Photographable femininities in women’s magazines and on Instagram

Introduction

Despite the recent radical changes in print media and the trend of decline in sales of printed magazines (Craik, 2019), the predictions of the death of the magazine that proliferated in the last decades seem to have been gravely exaggerated (Husni, 2008). Women’s magazines’ printed editions continue to reach large numbers of readers; the UK editions of Cosmopolitan (2019) and Vogue (2019) average almost one million readers, while Glamour (2019), ¹ following its recent change to a bi-yearly format, reaches around 350,000 readers – according to the magazines’ yearly media kits (information packages for prospective advertisers, introducing the magazines, their reach and audience profiles). Women’s fashion magazines thus remain an influential presence in our contemporary media panorama (Gill, 2007: 180), helping to circulate narratives and conventions of femininity (Moeran, 2006: 727).

However, women’s magazines exist in a complex and diversified media landscape, co-existing with newer digital and social media platforms. Among these, Instagram has become increasingly popular. According to the latest available numbers, Instagram has reached over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide (Constine, 2018). The platform has become a staple in the everyday social media use of numerous people and is part of the cultural media imaginary.

Women’s magazines and Instagram are thus inevitably interrelated, co-existing in a multi-layered and bi-directional intertextual relationship (Allen, 2006: 35–36). We understand the relationship between these media in terms of continuities and convergences (Bolter and Grusin, 2000), recognising that newer and established media exist in a continuous dialogue. Not only is newer media able to maintain and recombine some of the characteristics and qualities of older media formats, but also traditional media can be changed by the emergence of new media. As such, to adapt to the contemporary media landscape women’s magazines have repackaged themselves as transmedia brands, combining printed content with digital multimedia platforms, such as websites, mobile apps, or social media accounts (Duffy, 2013b). In this context, women’s magazines have started to make frequent references and allusions to digital media, in general, and Instagram, in particular, even adopting some of its conventions, discourses, and aesthetics (Caldeira, 2020). Yet this intertextual relationship is bi-directional; Instagram users can also incorporate ideals and conventions disseminated by traditional popular media into their own media production (De Ridder, 2014: 87–88). As such, it is essential to explore these media formats as embedded in wider cultural structures and media ecosystems, questioning how they mutually reshape each other and the conventions of representation of femininities they carry.

Both women’s magazines and Instagram can be understood as part of an increasingly aesthetic society (Manovich, 2020), where the production of visually pleasing images, objects, and experiences has become central not only to economic activities but to everyday life itself. As cultural products, magazines create aestheticised and often idealised images of femininity, through carefully edited and photographed fashion editorials, lifestyle articles, and celebrity content (Moeran, 2006). Initially conceived as an aesthetically oriented platform for sharing self-made photographs and making simple editing tools and filters widely accessible (Manovich, 2017: 73). Instagram is quickly becoming a particularly important realm of this aesthetic society (Manovich, 2020). The platform helped to establish and popularise recognisable Instagrammable aesthetic conventions and photographic practices (Manovich, 2017), which have helped to shape wider visual cultures.

Furthermore, both media formats can be considered from a gendered perspective. While women’s magazines are deliberately constructed with a predominantly female audience in mind (Hermes, 2008: 1), on Instagram this gendered aspect can be less deliberate. However, young women are among the predominant active users on the platform (We Are Social, 2019), and online self-representational practices are often stereotypically presented as gendered activities – mainly associated with young women and feminine vanity (Burns, 2015; Tiidenberg, 2018).

We must nonetheless recognise that women’s magazines and Instagram can operate according to essentially different logics, constructing their representations in distinct manners and often for distinct purposes. Women’s magazines are not only cultural products, they are also commodities – products of the fashion and print industries – and platforms for advertising, either in overt forms or integrated into editorial content, as advertorials (Moeran, 2006: 727). As such, commercial concerns underly the content production of women’s magazines (McCracken, 1993). While commercial interests are also indubitably present on Instagram – particularly in the cases of brands or influencers trying to monetise their social media use (Duffy and Hund, 2015) – the vast majority of people using Instagram are those we could consider ‘ordinary’ users and their photographic production takes place in relatively personal and everyday contexts. Yet, it is through these everyday practices that individuals enter conversations with broader conventions of representation circulated through traditional mainstream media and with hegemonic systems (Silverstone, 1994). By exploring the intertextual relationship between these two media formats we aim to question how the politics of gender representation are reified in everyday and aesthetic practices of content creation, revealing the nuances and even contradictions of these practices.

