What We Wear In The Shadows

Instagram gives me anxiety and takes up too much of my time. It's worth taking a closer look at what people are wearing outside in the real world.

More time browsing books these days, less time scrolling my phone. This is from the Take Ivy book.

I live in constant frustration of not having enough time to do things I’d like to do. I hear myself saying it all the time: where does the time go? Days just slip away, and it feels like I’m always in a hurry. I tell myself that if only there were more hours in the day, I’d read more books. I'd try to find new music. I’d go to museums. I’d be a more interesting person. I’d do all of these things and I’d wear cool clothes doing them. But I’m just too busy. I’m too busy to look at memes, cat videos, and pictures of what other people are wearing.

I have a complicated relationship with Instagram. I’ve been posting outfits for about five years now. I’ve met lovely, like-minded, fashion-loving, fun, deep people. I’ve had interactions with people I would have never had the chance to meet if it wasn’t for social media. I sometimes feel that posting my outfits on IG has helped me understand what types of clothes I like to wear, but like I’ve written before in another context, it’s more complicated than that. More often than not, IG has shaped what types of outfits have seemed worth posting to me. There have been times when I’ve found myself wearing and posting more colorful or print-heavy looks than I’d normally wear, because they would get more visibility and likes. What I wear is a lot more complicated than the fragments that creep into my IG feed or stories’ highlights, but I sometimes mistake the collection of my outfit photos as ‘my style’. I have previously drawn conclusions about my style and even made mistakes when buying new things based on the thin veneer of quick snapshots of what I’ve worn in the past and chosen to post on IG.

My most liked IG picture is of me wearing a very feminine 1970s silk dress with bright red Galliano platform Mary Janes. I posted it to take part in a gender presentation challenge. The picture has nothing to do with my personal style, but people liked it a lot. They told me that I looked fantastic, but I didn’t look at all like myself, and I even wrote in the caption how uncomfortable I felt in the clothes. I sometimes like to go back to the moment when the likes and comments began to pour in, to remind me that IG is not real, and that there are limits to how much IG could ever help me understand my own style. It’s never just about the pictures that we take, or about the clothes that we wear in those pictures. If it was only about the clothes and the pictures, if we only did it for ourselves, we wouldn’t feel the need to post the images publicly for others to see. We want to belong to a community, we want to be noticed, and we need the likes and the comments to feel validated. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s human nature.

I’m an over-thinker and an analyzer. After having suffered a work-related burnout about eight years ago, my mental health has never quite been the same. I am still prone to stress and anxiety, and I suffer from perimenopausal insomnia. I meditate daily and as a whole I’d say that my mental health is currently balanced and I’m pretty good at recognizing things that trigger anxious thoughts in me. It takes a lot of effort though. I’ve been wondering for a while whether IG might not be all that good for me. IG gives me anxiety and a sense of a splintered self. 

Social media affects people differently. Some are able to focus on the positives: the community building, the friendships, the creativity. For others, like myself, it’s more challenging. Social comparison can get out of hand, because it’s easy to forget that IG only offers a very curated, highly edited glimpse into other people’s lives. Instagram is addicting: it’s designed to keep you scrolling indefinitely. The feed has no end. FOMO, or the fear of missing out, is a real phenomenon affecting active Instagram users, so we just keep scrolling. It’s not all that surprising that studies link Instagram use to increased anxiety, body image issues, poor self-esteem and depression, in both teens and adults.

My personal struggle with IG is to recognize reality and to really tap into it in my everyday life. It’s hard to explain, but when I’m active on IG, I feel that I see the world through a filter of things to share with others. I often find myself picking clothes to wear through a lens of what they might look like in a photo, even if I don’t have any plans to take an outfit picture. I might be taking a walk in nature, and I scan the environment, considering places or landscapes to photograph and post on IG. If I see a beautiful sunset, I might look at it through the lens of my phone’s camera, trying to record it, rather than just enjoying it in the moment. I’m not the only one, I’m sure. I sometimes watch footage of fashion weeks and it amazes me time after time how practically no one who's lucky enough to see a fashion show in person is even looking at the clothes walking down the runway. They filter the experience and live it through their phone. The same thing happens when people go to concerts. The audience is a sea of lit up phones. We’re so busy recording and posting our lives for others to see that we no longer live in the moment.

I read Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How To Think Deeply Again, last year. I instantly recognized the phenomenon that Hari described in his book: this weird feeling of living a fragmented life, where I can’t seem to focus on anything, and my feelings seem strangely diluted. Even when I’m not really doing anything, I feel busy and distracted. I have a hard time not reaching for my phone when I’m unoccupied, say, waiting for an elevator or the train. Considering that one of my favorite books is How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson, I am failing miserably at being idle. A big part of that is how much various screens and apps, Instagram in particular, take up my brain power. The time I spend on social media is hindering my brain from entering ‘a flow’ – that thoroughly enjoyable, almost transcendental feeling of focusing on a creative task, when time seems to stand still and all of a sudden your brain is buzzing with ideas. I really miss that. 

I’ve kept trying to cut my scrolling time for months now, but it’s difficult. The fear of missing out creeps in. If I don’t keep up with what others are posting on Instagram and if I don’t post anything myself, I feel like I’m no longer a part of the conversation. When I scramble to put a IG post together, I find myself glued onto my screen, looking at the likes coming in, responding to comments, chatting on DM. I scroll, I read the captions of other people’s posts, leave comments, and write more DMs. It’s nice, and I feel like I’m part of a community, but before I know it, an hour or two has gone by. On a day when all I do is post a few stories in the morning of what I’m wearing that day, and scroll through a bunch of posts from other people, I easily spend well over two hours on IG. On days when I’m more active on IG, my total screen time on my phone approaches five hours.  

The past two weeks I’ve entertained the thought of leaving Instagram. What would happen to my style if I did? Would I still wear the same clothes? How much of my style identity is subconsciously tied to the validation I get from others on IG, and how would I feel about my clothes and my style without it? If I didn’t have my outfit history on IG to lean on, who would I be? If I don’t deposit my outfits into the communal memory bank that is Instagram, what type of style language do I speak? What would I draw from to construct my style identity? More importantly, what could I do with the time that I’d no longer spend on social media?

Last week I was sitting on the bus one evening, on my way home from work. I had tucked my phone deep inside my handbag in an attempt to stop killing time on social media, and as I was looking out of the window, I saw a woman standing at a bus stop. She wore a navy high-collared chore coat, a pair of navy, cropped, straight-leg cotton trousers, bright white ankle socks, black simple lace-up shoes, and a navy busboy cap that covered her black sharp bob. In a sea of other people wearing cropped hoodies, leggings and sneakers, she looked remarkable. I began to wonder how many people like her I miss every day when I’m too busy looking at my phone, at an alternative reality, at a curated feed that’s designed to keep me holding my attention and scrolling indefinitely? The truth is that I don’t remember seeing anything on Instagram that compares to the feeling of seeing an interestingly dressed person in real life. That’s not to say that I don’t see great style on IG, because I do, but the algorithm just repeats itself, and what you’ve liked before affects what type of images and people you see more of, and I find myself not getting exposed to all that many new ideas. I decided to begin an experiment and observe people in real life for a few days during my work commute.

My bus takes me from suburban Helsinki to Töölö, a posh neighborhood near-downtown, then I take a short tram ride to Kallio where my shop is located: a former factory workers’ housing area, currently the home to small brick-and-mortar shops, trendy bars and restaurants, students and young adults, but also the disadvantaged, drug users and old drunks. It’s fascinating how differently people dress in the shadows of my algorithm-induced IG feed. On the bus I mostly spot teens in their Y2K-gear, young men wearing band t-shirts with plain jeans and sneakers, and older ladies in floral dresses, cotton knit cardigans and orthopedic sandals. The closer I get to the posh neighborhood, the more I begin to see practically indistinguishable young women wearing oversized blazers or motorcycle leather jackets with cropped jeans or black leggings, teamed with big sneakers and designer leather totes, or alternatively, Cecilia Bahnsen -inspired colorful poofy dresses worn with sneakers and Marimekko crossbody bags. Older women wear white skinny jeans with classic sneakers, a plain t-shirt or a nondescript print blouse cut close to the body, pearls, and gold jewelry. As I move closer to the part of town where my shop is located, I start to see more experimental outfits: young people in full-on colorful 1980s sports gear, young adults in obscure, oddball designer clothes and ill-fitting but strangely cool vintage finds, women in their early 60s bravely mixing tacky leopard prints with tacky florals, pedal pushers, wedge espadrilles and blue eyeshadow, teens wearing old school hip hop styles, punk rockers of all ages in painted or fringed leather jackets, skinny jeans and Doc Martens, old women in slightly flared beige trousers, loafers, beige A-line coats and beige bucket hats… everything goes here, and it’s glorious.

These past few days that I’ve been away from Instagram have felt invigorating. I find myself questioning the concept of “good style”. As fun as it is to sometimes analyze and dissect what types of clothes we like, what we buy, and how we dress, maybe our method of discussing our style in general, and on Instagram in particular, has become too calculated. There’s a commercial, shopping-related aspect to IG that’s inescapable: we buy, therefore we have style, therefore we post images in which we wear the things we have bought. Then we buy more, so that we can have more style. We pay so much attention to the products we buy, and how our clothing choices look on the outside rather than how it really makes us feel when we get dressed. There’s a difference between wearing what you think might channel the person you are inside to the outside world, and wearing the clothes that you naturally gravitate toward, for no particular reason, except that they appeal to you.

I’m thinking that the real value of analyzing one’s style is not about style at all. It’s actually about shopping. Having a more calculated approach to one’s style can help us curb our urge to keep shopping, and playing with style adjectives or style words might really help us shop smarter. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Real style is something else though. It seems to me that the people whose personal style seems by far the most personal are the ones who just wear their clothes and get on with their lives: the punks, the middle-aged women in their tacky animal and floral prints and blue eyeshadow, the old ladies who’ve worn their beige bucket hats since the 1970s. 

I guess this is just a very convoluted way of saying that I will be taking an extended break from Instagram. We’ll see where that takes me. I will report my results here. If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter yet, I urge you to do so now. You will get the newsletter directly into your email inbox that way. I hope I will be able to cultivate some interesting conversation here, because I will sorely miss my people who stay on Instagram — the outfits they might post, the conversations, the sharing, the friendships. It scares me to leave it all behind for now, but I hope the connections survive, in the form of the comments section here on Substack.