A decade into Instagram’s reign over fashion, keeping pace with the changing platform and the ways people use it has become something of a holy grail for fashion marketers. But lately, the conversation has become about much more than reach or engagement.
Virality has lost some of its luster; some people are retreating to smaller, niche platforms where there’s still room to be “messy” online; influencers are burning out, while brands are investing in real-world communities as consumers tire of life mediated through a screen. And yet, for all the talk of a social media backlash, we’re hardly logging off: in the UK, time spent on Instagram has risen by 60% in the last two years according to Ofcom, and Gen Z adults in the US spend an average of an hour a day on the platform, per Emarketer’s count.
Instagram sits at the center of a broader reassessment of our relationship with social media — even as usage remains stubbornly high, consumers are questioning how much they want these platforms to occupy their lives. This tension came into sharp relief last week, when Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle US claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children, alongside new restrictions intended to curb compulsive use among under-18s. Meta denied wrongdoing.
For fashion, those changing expectations are rewriting the rules of engagement, too. And few people have been closer to this evolution than Meta’s VP of fashion partnerships, Eva Chen. She’s spent the last 11 years shaping how fashion brands, designers and creators use the platform, and watched its rules of engagement shift in real time. What’s clear, she says, is that the platform is in a constant state of flux — shaped as much by changing user behavior as by the technology itself.
“If Instagram feels like it changes every six months, every year, it’s because it does,” she says. “It’s a living, breathing ecosystem in my mind.” Whether you’re a creator or brand, Chen says, you have to be able to react and shift your Instagram strategy quickly, and use it to “be in touch with what’s happening in the world”.
Instagram was born as a social network before becoming a commercial fixture for the fashion industry — part advertising channel, part campaign platform, part digital storefront. Now, Chen sees those two functions converging. Brands may no longer question whether they need to be on Instagram, but the ones using it most effectively treat it less as a place to broadcast and more as a space for direct, often less polished, interaction with consumers. So what does that look like in practice? Chen sits down with Vogue Business to share the new rules of Instagram for fashion in 2026.