This research follows a feminist media studies perspective (Van Zoonen, 1994), focusing on issues of representation of women and femininities. It draws on well-established research into women’s magazines (e.g. Ballaster et al., 1993; McCracken, 1993), alongside the growing scholarship on gendered uses of digital and social media (e.g. Burns, 2015; Tiidenberg, 2018). In addition, this article seeks to broaden the still scarce scholarship on comparative approaches between these two media (e.g. Butkowski et al., 2020; Caldeira, 2020; Döring et al., 2016; Rocamora, 2012, 2017) building upon this scholarship. It extends the knowledge generated by earlier studies, such as Rocamora’s (2012) explorations of the mutual influences between traditional fashion media and fashion blogs, into the contemporary media ecology where social media platforms like Instagram have risen to prominence.

This research is empirically grounded in a cross-media qualitative comparative study (Palmberger and Gingrich, 2014) of a multi-sited textual analysis of both a sample of women’s magazines and a sample of Instagram users and their photographic self-representations. In this way, it complements previous studies of how women’s magazines have adapted to Instagram’s social media logic (Caldeira, 2020) with an empirical analysis of everyday self-representational practices of ‘ordinary’ Instagram users. By focusing on ‘ordinary’ users, rather than on influencers or fashion-oriented users, this article also addresses an under-explored relationship between these media forms, from which compelling tensions emerge. Furthermore, this article complements the scholarship that has addressed these intertextual relationships and their gendered aspects from a quantitative perspective (e.g. Butkowski et al., 2020; Döring et al., 2016), providing a nuanced qualitative account of these multi-layered representational practices.

The studied sample of women’s magazines comprises of three glossy fashion magazines – Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue. These titles were selected because they were the top three most-read women’s magazines (excluding housekeeping and cooking magazines) in the United Kingdom, at the date of the start of the study (National Readership Survey, 2015). The magazines were collected over six consecutive months, between April and September 2017, making a total of 18 issues. All editorial content (excluding advertisements and marked advertorials) containing photographs of women was analysed, totalling 1857 pages and 2697 images. Both photographs and the surrounding textual context were analysed.

The Instagram sample comprised of 77 randomly selected ‘ordinary’ users (i.e. not celebrities or Insta-famous users). Given our theoretical interest in women’s genres and questions of gender representation, all selected participants were female, with ages between 18 and 35 years. This sample was developed from four users randomly selected from the researchers’ personal following base on Instagram (later eliminated from the final studied sample), and was expanded through a snowball sampling strategy (Willem et al., 2010), thus extending and diversifying the sample beyond the researchers’ own networks. All research participants had public profiles (at the time of data collection) and were contacted via Instagram Direct Message, informed about the research, and openly agreed to participate. To ensure their privacy, no usernames will be referenced in this article. Using a random number generator (random.org), we randomly selected 20 photographic self-representations (i.e. images where the users themselves are featured) per user (posted between 2016 and early 2018) for analysis. These photographs were analysed alongside all surrounding textual context – captions, comments, and likes – totalling 1512 posts.

Both samples underwent separate qualitative textual analyses (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011). Following an initial close reading (Ruiz de Castilla, 2017), the selected magazines and Instagram posts were thematically coded. The coding frames for each of the textual analysis sites – magazines and Instagram – were constructed combining insights from a previously conducted literature review with insights that emerged from the familiarisation with the data. These coding frames were conceptualised jointly in order to facilitate a comparative approach. On both media forms, we analysed the formal characteristics of the photographs (e.g. colour, framing scale, use of filters or digital enhancements – noting whether extremely noticeable photoshopping or filters were used to alter the appearance of the represented women, if photo-editing was used in more understated ways to change only the aesthetic aspects of an image such as its colour or saturation, or whether an image showed a clear lack of photo-editing, signalled, for example, by #nofilter). We also analysed the characteristics of the women represented in the images (e.g. perceived ethnicity, body type, pose, facial expression, clothing, make-up, stereotypical character or representation of femininity). Regarding the textual content, we coded the use of particular discursive strategies (e.g. presence of political discourses, discourses acknowledging gender issues or addressing gendered experiences, judgements of physical appearance, or discourses on beautification and body improvement). We also analysed characteristics particular to the specificities of each media format – such as the genre of article in women’s magazines, or general usage metrics on Instagram, such as the number of likes and comments on each post.

This data were later critically interpreted, recording our insights and questions in analytical memos. We identified and categorised emerging themes and concepts, and subsequently created links between emerging insights (Maxwell and Chmiel, 2014). These interpretations were further analysed in light of the existing scholarship in the field, in order to create an interplay between the data, the concepts, and the broader literature. This research is based on an interpretative and qualitative approach, and as such these chosen samples were not intended to be representative, nor the results generalisable.

