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Marc Jacobs and Kevin Systrom have two very different digital footprints. Scroll through their respective Instagram feeds and you’ll find yourself in opposite worlds: one of a fashion savant working on his dream-inducing collections, the other of a Silicon Valley genius (and the founder of said social media platform), biking and hobnobbing with the likes of Hillary Clinton and the pope. But the overarching ideas that exist in those little square snapshots are far more connected than one might think. As creative powerhouses in different fields, Jacobs and Systrom both understand the power of images in “the age of Instagram,” a time in which pictures not only tell the stories of the day-to-day banal, but also define a person’s style and promote his or her brand. Right now, fashion and Instagram are powerfully, inextricably linked.
Today, Jacobs and Systrom came together with Vogue’s Creative Digital Director Sally Singer to discuss just that. Here are the most thought-provoking, Instagram “like”–worthy quotes from their Forces of Fashion panel.
“I used to consider social media, anti-social media. At the show last season, I insisted that the audience put away their devices for seven minutes—I mean, all I was asking was for everyone to spend seven minutes without an electronic thing attached to their arms. We insisted on that, but we gave all of the models phones and had the models take pictures of the audience as they left the space. Then, we posted all of those photos. It was something to sort of screw things up (and maybe piss people off a little bit), but it was good. It turned out well, and I think it’s important to keep playing with those things. This season, we went back to allowing everybody to do what they wanted. So, of course, the models were all taking pictures of each other backstage and posting them. I’ve realized that this is just the world we live in. I think it was my friend Lana [Wachowski] who said, ‘This is our experience right now.’ It’s not like you’re removed from the experience; this phone and this posting and this Instagram or this social media is part of what our experience is now. That’s what’s different about how we interact: Now it’s normal to have a phone with you at all times. I think it’s what our experience is with one another.” – Marc Jacobs
“If every single person in the United States counted twice, Instagram would still have more people using it every month than the number of people that live in the United States. We can’t get 50 percent of the people in the United States to vote. We have to be optimistic because we are one of the only platforms that can influence the world in a noninvasive way. If you look out in the world, where are you going to get your optimism from? Certainly not the news. So, when we cover events and we do programs, we ask ourselves: How can we be a force for good in the world?” – Kevin Systrom
“You asked a question about fashion and getting stuck with the fashion world: To think that if I could go back and talk to my high school self and be like, ‘You’re going to be on a panel called Forces of Fashion—you may not believe it right now, but they’re going to call you a force of fashion.’ It’s so funny to me. I just bear hug it. I’m not the best at it, but I learn a lot from the people on our team. I learn a lot from you guys, but you know, hopefully people here aren’t vying for my job as a computer programmer, either, so we can find a nice, happy balance. But I think I’ve learned a lot. In Silicon Valley the other day, they were like, ‘We decided that you are the most stylish CEO in Silicon Valley.’ I said, ‘Wow, well, thank you very much,’ and they said, ‘By the way, there’s no one else on the list.’ What I will say is that I’m flattered and I think the big thing for Instagram is that we want to stand for craft as a value. We want to stand for something that says craft is not an indulgence, but rather, it is a value that we all should hold in everyday work. That if we’re going to spend millions of dollars paying designers to craft beautiful code and pixels, it is not an indulgence to try to care about what you put on your body or what is out in the world. It’s both equivalent and compatible, so we should stand for craft as a value in Silicon Valley and not think of it as something that is high society. Rather, it is something that all of us should shoot for in our products. Code is beautiful; it’s not even luxurious, it’s beautiful.” – Kevin Systrom
Watch the Marc Jacobs Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear Show: