Who Are the Instagrammers Behind the Industry’s Favorite Fashion Accounts?

Instagram has some stellar archive- and throwback-focused handles in the mix right now. Feeds like @DZGaines and @VirgoMood are as addictive as they are painstakingly curated. Often focused on the ’90s and the ’00s, these accounts include rare images of collections and models pulled from the depths of the web, vintage independent magazines, or from the brink-of-extinction fashion forums. But who are the people behind these double-tap-worthy posts? Are they anonymous industry figures with an undying love for Naomi Campbell? Bored accounting majors living vicariously through early John Galliano interviews? High schoolers in small towns trawling the internet for long-lost detail shots from the Versace Spring 1992 collection? Those guesses aren’t too far off, as it happens. Here, learn a little bit more about each feed, who runs it, and most importantly, why you should follow it. Now, get ready to enter the Instagram fashion K-hole.

Instagram: @ThatBagIsFake

The account @ThatBagIsFake was started by 20-year-old university student Jorden Steward of Decatur, Illinois in 2013. It has a smaller following, but several of its followers are well-known, such as the photographers Mayan Toledano and Ib Kamara. It’s easy to see why the account has gained a small but dedicated fan base: It is a trove of digital gold that includes Channing Tatum circa his modeling days (hot!), Gwyneth Paltrow when she dated Luke Wilson (remember that?), and a close-up G-string moment from the Spring 1998 Gucci show (va va voom!). On average, Steward uploads up to 10 posts per day. “I love the mid-to-late ’90s—it was a minimal approach to the end of an era,” she explains in an email. “Street style was so fluid and minimal yet captured a glamour everyone could relate to, as well as the collections—it was a glamour that seemed attainable.”

The account arose from that familiar scenario of a small-town kid needing an outlet. “I didn’t know fashion could be a career until I was 16,” she writes. “I was in a fashion club in high school and we went on a trip to New York. I saw a lady with a monogram Dior saddlebag, I asked her who designed it, she said, ‘John Galliano.’ When I got back to my hometown, I started researching like crazy, discovering all of these designers, the world of couture, advertising, stylists. It was a new world for me.” What’s next? “I want to transfer to FIT in New York and maybe intern for some cool publications or stylists.” New York is waiting for you, @ThatBagIsFake.

Instagram: @virgomood

@VirgoMood is a haven for ’90s supermodel shots, dotted with the likes of Rebecca Romijn walking Hermès in 1995 and Karen Mulder strutting in bejeweled lingerie for Victoria’s Secret in 1998. Though the vibe is the proverbial opposite of a Virgo—a “shy” zodiac sign—it’s an outlet for its attention-averse creator, “A.C.,” a 21-year-old Chicago native and college student who works part-time as a retail associate. “I can’t speak for every Virgo, but for me, I love minimalism and I feel like that shows through my account,” he or she writes in an email. “Despite a lot of the extravagant pieces that I may post from time to time, I’m very simple.” On a typical day, A.C. spends “three to five hours on and off” searching sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, Google Images, Livingly, Vogue, The Fashion Spot, Bellazon, Fashion Anthology, and Flickr. “Rare runway pictures and editorials of my favorite supermodels and designers from the ’80s and ’90s are always a treasure to find,” A.C. writes. The curator’s favorite find so far? “That’s very easy. It’s a two-piece cropped women’s business suit from Rifat Ozbek’s Fall 1994 collection. It’s so beautiful to me, and I think it would still translate well today.”

Instagram: @DZgaines

Love a mid-2000s buff and brawny Bruce Weber–captured Abercrombie & Fitch moment? Or maybe a good J.Lo “I’m Real” screengrab is more your speed, or a young, baby-faced Catherine McNeil, or a stream of wispy models clutching block cellphones? If any of the aforementioned throwbacks strike a chord, then add @DZgaines to your follow list immediately. The account belongs to 25-year-old stylist assistant Daniel Gaines, a Miami native who moved to New York three years ago after graduating from Central Saint Martins in London.

Gaines spends two or more hours every day searching YouTube, Google, Tumblr, magazines, books, movies, and music for images or videos, or as he puts it: “Anywhere I can find the goods! I’m all about the hunt!” His favorite gems include: “Baby Kate Moss being interviewed at the Elite Model Look competition, the Sex and the City and The Matrix parodies from the MTV movie awards in 2000, and clips from Naomi Conquers Africa, when Naomi Campbell and a gaggle of other supermodels went to South Africa to meet with Nelson Mandela and do a charity fashion show, and Plum Sykes talking about getting dressed to work in the Vogue office.” That last one certainly hits home here.

Instagram: @HipHopUrbanPop

Mecca, a 22-year-old South Florida native, runs the wildly popular @HipHopUrbanPop account that boasts roughly 114,000 followers, including well-known ’grammers like @Gabriel_held_vintage and @Museuemmammy. It’s not exactly a fashion-based account, but it does, as its profile explains, bring “original nostalgic content to your IG feed.” Here, there are Y2K fashion personalities like a baby-faced Aaliyah, perpetually in low-slung pants, or a midriff-baring Mya. Other standouts include a rare screengrab of Jay-Z and Beyoncé having a denim-on-denim couple moment on TRL in 2000, Mariah Carey wearing a tube top and a belly chain, and a very unzipped TLC.

The ’90s and the early 2000s “forever will be my favorite era because they really did shape a lot of the things we see and hear today as far as fashion and music,” writes Mecca in an email. “When you look in a magazine, you see designers recreating looks from the ’90s, or if you listen to the recording artists of today, you can see how they take pieces from ’90s to the ’00s.” Favorite and rare moments include “some outtakes I’ve posted once of Missy Elliott and shots of Aaliyah by Eric Johnson. Super rare; he’s a really dope photographer!” writes Mecca. “I’ve also dug up my archives for clips from the TV series Cousin Skeeter. Fun fact: You can get a bit of that ’00-era-flavored style at Mecca’s e-commerce site shopflymecca.com in the form of sunglasses and clothes.

Instagram: @Oneofakind.archive and @another___kind

These related accounts by a pair of coworkers have posted some major rarities, like two looks from the Fall 1996 collection by the short-lived label GR 816 by Claude Sabbah and Gilles Rosier, a pubic bone–grazing pant moment from Alexander McQueen from Fall 1995, and a pre-Jacquemus larger-than-life hat seen at the Spring 1997 Yohji Yamamoto collection. (Though both feeds share similarities, @another.kind showcases more art- and film-themed posts.) The handles belong to 23-year-old Gregory ( @Oneofakind.archive) and 25-year-old James (@another___kind), and are dedicated to the archival One of a Kind collection (sold at 1stDibs.com), where they’ve worked for the last five years. “Starting here was our first introduction to fashion,” the duo writes. “The collection of 5,000 garments dating from the 1920s to the 2000s really opened our eyes to what real fashion was.”