Constructing images of femininities

Women’s magazines can carry complex and even contradictory meanings, being simultaneously an aesthetically pleasing media object that can be enjoyed by its readers and a vehicle for circulating conventions of how femininity should look and be performed (Ballaster et al., 1993). In contemporary western contexts, these socially constructed ideals of beauty tend to be dominated by representations of mostly white, young, thin, flawless, conventionally attractive, and seemingly heterosexual women (Gill, 2007: 12). As commercial concerns are central to the content production of women’s magazines (McCracken, 1993), these narrow ideals are bounded by a logic of safety (Krijnen and Van Bauwel, 2015) which seeks to ensure commercial viability and advertisement revenue by encouraging magazines to repeatedly produce media that follows prevailing trends and to repeat the types of representation which have already proven commercially successful, thus predominantly showcasing models who fit the conventional moulds.

This logic of safety is noticeable in the studied sample of women’s magazines, which overwhelmingly contained representations of women who fit very closely with the aforementioned beauty ideals. Over three-quarters of all represented women in this sample were white, and more than 80 percent of these models were also young (i.e. seemingly under 35 years old and not showing any visible ageing signs) and thin (i.e. perceived as fitting on the thinner side of the body-size spectrum, with little visible fat or muscle). Although extremely noticeable use of photo-enhancement was rather rare, these images were nonetheless generally flawless – with skin blemishes, lines, or even pores rarely being represented. Furthermore, despite the occasional dismissal of traditional stereotypes of ‘too prim, too fussy’ femininity (Vogue, 2017, August: 132–135), nearly half of the women present in these issues were represented according to stereotypically extremely feminine conventions – carrying several visual markers of hegemonic femininity (in contemporary western contexts), such as long hair, noticeable make-up, gendered clothing (e.g. dresses or skirts), and accessories such as high-heels or jewellery (Yan and Bissell, 2014).

Representations of women who did not completely fit the dominant ideals of beauty were occasionally present in these women’s magazines, usually in cases of women who hold somewhat powerful and respected positions in the fashion industries such as fashion and beauty experts, members of the editorial teams of the magazines, or celebrities. These representations showcased more examples of middle-aged women, as well as a slightly more diverse range of body types (in comparison to professional models), showing more women whose bodies fitted into the average or occasionally plus-size side of the body-size spectrum. Representations of ‘ordinary’ people also seemed to convey a slightly more diverse picture; these women, such as the 56-year-old ‘mother of two’ featured in a Glamour (2017, August: 151) beauty editorial, sporting short greying hair and signs of visible ageing, offer a brief respite from the idealised models that dominate these publications. However, these ‘deviations’ from the beauty ideal are not only relatively rare, they also tend to be minor. If a represented woman did not comply with one of the expectations of the beauty ideal, most often she would still fit almost point-by-point with all the other expected traits. For example, the two middle-aged models represented on the cover of the September issue of Vogue were still, despite the distinctiveness of their ages, extremely attractive, thin, and white women, showing virtually no signs of ageing.

The ethos of online self-representation seems to be quite distinctive from the production of women’s magazines, emphasising individual, user-generated content, and the curatorial agency of its users (Thumim, 2012). It allows users to take active control over the strategies of representation used, carefully curating their feeds and self-representations by choosing which aspects of their lives and identities to showcase, and how to represent them (Thumim, 2012: 8). As Instagram practices are grounded on the individual experiences of a large, geographically spread, and necessarily diverse user base, it has the potential to showcase individual diversity often absent from traditional media, showing people from different cultural and ethnical backgrounds, gender presentations, sexual orientations, and so on. This was noticeable in the studied sample of 77 Instagram users. These participants ranged from 23 different countries, mainly from Europe, but also from North America, Oceania, and a few users from Asia. While most women in the sample identified as white, nearly a quarter of the participants claimed other ethnic backgrounds – identifying as Asian, Black, Hispanic, Middle-Eastern, and nearly 12 percent of all participants identified as multiracial.

But Instagram not only allows a showcasing of demographic diversity, but also of variations of how individuals negotiate, incorporate, or reject the culturally constructed conventions of femininity through their self-representations. Unlike women’s magazines, highly stereotypical and hyper-feminine representations only comprised 17 percent of all studied images – roughly the same proportion of representations of androgynous-looking or non-binary gender presentations in the sample. Instagram carried more variation in gender presentation, with most images showcasing more moderate and individualised expressions of femininity. Still somewhat unconventional beauty markers – like tattoos, piercings, or unnaturally coloured hair – were visible in about 8 percent of all analysed images, double the proportion of those visible in women’s magazines. These Instagram self-representations thus show images of femininities often under or misrepresented in popular media, celebrating their uniqueness in multi-layered representations of #girlswithtattoos, with #pinkhairdontcare, or #melaninonfleek.

Moreover, these Instagram self-representations showcased users with a wide array of occupations ranging from university students, teachers, medical professionals and bartenders to artists, designers, personal trainers and yoga instructors, or aspiring models and influencers who had, naturally, different ways of using Instagram, and followed different strategies of representation. These self-representations showcased different, and often less polished, aspects of the everyday experiences of these young women, absent from the studied magazines; for example, one of the participants shared less pleasant moments of everyday life, such as a night spent in the hospital receiving IV fluids.

