Pinterest doesn’t just compile images, it deconstructs art into aesthetic fragments, stripped of their authorship and meaning. My Pinterest feed is a colorful collection of porcelain figurines, beach photos, artfully arranged books and soft movie stills, seeming to speak uniquely to me. But recently, one bright square caught my eye. The photo was familiar, an anomalous occurrence when scrolling, and revealed something unsettling about how platforms like Pinterest function.
At first glance, the photo of French-American actress Tina Aumont was nothing special. The posted screengrab focuses on her face, full features and thickly lined eyes. The 1960’s beauty is a mystery, posted on Pinterest by an anonymous user, cropped in and without a description.
By chance, I recognized the photo from a 1969 issue of Playboy magazine; the original photograph placing Aumont, face framed by full dark hair, outdoors where she appears nude, artfully covered by the well-placed grasses and flowers of the field she kneels in. However, none of this authorship appears in the image on Pinterest. The posted photo would be — to every other user who hadn’t stumbled across that issue of Playboy at a garage sale — beautiful but completely uninteresting. Without the full image, the knowledge of the Italian photographer, the actress’s sordid and controversial past and the context of 1960s Playboy, the image is just another pretty face; not photography and certainly not art.
Despite Pinterest’s supposed function as a platform for art and fashion, without the accreditation of these images, they no longer actually function as inspiring examples of aesthetic and design. The missing element of who is behind, and in front, of the camera destroys the connection of the audience to the work itself.
Consider a Robert Maplethorpe photograph without the context of Maplethorpe himself; his portraits, renowned for their stylized portrayal of 1980s queer culture, are famous because of when, where and by whom they were made. The historical, cultural contexts are essential to his work but that importance is lost. On Pinterest, his photographs are posted without accreditation, saved alongside hundreds of nondescript photos of handsome men and black and white flowers.
Images, cropped and flattened into the organic grid feeds, are serviced to the near 600 million active monthly users on the platform. We consume these images, allowing them to inform our tastes in lifestyle and fashion, without actually knowing what we are looking at, or who designed or photographed it.
Feeds of women’s clothing, posed without revealing a model’s face, close-ups on earring stacks or tattoo designs, the nature of Pinterest encourages a kind of anonymous aestheticization of images, suggesting that the top, jewelry, scarves, legs and heels could belong to you too. It removes all artistic integrity and implies that identity can be assembled from interchangeable parts; things are no longer referenced or inspired, they are copied.
This results in an ugly kind of parroted style, responsible for the oversaturation of micro-trends like the samba-like tennis shoes, deer print and watch rings. Sure, all can be cute, but instantly become hallmarks of a “Pinterest aesthetic.” There’s nothing personal or fashionable about them, they seem to exist in culture separately from their inspiration.
Most images of women on Pinterest, much like Aumont, become separated from their personhood as they appear alongside ads on the platform for lipgloss and HBO max subscriptions. Roughly half of the space on Pinterest served to consumers is advertising and suddenly no wonder it seems that everyone dresses the same.
Even the remaining content on the platform functions as a kind of crude retelling of culture, allowing for spaces where white influencers can post themselves in traditional South Asian dupattas dubbed “scandinavian scarves,” or coin classically Latin styles as “clean girl aesthetic.” Without accreditation of images or links to articles about designers or photographers, a lack of accountability ammasses in an amalgamation of bad taste.
Pinterest makes our fashion lackluster and homogenized. Designers, stylists, photographers and artists go unnamed as their work is copied into oblivion. On the app, creativity is stripped down to uniform aesthetic categories—where a Playboy photo spread can be cropped, repackaged and sold as “60s bohemian style.” Pinterest disrespects fashion as an art by treating everyone like an artist, so, in reality, no one is.
