Sharing our lives online is going out of fashion. Rosa Abbott reports…
Once upon a time, sitting on the front row of a runway show during Fashion Week was the privilege of only an elite coterie of industry insiders. It still is, of course, but social media has opened a doorway into this very exclusive experience: when half the guestlist is livestreaming their view, we can all feel like we’re in on the act. That door was slammed shut, however, at The Row’s AW24 presentation, when VIP attendees – including fashion buyers, press, top clients, celebs and influencers – were banned from using their phones to document the presentation and instead given a notepad and pen.
Effectively enforcing a social media blackout during what would have normally been the collection’s most visible moment was a bold move. But The Row’s phone ban became, somewhat paradoxically, a viral talking point, launching a thousand think-pieces and lending an air of intrigue and mystique to the collection, of which official photographs were released a week later. This move towards an “offline only” experience feels positively on brand for The Row. Having grown up in the glare of the spotlight, the brand’s former child star founders, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, quickly learned the value of privacy – something the rich and famous have long paid a premium for. Their ethos of discretion is evident in the minimal shapes, muted palette and timelessness of their quietly luxe designs. As our lives become increasingly flattened by the digital, brands like The Row place a renewed emphasis on quality of materials and craftsmanship. Specialist skills and time-intensive techniques become commodities more rarefied than Instagram-friendly logos, giving an aura of desirability to the artisanal. An offline existence, undisturbed by notifications, is part and package of this fantasy. After all, as that other great purveyor of quiet luxury, Phoebe Philo, once declared, “The chicest thing is when you don’t exist on Google”.
Chic as it may be, with everything from dating to career success hinging on our online selves, can any of us truly afford to log off? In 2024, being offline seems not only chic but a luxury in and of itself. Meanwhile, for those of us not on the FROW (front row), professionals of all stripes, from chefs to beauticians, graphic designers to yoga teachers, feel obliged to “build their profile” through social media. Models and actors are increasingly hired for their online clout, while authors with big followings can expect better book deals than those who toil in obscurity. Many herald this as opening up the playing field for traditionally exclusive industries, but the risk is that the book deal doesn’t go to the best author, but rather, the one who posts the most artful selfie with cappuccino and typewriter.
Even those who stand to win at this game might later express remorse. A friend and former writer for an online magazine specialising in personal essays recently confessed to me over a few hazy glasses of wine that she regretted having written certain pieces in her twenties. Many of them contained revealing information about her romantic relationships, sex life, body image and mental health struggles. Now in her 30s and pursuing an entirely different career, she felt the delayed price of having given away her privacy. New colleagues at work, people she’d met only a couple of times, would repeat the most intimate and excruciating details of her life back to her. “It sounds naive to say,” she confessed, “but I didn’t think it would still come up on a Google search of my name ten years later.”
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,” wrote Joan Didion in ‘On Keeping a Notebook’. “We forget the loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” For those of us who grew up using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as our ‘notebooks’, these past selves come screaming back at us in the form of embarrassing search engine results and lingering social media profiles with long-forgotten passwords. Several past selves float around online, their fashion faux pas, botched home-dye jobs and ill-formed opinions preserved for posterity in offshore data centres. A recently married friend, once a regular on the party circuit and often papped in compromising states by club photographers, confessed she took her husband’s surname in spite of her feminist reservations on the matter. It promised something too enticing to overlook: No Results Found on a Google image search.
This might sound like yet another Millennial/Gen-Z gripe to be filed beside bonkers house prices and climate meltdown. Yes, we envy those Boomers and GenXers who forged a career path without having to create a LinkedIn profile. But the pressure to log on and self-promote increasingly affects all generations. Long gone are the days of letting the intern take the reins of the company Facebook page: savvy business owners feel increasingly compelled to understand the mechanics of social media for themselves, while senior staffers might fear being usurped by their more tech-savvy juniors. Even TikTok, which has a reputation for being populated by the very young, is growing rapidly among all age groups: users aged 55 and up increased by a whopping 61.7 per cent between 2021 and 2023. (Joining their ranks are the politicians who flocked to the app during this year’s various international election cycles, ushering in a new era of cringe.)