However, these self-representations on Instagram can also appropriate and incorporate some of the discourses and conventions popularised in women’s magazines. With its emphasis on aesthetics, Instagram is seen by some scholars as extending the pressure to perform endless aesthetic labour, from the realms of fashion or beauty industries into the realm of everyday life and towards ‘ordinary’ people (Elias et al., 2017: 5). The logic of ‘spectacular femininity’ (McRobbie, 2007) and gendered consumption promoted in magazines – which constructs women’s identities as appearance-centric and consumer-oriented, emphasising ideals of beauty and style that can only be achieved through participation in neoliberal consumer culture – can often make its way into these individual self-representations, as users create posts that, perhaps unconsciously, seem to celebrate individual consumption of fashion and beauty goods in a highly aestheticised and Instagrammable manner. New clothing purchases or sartorial experimentations were illustrated by self-portraits or fitting room selfies, often accompanied by an acknowledgement of the brands in tags or hashtags, and captions exalting their enjoyment of consumption.

Although outside the scope of this study, the social media practices of influencers – popular users who strategically create and share content in order to attract an audience, gain popularity, and, at times, monetise their social media use – can provide interesting insights for understanding everyday Instagram uses. Influencers help to establish the ‘cultural scripts’, aesthetic and photographic conventions, and content-related tropes that define an Instagrammable aesthetics (Abidin, 2016). These cultural scripts often also reflect the conventions of popular culture and celebrity culture, including those disseminated by women’s magazines, thus existing within a broader intertextual context (Marwick, 2015: 139). These conventions can then trickle down to the everyday uses of the platform made by ‘ordinary’ users. These cultural scripts can be explicitly taught in how-to tutorials and videos, but are often unconsciously learned by users through their engagement with popular Instagram content (Manovich, 2020). As such, especially for those users with aspirations to become influencers, the posts they shared often echoed the deliberate promotional discourses of magazines, openly praising the clothing brands or beauty products worn in the photographs. These posts often follow a more ‘professionalised’ aesthetic – carefully produced, highly idealised, using professional image capture equipment, attentive lighting and editing (Abidin, 2017; Duffy and Hund, 2015), reminiscent of the high-production values of traditional mainstream media, such as women’s magazines (De Perthuis and Findlay, 2019). These similarities were even occasionally acknowledged in some of the comments made on these posts, praising them for looking ‘totally like a magazine’. This professionalised aesthetics have thus become predominant not only among influencers and Insta-famous users but also part of the general ‘cultural scripts’ of Instagram use, adopted and reproduced by ‘ordinary’ users in their everyday self-representational practices (Abidin, 2016: 87).

Constructing Instagrammable lifestyles

The decision of what can be deemed photographable (Bourdieu, 1965) is grounded in specific cultural, social, aesthetic, and ethical values of a particular socio-cultural and temporal context. As such, the photographable tends to privilege certain subjects, genres, conventions, compositions, poses, and styles. Beauty, in particular, has since the early days of photography come to be regarded as photo-worthy and associated with photogeny – judging someone or something as attractive by its ability to look good in a photograph (Sontag, 2008: 85–86). This conception of beauty as related to appearances has also a gendered quality, as historically women tend to have been disproportionally judged and valued based on their aesthetic appearance and physical attractiveness, and positioned in the role of to-be-looked-at (Berger, 1972). The photographable also implies an, often unconscious, judgement of value, regarding some people or objects as worthy of being photographed, while disregarding others (Bourdieu, 1965). The choice to photograph something thus confers value upon it, reflecting the photographer’s ability to find photographable beauty in something, even if it is not a traditional object of aesthetic appreciation (Sontag, 2008: 28).

The idea of beauty as photographable is present in both women’s magazines and Instagram self-representation practices. In the wake of an increasingly aesthetic culture (Manovich, 2020), where digital cameras are ever-present in nearly all moments of everyday life, the fashion and beauty industries have begun to conceive their products with a photogenic dimension and social media appeal in mind, creating goods that aim to be both photographable and Instagrammable (Rocamora, 2017). In this line, the studied women’s magazines also acknowledged the importance (and the labour involved) of developing photographable beauty, promoting ‘Insta-perfect’ beauty products that promise a flawless selfie-ready face (Glamour, 2017, June: 168–171).

This desire for a photo-worthy appearance has also seeped into the everyday social media practices of ‘ordinary’ women on Instagram, being noticeable in some of the studied posts. Posts of users engaging in fashion and beautification efforts were occasionally openly recognised as #beautytips for #Instabeauty, as in a selfie by a North-American health-based lifestyle blogger sharing a DIY lip scrub recipe, accompanied by a caption reminiscent of the advice-yet-promotional tone of women’s magazines. These posts also occasionally acknowledged the careful curation of both appearances and photographic practices necessary to achieve a photographable appearance, as when a Singaporean participant replied to a comment praising her cleavage in a selfie by revealing that ‘this one got push-up + lighting + angle + contrast + structure + filter’.

The idea of curation is central to our understanding of self-representational practices on Instagram. Rather than simplistically understanding self-representation as a technical act of production – merely a photograph one takes of oneself – we see the exercise of curatorial agency – of deliberately deciding what to share on one’s own account, of how to represent oneself online (Rettberg, 2014: 40) – as a productive act in itself. The curation of self-representation is thus a continuous process of constructing aestheticised images, through a series of minute decisions – in terms of lifestyle choices, pose, editing, captioning, and so on – which allow the users to select which aspects of themselves and their lives to share online, and which to keep out (Thumim, 2012: 8).

The curation of self-representation can also be linked to the pursuit of a particular Instagrammable aesthetic, leading to a careful consideration of lifestyles, objects, and experiences in terms of their visual and aesthetic characteristics, privileging certain items and contexts as particularly photo-worthy, likely to look good on Instagram and attract likes (Caldeira, 2020). The studied women’s magazines acknowledged the contemporary relevance of an Instagrammable aesthetic and were deftly able to incorporate it into their commercial logics (Caldeira, 2020). These magazines thus promoted goods, trends, and overall lifestyles by praising their Instagrammability – for example, presenting slogan t-shirts as not only a currently fashionable item, but as ‘totally Instagrammable’, incentivising their readers to buy these items and take selfies while wearing them (Glamour, 2017, August: 29). The Instagrammability of these fashion and beauty trends is also grounded in their ability to garner Instagram likes and engagement, as magazines promote ‘pieces with major “like” appeal’ (Glamour, 2017, August: 29). This exposes an underlying social media logic of popularity – present both in Instagram and inherited from traditional mass media celebrity logic – that privileges the ability to be ‘likeable’ and attract attention (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 6–7). Instagram’s metrics of popularity, such as the number of likes or followers, become legitimate, and legitimising, standards of success (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 7). In these magazines, the success of fashion trends becomes measured by their ability to ‘cause an Instagram frenzy’ (Cosmopolitan, 2017, October: 66).

The studied Instagram users also engaged in the representation of Instagrammable lifestyles, sharing aestheticised self-representations of their everyday consumption and lifestyle choices, such as a carefully staged photograph while sitting in a cosy café, accompanied by artful lattes and fashionable outfits. The Instagrammable aesthetic is expanded beyond the formal characteristics of a photograph or the conventions of a post, affecting a myriad of extremely personal aspects of everyday life, such as the choices of what to buy, what to eat, or which places to visit (Manovich, 2017: 99). Much like in magazines, these images of aestheticised lifestyles were also understood by some of the people commenting on these posts as #goals to be emulated, often through consumption (De Perthuis and Findlay, 2019: 8). These comments enthusiastically praise the experiences or items showcased in the photographs, admiring their ‘Insta-friendliness’ and expressing the desire to own the same items or have the same experience, occasionally posing pragmatic questions about how to purchase them. These everyday self-representations on Instagram seem to be echoing some of the commercial logics that mark traditional mass media, in a bi-directional flow of influences (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 3).

Aestheticised political potential

Instagram can also be understood as having an everyday political potential (Highfield, 2016). The women in the studied Instagram sample, with diverse interests, appearances, and occupations – for example, a young university student, a heavily tattooed bartender, expat fitness trainer, or queer musician – represent a perhaps small but nonetheless significant, shift from the limited representations of women often shown in traditional mainstream media, thus broadening the scope of who and what can be considered photographable and challenging the ruling hierarchies of visibility (Caldeira et al., 2020). Photography thus embodies an ‘ethics of seeing’, having the potential to be used to invoke understanding and tolerance (Sontag, 2008: 3). This idea is closely related to the concept of visibility politics, which sees the public visibility of the individual experiences of potentially marginalised identities as a tool for creating social and cultural progress, by changing subjectivities, beliefs, and feelings regarding these identities (Whittier, 2017: 376–377).

Furthermore, as previous research showed, both explicit and tangential political themes and concerns can become intertwined with the personal and everyday Instagram self-representations analysed (Caldeira et al., 2020). This was materialised through the occasional creation of deliberately political posts – such as selfies with ‘I voted’ stickers, or photographs participating in local Pride Parades – which echo the fourth-wave of feminism adoption of digital and social media tools for the quick and widespread dissemination of information, and mobilisation of participation and engagement (Chamberlain, 2017; Munro, 2013). But, drawing on the feminist idea of the personal as political (Whittier, 2017: 377), tangentially political discourses can also emerge in self-representations that were not deliberately created with any political aims in mind, but which nonetheless incidentally shed light on social or political concerns (Highfield, 2016). For example, selfies can become expressions of self-love and acceptance of one’s own appearance, or a vehicle for the celebration of often marginalised identities, such as in the case of #blackgirlmagic. The political is thus reframed through Instagram self-representation, appearing the contexts of the users’ everyday lives and experiences (Caldeira et al., 2020).

Women’s magazines are naturally aware of the current cultural moment of increased political engagement and revitalisation of feminist popularity in pop culture (Favaro and Gill, 2018) – in part facilitated by social media and Instagram practices, and by the aforementioned fourth-wave of feminism becoming a part of the contemporary cultural imaginary (Chamberlain, 2017). As these publications seek to align themselves with this popular feminist moment and position themselves as belonging to the same universe of Instagram (Caldeira, 2020), we can recognise in the studied magazines the existence of discourses that carry a somewhat political and feminist tone, emphasising ideas of female empowerment, ‘girl power’, and diversity. These discourses often directly recognised the links between emerging political and feminist concerns and Instagram practices (Caldeira, 2020).

These magazines thus embrace the idea that Instagram can help to counterpoint the general critiques, of lack of diversity in the representation of women, that are often aimed at traditional media (Gill, 2007: 12). Echoing the rise of body-positive and body-neutral movements online, and particularly on Instagram (e.g. Affula and Ricciardelli, 2015; Caldeira and De Ridder, 2017), these magazines present the online popularity and loyal fan-base of some plus-size Instagrammers as a sign of the commercial viability of diverse-looking models, stating that there is a ‘huge market for more diverse body shapes’, and thus justifying their inclusion in fashion shows (Glamour, 2017, August: 46–48).

Echoing the association between authenticity, diversity, and the showcasing of ‘real people’ within the context of women’s magazines (Duffy, 2013a), these magazines seem to take advantage of social media and user-generated content to invite (and signal) more diversity into their publications. Glamour, for example, launched an open call on Instagram to recruit readers as models for a beauty editorial. This editorial framed Instagram as a platform that ‘extols beauty in all its many forms’, and praised the diversity of its models (Glamour, 2017, August: 138–151). The sheer fact that these were deemed ‘ordinary’ people – despite most of the people selected by the editorial team being from professional fields closely related to the fashion and entertainment industries (e.g. fashion bloggers, aspiring actresses, make-up artists), and being styled, photographed, and airbrushed by professionals – lends to this article an aura not only of diversity but also of authenticity (Banet-Weiser, 2017: 276). Yet, under this overly optimistic celebration of diversity, Glamour continues to showcase a narrow view of beauty (Gill, 2007: 12), as most of the women featured in this article are white, conventionally attractive, young, and overwhelmingly thin.

Expressions of popular feminism often seek to be media-friendly and aesthetically driven (Banet-Weiser, 2018). As such, as cultural products concerned with the creation of aesthetically pleasing images of femininity, these magazines inevitably conflate the political with aesthetics. The political concerns become materialised by and through aesthetic practices – for example, going make-up free is perceived as making you look ‘like you are making some sort of political statement’, rebelling against narrow beauty expectations (Vogue, 2017, May: 198). This conflation of politics and aesthetics is a commonality between magazines’ and Instagram practices, as hashtags such as #nofilter or #nomakeupselfie become equated to a rallying cry against the highly edited standards of image creation (Marwick, 2015: 144), or even incorporated into hashtag activism campaigns (Hampton, 2015).

The idea of an ‘amateur aesthetic’ (Abidin, 2017) is often linked to a sense of authenticity and practices of self-representation (Thumim, 2012: 162). By comparison to the aforementioned professionalised aesthetic, an amateur aesthetic is defined by less studiously curated and aestheticised content production, made by ‘ordinary’ users, using less high-tech tools of image production – such as smartphones – and by depictions of everyday contexts, often absent from traditional media (Abidin, 2017: 7–8). This aesthetic can, however, also be strategically appropriated by professional content creators, such as influencers or women’s magazines – in a performance of what Abidin (2017) described as ‘calibrated amateurism’ – to create a sense of authenticity, intimacy, and ‘relatability’. The studied magazines thus engage in practices of ‘calibrated amateurism’ by, for example, adopting Instagram images to promote the idea of ‘bare-faced beauty’ as a reaction to unrealistic and highly airbrushed images. Yet, this article was still illustrated with Instagram photographs of flawless-looking and conventionally attractive celebrities (Glamour, 2017, September: 96–97).

