Snapshots of Text on Instagram

Fashion Curator Communication from a Design and Museum Studies Perspective

Abstract

This paper aims to examine engagement for a specific Instagram practice of fashion curators: posts featuring Snapshots of Text. It builds upon previous research, which indicates that fashion curators frequently post such images of text on Instagram (Sand et al. (2022)) and represent a high impact niche community particularly suited to qualitative research, whose communication strategies have been underexplored. The study examines multimodal digital communication by fashion curators from a design perspective, with a focus on engagement. Its mixed-methods approach combines qualitative eye-tracking, surveys, semi-structured interviews, participative netnography, thematic content analysis, and data analytics. It draws on communication and museum studies to gain a better understanding of how the visual elements of language are used and received in the Instagram environment. Findings indicate that while engagement with Snapshots of Text posts is higher with certain typographies and sizes, engagement is also dependent on certain caption characteristics. Furthermore, they indicate that a cross-pollination of digital fashion communication and museum studies research, particularly museum label guidelines and visitor engagement studies, may benefit both domains.