After only 10 years of existence, Instagram has become a vital platform for the fashion industry—and vice versa. Fashion is now a big player in the social network, which in 2015 appointed Eva Chen as their director of fashion partnerships. With her contacts in the industry, she helped transform Instagram into the preferred medium for sharing all fashion-related content: An industry that, like the app, is all about image. Alongside the official profiles for luxury houses, designers and fashion museums, other accounts equally dedicated to the fashion ecosystem have flourished, allowing anybody to expand their horizons in this field.
The @prada.archive account, for example, with over 40,000 followers, celebrates the best looks created by Miuccia Prada. In a similar tone to the 2019 book Prada Catwalks, a compilation of the brand's past runway shows, the account helps to preserve Prada's archives, while refreshing the memory of an industry that occasionally forgets its past as it is constantly focused on the future. The account @margiela.archive, dedicated to Martin Margiela, follows the same format. Like its counterparts, @oldceline (created after Phoebe Philo's departure from Céline, which was then still written with an accent) and @whatmiuccia (following the evolution of Prada's style through the outfits worn by its founder), it demonstrates the reverence bestowed onto certain designers who are being preserved for posterity.
Some accounts focus on a certain time period, such as @unforgettable_runway which posts vintage photos and videos for its followers to (re)discover Versace or Mugler shows from the 80s, 90s and 00s. Others follow the example of @newbottega and explore contemporary fashion. Without forgetting the widely popular @diet_prada which, thanks to the extensive fashion knowledge of its founders, posts side-by-side images with incisive captions about the sources of inspiration for current collections and pieces, drawing parallels and even exposing acts of plagiarism and cultural appropriation.