Similarly, some of the studied self-representations on Instagram also highlighted the tangentially political role of an aesthetics of authenticity, aligning themselves with less idealised and commercialised practices of representation by hashtagging their posts as #realoutfitgram, #teamnatural, #nomakeup, or #liveauthentic. The use of these hashtags signals a deliberate effort to perform an aesthetics of authenticity. Performing a sort of ‘moral distancing’ (De Ridder, 2017: 7), the studied Instagram participants also detach themselves from ‘inauthentic’ or over-idealised Instagram practices. These discourses of authenticity were heavily emphasised by some of the participants, as in the case of an Italian ski-instructor and vegan blogger who shared a simple black and white portrait of herself (taken as part of a photographer’s artistic project), purposefully shot in natural light, with no photoshop, and wearing no make-up, while accompanying it with a long and personal caption about embracing the courage to be imperfect, vulnerable, and authentic. This moral distancing can also be recognised in the analysed magazines, in articles criticising the same beautification efforts elsewhere promoted, jokingly dismissing them as a ‘menagerie of fakery’ (Cosmopolitan, 2017, July: 70–74).

Paradoxically, alongside this emphasis on the aesthetics of authenticity, both the studied women’s magazines and Instagram samples allowed also for the critical questioning of the culturally prevalent association of Instagram and social media with practices of over-idealisation and ‘dishonest’ content creation. As one of the writers of Glamour confessed in an article: ‘of course I lie on social media (that selfie had more takes than an entire Spielberg film)’ (Glamour, 2017, September: 54–55). These articles point out the artifice often involved in content creation, acknowledging also the connection between this idealisation and the drive to ‘harvest likes on Instagram’ (Vogue, 2017d: 329–331), thus calling attention to Instagram’s underlying logic of popularity (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). This acknowledgement of the tensions between a drive for authenticity and a tendency for idealisation was also observed in some of the analysed Instagram posts, as in the example of an Austrian lifestyle blogger who acknowledged that even though the shared photograph showed a highly aestheticised image of herself casually posing in her cosy yet perfectly styled bedroom, she was actually, at the moment of posting, working on her blog while wearing #nomakeup and #nohairstyle. These acknowledgements in captions allow the users to maintain a sense of authenticity, even if this does not match what is shown in the images.

This intertwining of tangentially political themes with aesthetic practices and concerns allows us to understand this aestheticised political potential as not only drawing from the aforementioned rise of the fourth-wave of feminism (Chamberlain, 2017; Munro, 2013), but also as containing the markers of a contemporary postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2016). Unlike the earlier conceptions of postfeminism (Gill, 2007), this contemporary sensibility is no longer marked by an open contempt for and dismissal of feminist ideals as out-of-date and no longer needed. Rather, contemporary postfeminism is able to selectively appropriate and rebrand feminist discourses, aligning them with neoliberal feminist ideals, and disregarding the structural social, cultural, and economic causes of gender inequalities (Rottenberg, 2014). Feminism is thus simplistically presented in terms of personal choice and empowerment, emphasising individualism and personal agency, and presenting fashion and beauty as central tools for empowerment (Gill, 2016: 613). In this way, the present moment of neoliberal capitalism creates a context where the aforementioned efforts for a visibility politics compete with a growing economisation of visibility (Banet-Weiser, 2018).

These postfeminist sensibilities are observable in both the studied magazines’ and Instagram sample. Appropriating well-known feminist slogans, hair and make-up styling was lauded by the analysed magazines as the way to “prove that the future is female via the most powerful beauty looks (Glamour, 2017, September: 154–158), thus conflating fashion, beauty, and empowerment. Consumption can also become a tool of aestheticised politics, echoing well-established practices of commodity feminism (Goldman et al., 1991). In their self-representational practices, these participants occasionally merged their political engagements in social causes with their fashion and beauty choices – for example, a French-Algerian participant who demonstrated her support for the Help Refugees campaign by incorporating a #ChooseLove t-shirt in her #outfitoftheday selfie. These efforts emphasise the ways in which representing oneself according to the conventions of popular feminism can imply significant aesthetic labour and commercial investment (Banet-Weiser, 2018: 4).

Emerging within gendered and aesthetically oriented platforms, such as women’s magazines and Instagram, aesthetic concerns about media representation thus develop not as an after-thought of political practices, but as an integral and central part of these. This political potential is marred by tensions between its possibility to provide new ideals and conventions for public visibility, and its ability to be reframed according to particular Instagrammable aesthetics. Echoing the logic of safety (Krijnen and Van Bauwel, 2015) subjacent to women’s magazines, the social media drive for increased popularity can also lead to the privileging and reinforcement of narrow Instagrammable aesthetics that have already proven successful in attracting attention, likes, and engagement on the platform (Caldeira, 2020: 93). Following this logic of popularity, certain people, opinions, and strategies of representation can become more prominent, reaching larger numbers of people and becoming standards to be emulated (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013: 6–8). In this way, visibility and popularity become interlinked, and visibility risks becoming an end in itself, rather than a means to strive for societal change (Banet-Weiser, 2018: 22–23). Furthermore, as these popular representations also draw from the intertextual influence of broader popular culture and mainstream media, self-representational practices on Instagram can also, often inadvertently, contribute to help reproduce the socially established conventions of femininity and beauty ideals of women’s fashion magazines (Butkowski et al., 2020; Döring et al., 2016).

