Fashion’s New Instagram Playbook, According to Eva Chen

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.

Connection is the new currency

Instagram, whose business model depends on capturing and keeping our attention online, is grappling with where it fits with users who say they’re craving more: connection away from the screen. From book clubs to run clubs and a swelling calendar of brand events, online communities are spilling into physical spaces — and then returning to Instagram to document them. The irony isn’t lost on Chen.

“When I started, many in fashion saw Instagram just as a place for person-to-person contact, which is ironically what they’re all trying to use the platform to do now,” she says. “We’re entering a world of third spaces and in-person gatherings; it’s that sense of connection that everyone’s striving to create.” Chen cites the branded gardening kit Loewe sent to some of its VICs last week in the run-up to China’s Mid-Autumn Festival. Although not shared on the brand’s own channel, it went viral via organic content from brand fans and internet commentary saying the luxury house was telling its wealthiest clients to get outside together and “touch grass”.

She also cites how “everyone has a book club now”, including Chanel, Miu Miu, Dua Lipa, Kaia Gerber and Emma Roberts, who all use Instagram to broadcast them. All this translates into sustained organic engagement, where consumers keep coming back to these brands and figures for these more memorable moments, prompting interactions with others — the closest online proxy for connection, she believes.

Chen says the fashion exec who best understands this shift is hyper-focused on engagement, rather than followers. “It’s a different conversation depending on who you’re talking to, because a lot of the time the CEOs are looking at the follower count. But the CDs are looking at engagement, who’s commenting, and whether certain fashion figures are interacting with the brand. That’s a different kind of metric — they’re looking for peer-to-peer engagement.”

The next frontier for fashion Instagram, Chen believes, is turning that engagement into live, communal experiences. “Fashion is asking a lot about how to create in-person live experiences with Instagram and gatherings,” she says, pointing to the explosive popularity of creators such as Lyas, whose fashion show watch parties bring young fans together in real life. “That’s what the youth and the new generation of fashion fans wanted — a place to get together and nerd out together. I think that the next frontier for Instagram is creating communal experiences and opportunities for people to get together and celebrate the things they love together.”

Document, don’t debut

That same appetite for proximity is reshaping the content that cuts through. The brands doing it best are bringing consumers behind the curtain from day one, documenting the creative process rather than simply presenting their finished product, according to Chen.

“I find that a lot of the brands who listen, learn, and react well right now are the houses that are being helmed by CDs who grew up with Instagram; you can really feel it,” Chen says. She cites Jonathan Anderson’s experiments with Instagram’s Close Friends feature on Stories while at Dior, and posting from inside the car with talent on the way to shows when he was at Loewe, as creating a distinct point of view on Instagram; Matthieu Blazy’s choice of music at his Chanel shows where people felt moved to share the intimate moment it created; how she discovered Matières Fécales on Instagram because of its traction among fashion names like Katie Grand who’d posted from the show; and how Trotter’s fuzzy recycled fiberglass coats in her debut Bottega collection translated well to Instagram because of the texture and movement they created.

Chen encourages brands and designers to think about how they can document and capture their collections from inspiration to production, and underlines the power of BTS video and photos. “I always remind creative directors and marketing teams that Coperni’s BTS casting video of Bella Hadid often does better than the runway video because it feels more intimate, not polished. That authenticity and intimacy is what brings people in.”

It’s a strategy that in many ways goes against the sense of aesthetic control luxury houses and fashion advertising want to cling to. Where 10 years ago, Instagram was the place brands came to post their final collection and a slick talent-fronted campaign, Chen says the Instagram user now has a “very high artifice meter” where they prefer something “real” over something slick, retouched and staged. It’s not necessarily new, but as AI makes polished imagery abundant — and consumers increasingly skeptical of what they see — the process behind an image now carries far more weight on Instagram than the finished product itself.

“I’m constantly telling fashion teams that every fiber of their being has been trained to create a perfect campaign or editorial image, but that’s not what Instagram is for. Your audience has already seen your billboard in Madison Avenue or Bond Street, so Instagram should be for something beyond, and fostering a sense of direct one-to-one connection,” Chen says.

Lower the stakes, not the cadence

For brands and creators chasing discovery, much of this translates towards posting more, not less. Yet it comes at a moment of mounting content fatigue. Chen’s answer is not to post less, but to lower the stakes of each post.

