The Instagram Theme Party™ (trademark ours) is everywhere, and it requires you to dress to code.
Sundresses studded with a faux-watercolor seashell print. A pair of pajama shorts sporting a flimsy pocket, embroidered with the words: “To Do List: Take a nap.” Beaded earrings in the shapes of strawberries, lobsters, Easter eggs. A maxi skirt adorned with a vintage botanical illustration print of cherries, lemons, and radishes.
If you’ve ventured into a fast fashion venue irl in the past year, you, like us, may have found yourself sifting through racks of months-out-of-date Eras Tour or Cowboy Carter costumes, exorbitantly priced t-shirts proclaiming “Go Sports!” or “I Just Hope Both Teams Have Fun,” or vague Amalfi Coast-inspired prints. As we filtered through the racks, we couldn’t help but wonder: who is wearing all of this, and where are they wearing it? If our Instagram reel pulls are anything to go off of, these clothes aren’t doomed to dwell alone on the racks of Anthropologie, but instead to be worn only once—at a bachelorette weekend with a strict day-by-day dress code, or a “Tinis and Weenies” backyard dinner, or a “neon disco” themed house party. These are outfits that are curated for a social media post and then discarded. The Instagram Theme Party™ (trademark ours) is everywhere, and it requires you to dress to code.
Buyers of say, Anthropologie’s $108 Crack-N-Peel Crab Shack mini dress, are more likely to flaunt it on our feeds as part of a Lobster Themed Dinner Party than on an actual New England vacation—much less wear it for any occasion in everyday life. One influencer’s July event (which featured lobster-printed name tags, lobster-shaped silverware holders, a cake with sliced strawberries arranged in a decapodal shape, and actual lobster, corn, and crack-and-peel crab) is but one instance of an increasingly ubiquitous brand of intimate gathering that is not only Instagram-ready, but which arguably could not and would not exist without social media at all.
Symptomatic of more than just micro-aesthetics like Sardine Girl Summer, Coastal Luxury, or Crustacean Chic, objects like the Crack-N-Peel Crab Shack dress represent what we call material signs of algorithmic life (full disclosure, one of us owns a sardine necklace and once proudly identified as a Tinned Fish Girl, but now she’s just kind of embarrassed. The other of us is unwilling to give up her multiple pairs of lemon earrings). They are ritual talismans for a kind of choreographed sociality that both relies on and is reproduced by algorithmic culture and platform capitalism, a solution to the loneliness of adult life that promises new kinds of togetherness through a terminally online roster of sets, costumes, and scripts.
On the face of it, the new abundance of these algorithmic props might be explained away with a pithy diagnosis, as they often are via Instagram or TiKTok comments: overconsumption core and recession indicator are two partially valid if overly facile explanations. These brief dismissals speak to a broad suspicion of product placement on social media, but gloss over more nuanced entanglements between lived sociality and mediated style. “Overconsumption core” is usually appended to hygiene hauls and drawers stocked with endless colorways of Stanley Cups, consumption habits that feel more tied to “self-care” and status signaling rather than bespoke social gatherings. “Recession indicator” has become a bloated catch-all meme for a spectrum of consumption patterns ranging from conservative coded protein-maxxing to Ke$ha’s triumphant return to the charts. For some, Instagrammable props might even signify a form of dopamine dressing, an artifact of the pandemic which more or less equates to wearing clothes that boost your mood, usually in the form of bright colors and bold patterns. While “overconsumption core,” “recession indicator,” and “dopamine dressing” speak to the migration of internet trends into daily practice, none capture the distinctly algorithmic feeling of fast fashion as a social form—what we might call the Instagram Theme Party™-ification of everyday life.
To some, the Instagram Theme Party™’s required costuming may well provoke a faux nostalgia for a certain era of millennial frat party, where themes like Anything But Clothes, Après Ski, or the infamous Corporate Hoes & CEOs once abounded. To others, these trends extend the long history of costumery, which has critically shaped and is in some ways indistinguishable from the couture moments that eventually trickle down in cursed forms to mass market. As unapologetic lovers and hosts of themed birthdays and murder mystery parties ourselves, however, we find that these props are distinct from other costume trends both in their inseparability from our explore pages, and also in how they co-orchestrate new algorithmic socialities. Most interestingly, these algorithmic props represent an intrusion of digital culture and platform economy into physical space. These theme-party clothes speak to how online life shapes offline space, and how we make our bodies move through it.
We are far from the first to notice this. Critics of Instagram fashion have already powerfully roasted “explore page” outfits, the irl ensembles collaging TikTok micro-aesthetics and brands that employ Instagram heavily for advertising. As fashion commentator Alexandra Hildreth told Vogue, “you can tell someone’s screentime from their outfit.” Critiques of “explore page style” often focus on condemning the exhaustingly swift and unsustainable micro-trend cycle; others invoke social media’s role in provoking the death of and deceptive overemphasis on curating personal style. On the whole, they are chastised for being cringe, not just aesthetically, but in terms of what they reveal about our own relationships to the internet. Hildreth’s claim that personal style has become “trapped in the algorithm’s echo chamber” suggests that such material signs easily betray our ostensibly private digital habits. Complicating this argument further, brand strategy consultant and creator Eugene Healey argues that “the microtrend has become a low status behavior.” Our awkward attempts at bringing blokecore or mobwife into meatspace only reveal just how terminally online we are. As Healey suggests, getting off the grid—or at least performing off-the-gridness—is the greatest luxury, crystallizing “irl as a new status symbol.”