Conclusion

This article aimed at complexifying our understandings of the existing intertextual relationship between women’s magazines and Instagram. First, this article explored how this intertextual relationship is affecting conventional representations of femininity. Second, it explored the underlying tensions that emerge between women’s magazines and Instagram, in particular how their distinct ethos of representation co-exists.

The representations of femininity predominantly present in the analysed magazines still chiefly abided by well-established normative beauty ideals (Gill, 2007) – showcasing countless young, white, thin, and attractive women – thus relying on an underlying logic of safety (Krijnen and Van Bauwel, 2015). However, echoing popular feminist discourses, these magazines seemed to be increasingly celebrating diversity, allowing for rare representations of women who deviated – albeit often in minor ways – from the beauty standard.

Instagram, on the other hand, seems to operate according to an essentially distinct self-representation logic (Thumim, 2012). This potentiates the visibility of a wide diversity of representations of femininities, arising from a large and globally spread Instagram user base. These can thus include less stereotypical representations of femininity, often unseen or misrepresented in traditional media. However, Instagram self-representations can also draw influence from women’s magazines, incorporating some of its conventions and discourses of gendered consumption. Lifestyle and consumption choices are thus reframed in Instagrammable manners, occasionally echoing the commercialised tones of women’s magazines, as well as their carefully produced professionalised aesthetic (Abidin, 2017; Duffy and Hund, 2015). In this way, the noteworthy potential for increased diversity and for engaging in visibility politics, enabled and popularised by Instagram and social media, exists in tension with both the logic of safety which underlies women’s magazines and the logic of popularity of social media. These logics can thus temper and limit the political potential of these media, privileging and providing increased visibility for a selective scope of representations – often white, thin, and seemingly heteronormative – while more diverse representations might struggle to achieve the same level of widespread visibility.

As both women’s magazines and Instagram have a significantly aesthetic character, the notion of the photographable has become increasingly important, and ideals of beauty became conflated with the ability to look good in photographs (Sontag, 2008: 85–86). Both media formats acknowledge the importance of developing an Instagrammable appearance and lifestyle, highlighting the careful and often labour-intensive practices necessary to maintain it. This relies on a careful curation of self-representational practices on Instagram. Curation can be understood not only as a reclaiming of agency in the process of selecting how to represent oneself and which aspects of one’s life to showcase, but can be also seen as linked to the pursuit of an Instagrammable aesthetics – which privileges those people and objects that will look good on Instagram and attract engagement (Caldeira, 2020), thus relying on an underlying social media logic of popularity (Van Dijck and Poell, 2013).

However, these aestheticised representations can also carry a complex everyday political potential (Highfield, 2016). Maintaining a cautiously optimistic perspective, we understand Instagram’s self-representation as having the potential not only to showcase a wide-ranging scope of representations of femininities but also to incorporate explicit and tangentially political themes. Likewise, women’s magazines also seem to be echoing the current moment of a resurgence of feminist discussions (Favaro and Gill, 2018), adopting a tone of ‘girl power’, which emphasises personal empowerment and diversity. These magazines often present Instagram as a counterpoint to the lack of diversity that has historically marked women’s magazines (Gill, 2007), incorporating the ethos of user-generated content as a way to invite, or suggest, more diversity (Duffy, 2013a). Through a conflation of the political with aesthetics, political topics and concerns can become reified through aesthetic practices. As such, the strategical adoption of an Instagram-inspired aesthetics of calibrated amateurism (Abidin, 2017) can be used by these magazines to signal a sense of intimacy, authenticity, and diversity. Similarly, Instagram self-representations can also adopt a tangentially political aesthetics of authenticity, morally distancing (De Ridder, 2017) themselves from practices deemed as overly idealised and inauthentic.

These aestheticised practices of representation are not monolithic. Rather they are intertextual and multifaceted, allowing for the rise of complex tensions in which political potential can co-exist with postfeminist logics that privilege aesthetics and consumption. Both women’s magazines and Instagram can thus be platforms for the representation of diverse identities, and simultaneously a site for the reproduction of hegemonic ideals of femininity (Döring et al., 2016). As aesthetic concerns seep deeper into the realm of everyday experiences and Instagram social media practices (Manovich, 2020), we should strive to acknowledge the complexity present in these representational practices. Although often dismissed as trivial women’s genres (Hermes, 2003), we should aim to explore the ways in which these practices can be deeply intertwined with the politics of gender representation – embodied, experienced, and negotiated through aesthetic media practices.