It always hurts to hear a celebrity you love hates something you, well, love. And while this has never happened to me until this moment, I’m shocked and appalled and most importantly, afraid she wouldn’t want to be friends with me because I take too many pictures.
That’s right: Grace Coddington hates Instagram.
I mean, I get it. Girlfriend has the same amount of time reserved for Instagram as I do for like, listening to Rob Lowe talk about things (so: no time — no time at all). She’s busy. She’s famous. She’s writing amazing books and drawing amazing illustrations and she works at Vogue, so relax, me. But still.
“I hate Instagram, actually,” she told Vogue recently. “I think it really interferes with people’s lives and things and it’s pathetic how everyone’s photographing everything they’re eating all the time. Everybody uses it instead of reading newspapers these days. People want you to know that they’re holidaying in Greece. I mean, really. The first one I posted, my whole account got taken down because I was naked, which is ironic: It’s a goddamn cartoon!”
And, like, fair. It’s insane that Instagram’s so anti-boob anyway, but to cause such a hooplah over a cartoon of Grace Coddington is straight-up embarrassing.
But that being said, the Vogue stylist extraordinaire is also not the only celebrity as of late to declare herself Instagram-free. Also for Vogue, Kate Winslet recently declared her life Instagram-free.
“I don’t get any of that,” she said. “I don’t get it at all. It’s a privacy thing obviously but at the same time I don’t really understand it. If I want to show someone a photograph I’ll show it to them or I’ll send it to them, and what I think is a problem about these things is that you experience moments in life — sure, we photograph them as well — but our first instinct is becoming to post them somewhere — well then it’s not my memory anymore, it’s gone.”
But here’s where I think she makes a particularly interesting point:
“What worries me about these things is that when that 11-year-old girl called Charlie in Pasadena tongs her hair and gets 72 likes, what the fuck does that do to her sense of her herself and experience and experiment and discovering? She’s always doing it for someone else, or to be liked, often by people that she doesn’t even know. That is fucked up. And that’s why I think it’s terrible for children.”
And she’s not wrong. I — and you, I’m sure — love Instagram. But at the same time, even at 30, I’ll still get put off or bummed out if what I think is a great photo gets less than 11 likes. And then I’ll go down the wormhole of “but what does this mean? Am I the worst?” (Yes.) As if strangers’ approval of a photo of my cat is the one thing in life I need to be happy.
So I’m not saying we need to toss our phones into the sea, but I am suggesting we maybe take a page from the book of Grace and roll our eyes in moments of thinking, “Maybe I should take a photo of this kale salad.” Maybe not everyone needs to see it. Or maybe we don’t need to care if people don’t want to (and thus leave a dreaded less than 11 like legacy on our #art). Either way, maybe we tweak our dependency on Instagram validation and either post because we want to, or not post at all.
If our addiction allows, that is.
