The Rise of the Instagram Curator

In 2008, Justin Saunders launched JJJJound, an image-based blog that quickly became a favorite source of inspiration among a narrow but influential swath of internet users. In retrospect, Saunders’ visual smorgasbord of artful nudity, tasteful interiors, and stark product shots inadvertently hinted at the appeal of scrolling ceaselessly through the timeline. By the start of the 2010s, Instagram was ascendant, and the platform’s swift success helped usher along a seismic shift in the way people interact with information online.

Gigs with folks like Kanye West and Virgil Abloh have made Saunders an aspirational figure in the world of would-be creative directors, and JJJJound, the blog, has long since become JJJound, the brand. Now Saunders’ heirs apparent have arrived. Over the course of the last few years, a group of mostly anonymously-maintained Instagram accounts, led by the likes of @liljupiterr, have emerged as prominent tastemakers for extremely online menswear enthusiasts. To call someone like Jupiterr an influencer is only partially correct: yes, he has thousands of followers, and yes, he updates his feed frenetically. But there’s no unabashed hawking of off-brand diet tea or lengthy confessional screeds. Instead, there’s pictures of the sure-to-sell out Jordan collaboration Dior debuted at its pre-fall show. There’s a video of Lil Uzi Vert dancing. There’s a meme expertly poking fun at a favorite internet punchline, the Fila Disruptor, and there’s one dunking on the CDG Chucks. By posting a seemingly random medley of recent sneaker releases, throwback celebrity fits, and makeshift tributes to legends of hip-hop both old and new, Jupiterr and his peers suggest that stunting in the latest sold-out sneakers or must-have seasonal cop is no longer necessary to command clout online. To build a following today, all you really need is taste.

Curators like Jupiterr are a 2020 version of what Malcom Gladwell called “coolhunters” in the late '90s, but instead of hitting the streets to see what the teens are wearing, they plumb the deepest depths of the internet to aggregate content for their hundreds of thousands of followers, who include both industry insiders and some of the biggest celebrities in the world. The best of them—accounts like @seereverseforcare, @veryadvanced, and @yungwatergun—offer a crash-course in the cultural touchstones a generation of guys raised on a steady diet of video games, streetwear drops, and SoundCloud rap are interacting with online. For young dudes newly invested in sneakers, hip-hop, clothing, or the intersection of the three, congregating on Instagram is the ideal way to swap inspiration and share opinions—and maybe even figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

For the anonymous twentysomething behind @hidden.ny, deciding what to post still feels like a deeply personal process. Hidden started his account, now more than 150,000 followers strong, as a way of sharing style-related moments that resonated with him, from pictures of Skateboard P- era Pharell to rare pairs of Jordan 1s. He sources his material from an archive of some 40,000 images he’s been storing on his iCloud since the early 2000s (why don’t hackers ever get their hands on the good stuff?!) and scours resale sites like Grailed and select online retailers for specific product shots. “Curating images on the ‘gram is a new way for young creatives to discover their own style,” Hidden says via email. In an earlier era, kids who wanted to show off their good taste made collages out of their favorite magazines or nagged their friends to follow them on Tumblr. Instagram’s reach extends much further. Hidden anticipates a cohort of IG users pointing to their carefully curated online profiles as a means of landing long-term positions in creative industries down the road: it’s social media as CV. He cites the support he’s received from prominent followers as a big help in building his audience and as validation that the industry has caught on to his influence. When he started his account, Hidden aspired to convince designers to create clothing he identified with by showing them that there was an audience for his specific aesthetic preferences. (Shoot for the moon, kids, because even if you miss you’ll land among those who are mildly influential online). Now he’s seeding Drake with a regular supply of rare pieces, after the rapper reached out via DM. “Whether it’s explicitly acknowledged or not,'' Hidden says slyly, “what I want to see is happening.”

Scroll through any of the suggested accounts Instagram’s algorithm spits out after spending some time lurking on Hidden’s page and the entire platform starts to look pretty similar. (It’s not uncommon to see the same images pop up across different accounts throughout the day). When everyone’s combing through the same source material, a sharp curatorial eye isn’t always enough to distinguish your feed from others’, even if you were doing it first. What’s a curator to do? Recently, pictures of Jupiterr himself started cropping up on his feed, often wearing sneakers he designed in collaboration with K-Swiss. Hidden sees the “art of content curation” as a means of honing his skills as an aspiring creative director, and the logical next step seems to be parlaying his online presence into IRL brand partnerships. Monetizing his influence as a curator, though, largely depends on his willingness to shed the veil of anonymity, and embrace, even tentatively, the process of building a personal brand. Hidden cites Saunders as a prime example of a personality that was able to “channel his curation skills” across multiple different mediums, and from creative direction to sneaker collaborations, Hidden wants in on all of it.

It’s tempting to see making it as an Instagram curator as a new, troubling development in the field of being super online. What, this schmuck couldn’t even be bothered to find somewhere photogenic to shoot his fit pics? Internet aggregators are ostensibly unencumbered by the sense of burnout more conventional IG personalities face in their exhaustive pursuit of the next opportunity to flex. Of course, curators like Hidden are on their phones constantly, always online, never really “off” the way an influencer (who depends on sharing a more detailed simulacrum of his daily life) is when the camera stops rolling. They post multiple times a day, throughout the day, at a rate that would be dizzying for most other influencers. Eventually, the line between “curator” and “literally anyone with a phone” starts to look mighty thin. We’re all curators of our own little slice of the culture, incessantly fussing with our feeds to reflect changing tastes and preferences. Perhaps the appeal of curators is that they try to do the work for us: when we double tap one of Hidden’s posts, we don’t do it because we like the way he looks, or dresses, or photographs his food. We like something far more personal. We like his taste.

A few days after Christmas, in the brief period when the constant content churn of the timeline typically slows down ever so slightly, the internet was abuzz: Travis Scott and his Cactus Jack label had dropped a collective album, featuring cover art shot by Harmony Korine and a series of accompanying music videos. Stills from the videos quickly circulated online, including images of Scott playing around with a flamethrower in front of a Tesla Cybertruck, wearing a pair of unannounced collaborative Nike dunks, and arguing with a love interest played by Julia Fox, the breakout star of Uncut Gems. In other words, a perfect storm of current internet touchstones, cooked up to appeal to an audience with little else to do but interact with their closest relatives or scroll through the timeline. While most of us were with our families, or trying our hardest to avoid them, Jupiterr and his peers documented the best bits and pieces for their dutiful followers. The internet’s newest class of influencers were hard at work.