their glamour and good taste but also for their
physical characteristics. Their bodies are cele-
brated as aspirational.
The catalyst for our changed understanding of
beauty has been a perfect storm of technology,
economics, and a generation of consumers with
sharpened aesthetic literacy.
The technology is social media in general
and Instagram specifically. The fundamental
economic factor is the unrelenting competition
for market share and the need for individual
companies to grow their audience of potential
customers for products ranging from designer
dresses to lipstick. And the demographics lead,
as they always do these days, to millennials, with
an assist from baby boomers who plan to go into
that good night with six-pack abs.
Social media has changed the way younger
consumers relate to fashion. It’s hard to believe,
but back in the 1990s, the notion of photographers
posting runway imagery online was scandalous.
Designers lived in professional terror of having
their entire collection posted online, fearing
that it would lead to business-killing knockoffs.
And while knockoffs and copies continue to
frustrate designers, the real revolution brought
on by the internet was that consumers were able
to see, in nearly real time, the full breadth of the
fashion industry’s aesthetic.
In the past, runway productions were insider
affairs. They weren’t meant for public consump-
tion, and the people sitting in the audience all
spoke the same fashion patois. They understood
that runway ideas weren’t meant to be taken lit-
erally; they were oblivious to issues of cultural
appropriation, racial stereotypes, and all vari-
eties of isms—or they were willing to overlook
them. Fashion’s power brokers were carrying on104 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC