Pinterest and the Hegemony of Style
This essay explores the ways in which photo sharing apps and social media (specifically Pinterest, but more broadly as well) can reinforce exclusive, hierarchical ideas of beauty through their visual language and send harmful messages about what it means to be fashionable. It also details my personal journey grappling with the ways in which I internalized an invented affinity between “fashionability,” slimness, and whiteness, how I am beginning to resist it, and where I go from here.
If you were to make a new account on popular photo sharing app Pinterest and search “Trendy Dresses,” “Women’s Fashion,” “Summer Outfits,” or the like, an algorithm would gladly come up with a page of images designed to please you. You might notice that these pictures share several commonalities. They will invariably look chic and polished, featuring women confidently sporting model off-duty looks yet somehow making it look effortless. If their face is in the shot, it is probably to beam at the camera or stare into the distance with a bored, languid expression. Their shooting locations may be marginally more diverse, but will still likely fall into a handful of categories: bustling New York cityscape, sophisticated mirror selfie in a manicured bedroom, or a beach drenched in evening sun.
And, odds are, nearly all the women in the photos will be blonde, white, and thin.
I discovered Pinterest in 2015 and have since derived most of my style inspiration from the platform. That is to say a lot of inspiration. Yet, in several years of scrolling through my Pinterest, I rarely saw girls who looked like me. More than once, I would search “style inspiration” — a neutral, if not boring request — and see nothing but thin white women populate my screen, not-so-subtly suggesting that having “style” meant being white and thin just as much as it meant having cute clothing. Occasionally, a black woman would appear in the results without me explicitly asking, the infrequency of this occurrence making it feel like more like an anomaly than anything else: a glitch in the circuit, a bug in the almighty algorithm. Even then, the tendency for these women to have lighter skin and thinner frames, like me, was painfully clear, evidence that the “acceptable” could only deviate so much from the standard.
Despite insistently denying it, fashion, with all its manufactured trends and seasons and faux pas, and, is incredibly exclusive. It rarely rewards any meaningful undermining of the status quo. Fear of upsetting any aspect of the fashion industry, from that season’s color trends to the racist, classist, exclusionary structures which have defined it for centuries, often leads to these standards being perpetuated. Louis Voitton is luxury — you don’t question it. Skinny jeans are out of style — you don’t question it. Thin and white means fashionable — you don’t question it — until you do. I, like most people, was content to be conditioned. To be safe and comfortable with the status quo, never questioning or disrupting. But eventually, even that began to change. All I know is that one day, everything I took for granted as “the way things are” was suddenly and overwhelmingly a lie. And there was no clearer evidence that I had bought into the lie than my Pinterest board, which had now become nothing more than an aesthetically pleasing indictment. Now that I saw the problem, the solution seemed clear: step outside of the popular, conventional pictures. Try and find people who don’t simply appear on the front page. Refine your searches to be more intentional than “winter outfit inspiration.”
But the simple, crushing fact was that I shouldn’t have to. Having to type in a personal descriptor just to see a girl who looked like me was as clear a sign if there ever were one that I lay outside of the enforced and unspoken default. It was Pinterest’s way of gently reminding you that something about you — your skin, your size, your hair — wasn’t marketable or favored.
Black girls are far from the only ones who experience this. On Pinterest, unless you invariably want to see young white women with visible ab muscles and beach blonde hair, you either have to plainly request it or hammer the algorithm into submission. Pinterest sending such an unambiguous message about the type of content that is most worthy of promotion (to Pinterest’s credit, the same content is all but guaranteed to be the most popular amongst users) should come as no surprise to me, a Black woman who has lived twenty-one years in a country which has always viewed whiteness as the universal, the ideal, the default. It should surprise me even less that the fashion industry, which places whiteness and thinness among its most revered traits, would operate under the same exclusive, deterministic standard.
What did surprise me, however, was my own willingness to buy into it. At first, I was content to save nothing but images recommended to me and draw inspiration from the most popular fashion boards. Indeed, there was a kind of comfort in it, a certain reassurance of normality sandwiched into the thin white border between images on a screen. But as I spent more time on the app, a disquietude began to descend over me. Subtle at first, then insistent. I’m not sure what caused it. Maybe maturity, maybe restlessness, maybe some inexplicable chemical reaction in my brain. Regardless, I began to feel acutely aware of the absurdity that was saving picture after picture of girls who I would never look like to a board entitled “Looks to Try,” because, however we may wish they weren’t, these images are incredibly telling in their curated, aspirational nature. They dictate ideas of what is beautiful, worthy of recreating, worthy of desiring. With a flick and tap of my thumb, with the mechanical indifference of sending a text message or setting an alarm, I convinced myself that being thin, white, and pretty was all but a prerequisite for being “fashionable.”
But why can’t I just be content to scroll along the endless sea of photos? Accept my place on the ladder of beauty with respect to the ideal Pinterest girl? Measure myself and others against a normative, exclusive standard of beauty? Aside from the obvious self-delusion that was me saving images of refined ladies dining in Paris to a secret Pinterest board while lying in bed in sweatpants, the nail in the coffin was convincing myself that this certain archetype of a “fashionable woman” was real at all. Photo sharing apps, in particular Pinterest and Instagram, are hardly the democratic platforms many herald them as. They are ripe with connotations of desirability and worth: prisms through which beauty standards are both reflected and decisively filtered. The perfect fashion influencer is omnipresent: she is always smiling, always beautiful, always dressed to fulfill an aesthetic.
Her photos are popular for a reason. Conformity to a standard brings satisfaction — easy, cheap, superficial satisfaction, but satisfaction nonetheless. Yet it comes at the cost of the self-worth of women and girls who do not typify the ideal that is the face of fashion, who often feel ashamed and othered because we do not fit into the grand model of perfection and profitability. The algorithm had assigned us and everyone else a value, and ours was not a high one.
I do not just take issue with Pinterest recommending certain images over others. I take issue with the message this clearly sends, which, for me, comes in the form of a reminder. A reminder that women who do not fit that narrow criterion — thin, white, conventionally beautiful — may dress to the nines, but not be seen as fashionable. They may have everything we desire in a person but never be celebrated as desirable. It is a reminder that there will always be a distance between me and the ideal, that on social media, if I am seen as fashionable at all, it will often be in spite of, not because of, my blackness. It is a reminder that as a black woman, I am never the default: I am an exception, a special request, an addendum.
I like to think I unlearned internalized self-hatred for my blackness long ago. But in my overwhelmingly white Pinterest boards, I saw an 8-year-old girl praying for straight hair and hiding in the shadows because she was afraid of the sun. I saw a girl for whom tan lines held the unspeakable, whose hair and nose were less features that made her feel beautiful than ones she’d rather forget.
For that girl, the next several years of life consisted of an arduous cycle of forging her identity, or more accurately, gluing it together, piece by piece, until it resembled something whole. Years later, long after she thought she was finally done doubting herself, she would still sing along to the chorus on social media which exalted the women her 8-year-old self wanted to be, over and over. Though, perhaps in a slight improvement from her girlhood, now the notion of beauty she saw was so narrow, so complete, that it led her to conceive of her own beauty not as lesser, but as simply not there.
I am not the first person to point out Pinterest’s diversity problem. I hope I won’t be the last. At the end of the day, all my grief over a photo sharing app that I could delete off of my phone in two seconds if I wanted probably doesn’t matter, and perhaps it doesn’t need to. Ultimately, Pinterest is simply the messenger. It goes without saying that similar hegemonic beauty standards are at play all across the digital multimedia world and beyond. I doubt that collective awareness of the issue will do anything to change it anyway. It may be, soberingly, that a generation which insists upon itself as being more inclusive and accepting than its predecessors does so precisely because of its unyielding adherence to the realm of conventional aspiration. After all, I am still saving these images to my Pinterest, am I not?
Not entirely, anymore. Undoubtedly, I could rail against the algorithm, the unjustness of being made to feel like an afterthought, and the suffocating, oppressive hegemony of “beauty.” But, ultimately, I also had to reckon with the ways in which I had reinforced, normalized, and naturalized an ideal which did not reflect my reality. On social media, preserving the status quo is not only easy, it is encouraged. I let the images I saved on an app lull me into complicity, into believing that to be fashionable meant not just having cute clothes, but an infinite supply of them, alongside flawless skin, a picturesque backdrop of quaint Spanish architecture, a thin hourglass figure, 24 karat gold jewelry, and wavy hair framing a striking, modelesque face.
How bizarre. How bizarre that something as universal and personal as self-adornment and expression be made to feel so exclusive. Fashion belongs to everyone. Not to the wealthy and elite, not to thin white people, not to Instagram models and Italian designers. It belongs to the marginalized, it belongs to queer people, to Black and Brown and Indigenous people, people of all shapes and sizes, to the people not deemed as beautiful. It belongs to us too.
At the end of the day, I have the autonomy to seek out content on Pinterest that interests and reflects me. This means going beyond “outfit inspiration” and exploring the parts of Pinterest that are too often overlooked and underappreciated (at least by me): Street fashion, Korean and Japanese fashion, Igbo fashion, Ethiopian fashion, queer fashion, vintage fashion, DIY fashion, dapper fashion, and yes, Pinterest, “Black girl fashion” also known as just fashion. If I really want to explore fashion beyond what is conventional, I have to take the added steps of searching for terms I’ve never searched (impossible, I know), and maybe stomaching some initial discomfort. But along the way, I will support creators on Pinterest who don’t look like the most popular creators. I’ll circulate their content. I’ll draw inspiration from their creativity, and question my own ingrained belief of what being fashionable even means. I’ll go beyond the algorithm’s spoon-fed recommendations and find content that challenges and destabilizes Eurocentric hegemonies of beauty. Pinterest won’t make it easy, but I’m up to the challenge. And though it will take effort, most things worth doing do.