But going beyond accounts of fashion as indexing our on- or off-line status, we want to point to the ways that “explore page style,” the Instagram Theme Party™, and the like both represent and produce shifts in how we relate to our bodies and how we relate to each other. In other words: not only reputation or “cringe” are at stake here. Instead, we emphasize how digital life and datafiction continue to reshape the social. Theorizing “explore page style” necessitates that we recognize the material transplantation of algorithmically aggregated content onto real bodies. We are interested in how that transplantation fuels and subsists on what we might think of as “explore page events” like the Instagram Theme Party™. That is to say, we find ourselves thinking not just about the Crack-N-Peel dress, but also about why we feel compelled to host the Crack-N-Peel Party at all. The material signs of algorithmic culture we’ve stumbled upon in Anthropologie, Target, and Urban Outfitters are costumes for social spectacles that are designed to be shared, as invitations to “turn your home into a coffee shop” or “dress as your type.” These invitations themselves are starting to make less and less sense without short form, algorithmically managed platforms. The theme party is obviously not new, nor is uploading evidence of social gatherings online; at least one of us has several Facebook albums documenting decade-themed college parties from 2010. “Explore page events” are distinct both in how they are manufactured and conditioned by platform capitalism, and also in how their necessary props and scripts materialize ever-awkwardly for consumers. These material signs of algorithmic lift reflect not only how we present our bodies to each other (online and off), but also point to the ways that algorithms shape how we interact.
In other words, we consider these material signs of algorithmic life not only as born-digital commodities, but also as indications of a larger trend of social gatherings that feel like ways of compensating for our degraded sociality—and for our fears of living lives that are (or seem) alienated and uninteresting. In some cases, these objects and events feel overcompensatory because they index both what we can have and what we cannot. Most of us cannot jaunt off to the Amalfi Coast at whim, but we can shop from Target’s Amalfi Coast section and sip an aperol spritz on our porch. Matcha is expensive and apparently performative, so we turn our own apartments into a cafe. In other cases, the Instagram Theme Party seemingly grants us both an identity and a point-of-view. The often heternormative Dress Up Like Your Type party—where partygoers dress as finance bros, “chill guys,” or actual red flags—performs a cheeky, quasi-feminist solidarity (look at us all liking shitty dudes together!) that is ultimately as superficial as the “men being vulnerable and eating meat together” nights that plague at least one of our feeds. More broadly, amidst feelings of loneliness and instability, we find a script to play out—and corporations are all too happy to provide the costumes needed for us to inhabit our roles. If we can gamify every gathering and brand every moment, then what is promised to us, as everyday people encountering algorithmic capitalism, is that we have an interesting life and we are not alone.
Explore page events are not devoid of joy, or community. In fact, “community” is trending right now: an evening’s doomscroll will have you landing on multiple comments along the lines of “everyone wants a village; no one wants to be a villager,” and “inconvenience is the price of community!” A response to the self-care genre of individualism, TikTok and Instagram have decided we have been protecting our peace a little too much—it is time to join the party again.
We agree to some extent, and amidst the deep isolation and alienation of algorithmic life (not to mention global crisis), we cannot blame anyone—including ourselves—for this emphasis on events that feel pre-scripted, complete with costumes and props, and ready to post. But to us, the explore page event is an intentionally misleading shortcut to community, a capitalist workaround for performing sociality and togetherness. The notion of community itself has become a prop for the algorithm, all the better to rake in the double-tap dopamine hits. And now we are left to swim in its ugly material discards, the glitter and sequins and microplastics left to litter our floors, trash cans, oceans.
And all of this has an expiration date. The Crack-N-Peel dress is doomed to cringedom upon arrival. But its cringe is not only a signal of our screentime, but also a symptom of the lag between the speed of the algorithm and the speed of even the fastest fashion. Brands like Anthropologie cannot physically compete with the pace of the algorithm, relegated instead to a catchup timeline—hoping to produce a Crack-N-Peel dress in time for its customers to still want to attend Crack-N-Peel parties. We cannot shake the feeling that these garments and gatherings are, first and foremost, algorithmic fodder. The genre of these gatherings is one that exists to be performed and recorded and shared online, rather than to foster real closeness between actual friends. The social connection these clothes promise is quickly worn out in the wearing of them. Romanticize your life, the platform beckons, by buying a bunch of stupid one-off crap, all the better to feed a hungry landfill with. Neither the landfill nor the gaping maw of alienation will be satisfied.
As summer swings into fall and soon winter, we know that Sardine Girl Summer will recede in favor of a new set of themes—perhaps pumpkin spice, tarot cards, Scandi Chic, or the perennial Gilmore Girls-core. The algorithm will continue to mark us with its material signs. But the gratifications offered by the Theme-Partyification of the world do not actually ease the needs beneath, whether for a meaningful identity or for the kind of togetherness that cannot be assembled through algorithmic scripts. For that, we need not another “shop the drop,” but the hard, unglamorous work of building another world.
Sarah Sgro is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Communication at Warren Wilson College and born-again poet. She once spent 72 hours doing a LARP of the hit reality series Traitors with her friends, which she definitely posted to Instagram.
Olivia Stowell is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, where she studies race, gender, and labor in television and new media. Her dream instagram theme party would be a Food Network party.
Article illustrations by Carolyn Jao.