Being offline signifies membership of a leisure class which doesn’t need to share their lives online to amass social or cultural capital, or build a personal brand to establish financial security.
But just as the truly wealthy tend to opt for quiet luxury rather than flashy logos, you know someone is truly sought after when they don’t need to go on social media to self-promote. Being offline signifies membership of a leisure class that doesn’t need to share their lives online to amass social or cultural capital, or build a personal brand to establish financial security. Perhaps venerating such a status is just another form of the elitism and gatekeeping that social media promised to banish. After all, there has always been a snobbery around self-promotion: among music fans it used to be stigmatised as selling out, as if commercial success was the death knell of authenticity (“I know this really cool band, but you wouldn’t have heard of them…”).
Love it or loathe it, though, fashion thrives on this kind of insider access – and as every fashion house knows, oversupply reduces value. Whether it’s the limited release sneaker drop, the long waitlist for a Birkin, or the vintage eBay find you were outbid on at the last second, you always want what you can’t have. For years I’ve been tormented by tantalising screenshots revealing snippets of the invitation only fashion newsletter Opulent Tips, by fashion critic Rachel Tashjian. Drip-fed witty one-liners in fragments, I can only wonder at what other nuggets of wisdom I am missing out on. Then I remember the number of open-access fashion/beauty newsletters I’ve subscribed to that languish unopened in my inbox. If Opulent Tips was one of them, would I even have remembered signing up? It’s the digital media equivalent of treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen.
In an interview with The Cut last year, model/actress Hari Nef declared the death of the It Girl, “a term from an era where being cool was possible because it was possible to be unattainable and mysterious. No socials, no Getty Images database. There was no economy for revealing yourself.” Nef blames reality TV for creating an “economy of telling your story and expressing your authentic self” and cites Chloë Sevigny as the ultimate It Girl. The vagueness of the word ‘It’ was precisely the appeal – that je ne sais quoi – and a degree of mystery and aloofness part of the package. Would she show up at the party fashionably late? Or did she have somewhere better to be? Their modern-day descendants, the Influencers, no longer have the option not to show up – they’re contracted not only to appear but to share three Stories, one Post, and one Reel about it too.
“Warhol’s prediction that everybody would be world-famous for 15 minutes became true long ago”, says the pioneering video artist Hito Steyerl. “Now many people want the contrary: to be invisible, if only for 15 minutes.” If fame was once appealing for its scarcity, the same is true for logging off: that an offline existence isn’t an option for most of us mere mortals doesn’t diminish its appeal – it’s the very foundation of it. And the growing popularity of tech-free retreats and digital detoxes among the fashion set suggests an increasing number of us are willing to pay for those 15 minutes of invisibility. If we once aspired to have legions of followers tapping “like” on our Valencia-filtered holiday snaps, now many of us are pledging to hand in our phones and spin pottery, or plant dahlias, or go wild swimming, or whatever wholesome offline activity we imagine we’d spend our newly free time on.
2024 has also seen the triumphant return of “boho chic,” which dovetails nicely with this back-to-the-roots vibe – the trend’s flowing fabrics and pastoral prints create the illusion of a free spirit and hint towards a nostalgia for the mid-2000s, a time just before the smartphone became ubiquitous. Whether or not we dust off our peasant blouses this autumn though, many of us yearn for the lifestyle it suggests: of the mysterious stranger with a truly unique sense of style, address book burgeoning from in-person encounters, who captivates us with riveting anecdotes about farflung escapades. Meeting such an enigmatic figure is an increasingly rare treat, like being brought to an exciting bar or restaurant frequented only by those in the know and where no one is taking pictures of their dinner. After all, everyone likes to feel like they’re in on a secret. The paradox, of course, is that enough people – and the right people – need to feel like they’re in on it too.