My Fashionista Experience

My Fashionista Experience

Intro

So this is something that I had been meaning to make a video about for a long time, but I never actually got around to making. It's the kind of thing that you have to have very specific experience with to like make a video on, but like I thought it would be fun to make. Here is my experience as a post successful niche internet fashion microcelebrity

So I was a popular Instagram influencer. To begin, I’m not autistic but I'm the type of person who hyperfixates on completing things I’m intrigued by or am envious of. When I have a clear goal in mind of what I want I just go for it, and by that I mean spending hours upon hours in my room until 3 in the morning working on a project, or working for months on end to complete a particular goal. As long as I have a clear picture of it in mind and the ambition to throw my life away, I will put my all into any task.

Around 2023 on Tiktok, I began seeing all these fashion videos where people were wearing cool clothes. Some major brands like Affliction and Tapout weren’t that big yet, but I already knew it was catching on. 

At the time I had already been making videos, and had been since I was really young. I already knew how to use editing programs to put videos together, and I even made some random videos on Tiktok but nothing contributing to an online image, moreso just using my skills on random projects.

So I’d be watching these videos and be thinking to myself “I could totally do this, like this is relatively easy.” I already knew the algorithm strategies because at this point I had already been popular on another social media platform but for a different skill, which is a whole other video in itself. 

I especially knew the algorithm because I had been a part of it myself, as a consumer. I watched Tiktok videos on fashion daily at this point in my life, so it was easy to imagine what to do. These particular videos and community was driven by people relatively around my age as well, so it wasn’t something I needed like professional equipment for or necessary life experience.

I began buying clothes from depop, since high school me was working after school everyday and decided to spend a third of my biweekly paycheck on clothing hauls. Looking back on it now, the community demographic was that of people in highschoool, which is probably the primary reason i’m not really interested in making content like this anymore but we’ll get into that later

The actual instagram I was using to make these posts on, I had created the summer or junior year, so I was relatively older when it came to the demographic of the community, but all it really meant was I had more experience with promoting myself. By senior year of high school, I was still well within the demographic for this kind of thing. 

Mutuals

When I wasn’t in class, or at work, I had all the time in the world to post about my outfits. When I was in the bus or in the hallways, or even during a boring class, I’d be making mutuals or thinking about spots to post. I think it's easy to grow mutuals when you're at school because I feel like a lot of people especially in high school are focused on outfits in general. In high school that's like one of the main things that people are focused on in the first place so it's easy to gain mutuals because most of the people who are interested in those things are also the same age as me.

As popularity grew, I began as a front runner, because even though it was kind of already popular, on tiktok, it hadn't gotten main attention from the general public yet. Its kinda really interesting to think about because nowadays the general basis for a good outfit is baggy pants and something vintage. Idk maybe it's always been that way.

It was honestly a double edged sword, the idea that it hadn’t reached mainstream platforms yet. This meant that I had an opportunity to become big in an area that hadn’t been capitalized on yet, but it also meant I had to stand out among other people just as ambitious as me to become popular in this scene.

There were a few things I did to gain more attention than others. 

Notice how there’s a difference between people you’re competing against and people who are your mutuals. For people who have no idea what the life of similar content creators are like behind just enjoying their content, let me break it down for you.

Mutuals, or Moots as you’ll see on videos or in hashtags, are people who create similar content to you. If you’re on tiktok, a mutual could be someone who uses the same sounds as you, or wears a similar genre of fashion to you. The point of gaining a mutual is to benefit both the creators and the audience. 

For the creators, they can actively promote each other and get their audiences both interested in similar creators such as themselves, and effectively grow in the process. For audiences, they not only get to enjoy content from the person they’re following, but will get more content from different people with the same interests.

Group chat method

The most common way people do this on instagram is through group chats, where some persona relatively larger than everyone else adds a ton of people with similar content into a gc, and everytime a new person posts everyone in the groupchat will repost that person’s content. 

There were times I got invited to group chats like these but they often just became very inactive so in my experience maybe this is a more old way of doing things? The way I gained mutuals was more individualized. Instead of waiting for some popular dude to add me to a group chat, I just went to the people with the largest influence at the time and stalked the absolute shit out of their following. 

Following People who reposted them with similar followings to mine made it easier to get in contact. Once we followed each other back, I’d be hella active by reposting all their new shit, commenting, swiping up on their stories, and not only to just them. Whenever I found someone they knew, I’d do the same thing to them, and eventually get to know a whole circle of people without being in any sort of group chat with any of them.

Whenever I made a post, I’d use the feature that allowed me to see everyone who promoted it, and individual reply to EVERY SINGLE PERSON. If you want loyal mutuals, the more individually consistent you are, you will definitely gain loyal mutuals.

How I stood out

There were tons of things that I did to stand out from the rest of creators in my league. Since I already had digital media skills, like editing and the understanding of how to promote content to multiple platforms, I created a method to get as much attention as possible and still have content that varied from those around me.

The Structure / My process of creating pds content

First, I’d buy clothing off some second hand site, mainly depop, or I’d thrift some clothing to use for a post. This meant in real life outside of school and work I’d go to the thrift everyday, hoping to get a new find. After putting together a pretty sick outfit, I’d usually wear it to school to stunt on the 304s, and then think of a post idea to execute when I got out of school. 

Using digital cams to take photos

Then, I’d use cameras that bring a vintage aesthetic. At the time, digital cameras were popular but not for the purpose of instagram photos. What most people my age didn’t realize was digital cameras had significantly better quality photos than iphone cameras, but I didn’t use the cameras to get better quality photos, noooo…

I wanted the shittiest quality I could get. Relatively of course, like I wasn’t uploading straight mosaic pictures. The first camera I bought was a Vivitar, and for my first digital camera, it worked pretty well. The photos came out in a way that could definitely not be recreated in any image editing app, so all of my posts would look distinctly like my own. The coolest part about this camera, or atleast what most people online loved, was it’s ability to record low quality but aesthetically pleasing videos.

I’d use the digital camera to take photos of the outfit, typically in different environments with the same theme. A lot of mutuals were in the city and didn’t have access to woodsy-like environments such as I, so most of them took place outside somewhere in the woods, but never the same exact place.

After taking photos, I would take all the photos and pick the best ones, add slight adjustments to them, and make them square aspect ratio. Then I would pick a song, go into CapCut, and I would edit the song behind them. This was because at the time my account didn't have the feature to put music over the profile since it was just being rolled out. This was also better than using the music feature instagram gave anyway because I could put music over individual slides which made it more presentable and I could use songs that were popular with my audience.

After the photos were finished, I’d usually make the last slide a video from my camera. My digital camera recorded video footage that was all grainy and distorted, which kind of added to that kind of imagery I was trying to present. I would post a video from the camera as the last slide of the instagram post, and as a reel.

This was great because not only would I be getting attention from the instagram post, but the reel would be getting attention from people who only used reels, which were VERY popular at this time, I’m guessing because it's video format and not just pictures. The reels would also bring more people over to the instagram post, getting more attention. Even when I wasn’t doing outfit posts with videos with them, I would post reels of other content at the same time. 

I know this sounds like a complicated process, but I promise you, if you do this like 10 times, it just becomes an easy thing to do. In fact, relatively recently I did it again because I remembered all of the steps.

My post making was so intricate that I even pinpointed the times my mutuals were most active during the week and posten them, even if I had created the post days or weeks earlier. 

Why I got bored of it

The issue for me with getting really good at something is that there’s always a process that ends because of a developed understanding of said thing.

An example is being really good at drawing. When you’re a beginner, you love drawing because you're practicing things that you never knew how to do before. As you're perfecting your skills, it's getting even better, which is technically the best part because you’re actively watching your improvement and growth. Eventually when you’ve practiced for a long time you get to a certain point that every drawing is the same because it follows the same structure. It's not that drawing isn’t fun, it's that you see art as a structural process because of your developed understanding of the task.

Structure is used to create everything. If you're gonna draw a face, you need this face shape. If you're gonna draw lips, you need this lip shape. You don't have to use the same one, but when most people develop an art style, which is basically just how they like their art presented, they stick to a structure.

And so, for fashion, I began to understand the way that the algorithm worked. I understood, okay, every outfit needs these things. Once you get these things, this is the layout. Now, you can customize these things to your liking, but you're still following that same layout. Regardless of the material or style, it's kind of just the same process, especially when you're grouped into a specific demographic of clothing. So for me, I was the Y2K baggy affliction guy, but this was before any of the hashtags had been created. So of course I was garnering more attention than other people. 

It's not that anyone else could have done this, truly anyone ambitious enough with an available opportunity could definitely do this, people probably even are right now.

The fall-off

The fall off began when I started having other stuff going on in my life. Mainly, the fact that my last year of high school was ending had a big part. I was slowly becoming less inclined to the ideals, although obviously I am still interested, it just got to a point where repeating the entire post-making process was more tedious than anything. Like how I mentioned earlier with structure, after understanding and accomplishing the process you worked so hard for, it just feels like work, and I had lots of important things in my life on the way, like college for one.

Now working more since school was out, most of my money began going to a lot of my other hobbies. I still enjoyed fashion, but the fashion I wanted to get more involved in was more expensive, and didn’t fit the current brand that was my persona at the time. While it’s true I could have been ambitious enough to slowly steer my following into the world of fashion I had began to take more interest in, I lacked the ambition at the time and my priorities were changing. 

Second instagram account

This also lead to me creating a second instagram account. I wasn’t directly private about the account, and I let people on my other one know I was using this new account, but I only followed close friends and people I knew in real life, excluding a lot of the mutuals that I had made on my other account. The persona I had created had kept me from sharing things I began loving because I felt confined as a content creator to keep promoting the things I already had been, so I created the new account to sort of escape it.

I still enjoyed fashion, and most of the summer I attempted to create my own clothes from scratch, but most of that was separate from the persona I had created on prettydemonswag. I started a whole new page dedicated to my life during the summer, somehow dividing my high school self and my college self this way, although It’s not like my interests changed so much I needed to isolate the two.

So that is my story with being involved in the instagram/tiktok fashion scene!