“Scarcity is great for a drop, but it’s not how you build a community, and community is the thing that compounds,” she says. “With burnout, I’d say the problem is almost never volume, it’s that people treat every single post like a campaign, and that’s exhausting, of course it is. So what I tell brands and creators is that the goal isn’t more content, it’s less precious content. Don’t overthink it.”

More than anything else, Chen says brands should be focusing more on Reels, which is where Instagram users now spend more than 50% of their time on Instagram, sharing reels over 4.5 billion times every day. This, she says, is one of the key paths to discoverability by Instagram’s algorithm — as is leaning into what she calls other “unconnected surfaces” on the platform, or places users can see content from people they don’t follow.

“Reels matter enormously, posting less there isn’t restraint, you’re just absent,” Chen says. “But they really don’t need to be cinematic. A temptation for many brands is to lean towards a very long, slow intro that fades from black to your logo, which is great for an ad, but you’ll lose people within seconds with a reel. Just start with an action. It needs to have a sense of human connection and bringing people in from the start.” For fashion brands, the best examples include reels of fittings, sketches, and designers showing an unfinished dress.

The biggest mistake luxury brands still make, according to Chen, is over-focusing on their grid and treating their brand profile as the “landing page of a website”, when 99% of followers, once they follow a brand, never go back to the grid. “I think that it’s almost a vanity metric where each house is looking at each other’s grid and overinvests in their grid symmetry, forgetting that most of the experience is done scrolling.”

Among the other surfaces Chen says brands and creators should lean into are Stories, Threads, Instants (which live within DMs), and Notes in DMs, which she says is one of the most “under-celebrated” features on Instagram that’s used voraciously by younger users especially.

“The way people use Instagram now, especially younger people, is so much more casual than the era everyone’s still designing for. So don’t recycle campaign imagery; shoot it on your phone and make it feel made-for-Instagram. Give people something they can’t get anywhere else,” she says. “Let the profile be the portfolio, and let everything else be the person.”

Asked what creatives and fashion marketers can expect from Instagram’s new features roadmap in the next few months, Chen highlights upcoming updates to Meta’s Edits app, which allows users to make and edit reels. She says Meta has started testing a tool that “knows your Instagram” and can help you think through content ideas. She also points to Instagram’s “First Draft” feature, which allows users to make a first Reel edit in 10 seconds, as well as new updates to Instants, which will let users send quick photos with close friends.

“Everything we’re building is aimed at lowering the cost of making something good,” she says. “If your advantage was a production budget, that’s getting less valuable every year. If your advantage is that you have something to say, that’s getting more valuable.”

Cultivate taste

Yet as Chen encourages brands and creators towards a more unvarnished form of authenticity, AI is complicating Instagram’s definition of what it means to be “real”. A 2025 AI Forensics study found that just three of 13 Instagram posts containing synthetic imagery in its sample were labeled as such. This week, Instagram tightened its rules, limiting the reach of AI-generated personas that fail to disclose they are synthetic and replacing the “AI influencer” label with the more explicit “AI-generated profile”. It’s a notable tension for Meta, even as it bets heavily on AI across its products.

Chen draws a distinction between using AI creatively and obscuring what is human. “These updates are about making it clear to people when they see a profile featuring an AI-generated person vs a human. People want to know when they’re seeing things made with AI, and we’re doing a lot of work to help with that transparency,” she says.

At the same time, she points to designers including Collina Strada and Willy Chavarria experimenting with AI across pattern creation and digital storefronts. “This experimentation is the right instinct. Every creative needs to explore AI on their own terms and use it, or not, in the way that feels right to them. But as we see more AI content, people will seek out content from real people more, not less,” Chen says. “What makes you stop scrolling was never the photo; it’s who made it. Their perspective, their taste. Taste is the entire fashion industry — for luxury, I think that’s an advantage.”

Taste, of course, has become something of an internet obsession in 2026, as Silicon Valley attempts to define — and increasingly automate — something fashion has long traded on. Does Instagram’s algorithm have taste?

“What the system does is less mysterious than people assume,” Chen says. “It’s trying to show you things you’ll find worth your time, not things with a particular aesthetic.” She cites Instagram’s recent introduction of its “Your Algorithm” feature, which lets users curate their tastes and interests for more relevant recommendations.

“Your feed is also a reflection of who’s in your circle and what they’re reacting to. Whatever taste the people around you have, your feed will reflect it back,” she says. “Taste is a point of view, and it has to come from a person, not an algorithm.”