How Fashion Designers Became the New Instagram Influencers – The Wall Street Journal

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The term “influencer” loosely describes anyone with a sufficiently robust social-media following to affect people’s behavior. Today, an increasing number of fashion designers with weighty day jobs fit that bill. Gucci creative director

Alessandro Michele

has amassed over 684,000 followers on his personal Instagram account. Even so, it would take some effort for him to catch up to Louis Vuitton men’s artistic director Virgil Abloh or Donatella Versace who both boast over five million followers. Of the 5.8 million who follow Balmain’s design head Olivier Rousteing, 114,752 watched a minute-long video the designer dancing by himself to the Backstreet Boys.

For any public figure participating in the attention-economy (see: Kardashian, Kim or Bieber, Justin), posting on Instagram is a way to stay relevant and front of mind. An admirer of Mr. Jacobs might see his dresses in stores only rarely, but with Instagram, he’s there all the time, feeding you photos of his house, his designs, or his dog Neville. (Neville is an Instagram influencer in his own right, with over 207,000 followers.)

Followers eat up peek-behind-the-curtain posts. “Having that kind of insider access or sort of candid, not-so-polished human relationship…is what people are really attracted to,” said Katy Lubin, the VP of communications at Lyst, an online platform that tracks fashion-search results. The data bears this out. Seven of the 10 “hottest brands” on Lyst’s index have a creative director who is publicly active on Instagram. Per Lyst’s tracking in the past three months, the personal Instagram accounts for designers like Mr. Michele, Ms. Versace and Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino are growing at a faster clip than the accounts for the brands they lead.

This surge of creative-directors-cum-influencers reflects a less controlled, more relatable, even vulnerable version of brand marketing, said Ms. Lubin. These designers still work for monolithic brands, but they’re human faces you can empathize with. Watch them look bored in a car, or get delayed on a flight, or actively design a new sweater. You might yawn past that same sweater in an idealized magazine advertisement; on Instagram you can submerge yourself in the messy world it came from.

“What has happened over the last few years, especially, I would say three years, is that super-produced content feels not as exciting,” said Eva Chen, the director of fashion partnerships at Instagram. Not coincidentally, it was roughly three years ago that Instagram introduced its “Stories” feature, a snappier, more slapdash posting option where messages disappear after 24 hours.

Letting a designer off the leash on social media comes with risks. In 2018, Stefano Gabbana, of Italy’s Dolce & Gabbana was called out publicly for sending derogatory, racially charged messages to a fellow user on Instagram and leaving inflammatory comments on other users’ posts. A representative for Dolce & Gabbana did not offer comment. Last year, in a Facebook post, Italian designer Marcelo Burlon called the singer Madonna “la cessa,” a slang expression that roughly translates to “human toilet.” Days later, Mr. Burlon posted a lengthy Instagram post apologizing for the comment.

By and large, however, brands mostly profit from the efforts of Insta-happy design-heads. “The more people that tune in [to a designer’s account], the less money that brand has to spend on traditional advertising. So it can transfer over and it can have a benefit for the brand,” said Jonah Berger, associate professor of marketing at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. According to eMarketer, a market research company, magazine- and newspaper-based ad spending fell 17.8% between 2018 and 2019.

Some labels have entirely dissolved the barrier between “official brand account” and “designer account.” Simon-Porte Jacquemus, head of French label Jacquemus, runs the brand’s over 1.8 million-follower Instagram page, blending shots of its dazzling pink suits with cheesily romantic selfies of him and his boyfriend on the beach.

When designers choose to stay silent on social media, fan accounts swoop in and take their place. Mary-Kate and

Ashley Olsen,

the owners of the stupendously luxurious New York label the Row stay off social media, but @OlsenOracle, a fan-operated Instagram account with over 90,000 followers steps in to satisfy admirers of the twins’ style.

Miuccia Prada

is also notably inactive on social media, but a fanpage known as @whatmiuccia posts photos of the renowned Italian designer from across the years. In January, Guillaume Lavoie, the Montreal native who runs the account was invited to Prada’s Fall 2020 men’s show and briefly took over the brand’s Instagram page. For a few hours, the fan became the influencer.

Wr ite to Jacob Gallagher at Jacob.Gallagher@wsj.com