Marks & Spencer, that stalwart of the high street, has just upped the ante somewhat in its mission to reinvent the chain as “cool dad” rather than “trusty aunt”. Seeking to position itself as a hip high-street store, catering for young adults as well as their ancestors, it has launched a new radish that, when sliced, looks “just like a watermelon!”
With flesh a light shade of magenta, bordered by a lime-green rind, the modified radish is primed to become the most popular legume on Instagram this summer. Forget fashionistas like Alexa Chung: Clearly, M&S has concluded that its exclusive roots are going to pave the way to millennials’ hearts.
Modern life, after all, is not merely represented on Instagram, it is now created on — and for — it. Museums, galleries, restaurants, pubs, alleyways and beaches have all started adopting “for Instagram” designs: Think colourful tiles, garish wallpaper, pink lattes, flamingos, pineapples and angel wings. The kitsch imagery favoured on the photo-sharing site is seeping into the real world, as material environments are increasingly designed with the internet, not reality, in mind.
In New York, the Museum of Ice Cream’s pastel tribute to cool treats sold 300,000 tickets, at £14 (Dh65.65) each, within five minutes of release, thanks to its Instagrammability. In London, pub landlords have spent thousands of pounds transforming boozers into “selfie-friendly” boutiques, while restaurants sprinkled with twee paraphernalia fill their menus with recipes that are more aesthetically pleasing than tasty.
This trend for life imitating digital art struck me on a recent holiday to Mexico, a country that has pinned its tourism hopes on Instagram. To counter its reputation as a haven for drug cartels and American tourists, social-media-savvy entrepreneurs have turned Mexico’s beaches — often crowded and sometimes cloudy — into pristine landscapes. Empty hammocks hang between driftwood poles set in shallow turquoise waters; rustic swings overlook white sandy beaches and swimming pools are set in the deepest jungle.
In priming themselves to be among the most Instagrammed places in the world, resorts such as Tulum and Isla Holbox have no doubt become popular with younger travellers, but the inauthenticity detracts from the beauty. Give me a (real) twisted driftwood branch over manufactured sea hammocks any day.
After all, if everyone is determined to have the same “perfect” photo for their Instagram feed, such images lose their singularity and character. As do the locations, which are flooded with phone-wielding nuisances.
Of course reality sometimes needs peppering with a bit of texture, colour and design to liven up the mundanity. Salads could do with a splash of pink and pubs have long been in need of a healthy dose of style.
But the idea that we should design real things to satisfy our online lives rings Black Mirror alarm bells — and leads to unrealistic expectations about how the world should be. Tourists on Mexico’s Caribbean coast have complained because there are unexpected piles of black seaweed that were nowhere to be seen in the Instagram photos. And, as restaurateurs have pointed out, towering, seven-stack burgers designed to look good on social media are so impractical to eat that they totally defeat the point.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
Cara McGoogan is a feature-writer for the Telegraph Media Group.
