brands to market themselves in cool and interesting ways. But has it all become too much? Thanks to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Instagram and Pinterest (and probably some others I'm forgetting), the week was a mess of self-promotion, bad street style, and slightly shady endorsements — more so than ever before. Here's why it might be time to pull back from social media just a bit.
1. Social media has made it impossible to just sit there and enjoy a fashion show.
The Jason Wu show.
Image by The Associated Press / AP
Everyone is seized with the desire to tweet everything going on as it happens. So instead of watching the clothes come down the runway, people in the audience spend the whole show staring at their phones. I can't remember the last time I went to a show and didn't worry about tweeting boring things about what was going on. Like, "Opening look at Betsey Johnson!!!" or whatever show it is. Meanwhile, everyone else is tweeting the exact same thing and I think a lot of us are doing it 1. so that we can announce to the world that we're there and have a good enough seat to get the photos of the outfits and 2. for shameless RTs from people who get really excited by fashion shows and lead us to more followers.
But to the second point: I think tweeting clothes on the runway will slow eventually, because the race to post fashion show slideshows online before anyone else has gotten so intense that hugely stressed-out interns are regularly sent into the night to get a USB drive from a photographer, so it hardly takes any time for the images to hit the Internet anyway. Also, Style.com and NowFashion.com posted live from shows as they happened and they weren't crappy TwitPics or Instagrams! So really, we can all probably stop worrying about tweeting looks with no jokes or insight for shameless RTs, and go back to looking at the clothes IRL and thinking of things to say that are interesting/funny.
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