The Original Influencers: How Fashion Went Viral Before Social Media

Fashion moves at a bewildering speed today. A celebrity can be photographed leaving a restaurant in an unexpected pair of shoes, somebody on TikTok can revive a forgotten way of wearing a cardigan, or an outfit can appear on Instagram and by the following morning thousands of people are searching for something similar. We tend to think of this ability to influence what other people wear as a very modern phenomenon, born somewhere between the arrival of the smartphone and the invention of the word “influencer”, yet while the technology may be new, the behaviour behind it really isn't.

For as long as fashion has existed, people have looked at other people for ideas about how to dress. What has changed is who we are able to look at, how we see them and, perhaps most importantly, how quickly their influence reaches us. Before social media there were film stars, models, musicians, society women and royalty. Before television there was cinema and the illustrated press, and before fashion photography there were fashion plates. Behind all of them were dressmakers, designers, photographers, editors, pattern companies, manufacturers and retailers taking an image that people desired and finding ways to bring some version of it within reach.

The history of the fashion influencer is therefore much bigger than a parade of famously well-dressed women. It is really the history of how fashion travelled, and how something worn by one person could eventually find its way into thousands of entirely ordinary wardrobes.

When Fashion Travelled on Paper

Long before anyone could photograph a fashionable outfit, printed fashion plates allowed new styles to travel far beyond the streets, salons and drawing rooms where they were originally worn. By the nineteenth century they had become an important part of fashion periodicals, with beautifully illustrated and often hand-coloured images showing readers the shapes, trimmings, hairstyles and accessories considered fashionable for the season. The V&A describes these plates as predecessors of modern fashion photography and notes that they were used by fashionable women when deciding what their wardrobes should contain.

There is something wonderfully familiar about them. Fashion plates did not simply record a bodice or sleeve as though they were technical diagrams; women were shown dressed for different occasions, often surrounded by the visual trappings of an elegant life. They sold an idea of fashion as much as the individual garments themselves. A reader could study the picture and imagine how a fashionable silhouette might translate into her own world, even if the clothes illustrated were beyond her means.

That distinction matters because fashion influence has never depended upon everybody owning the original. A woman did not need access to an expensive Parisian dress to be influenced by its shape. A local dressmaker could interpret it, a sleeve could be copied, a trimming adapted or a less expensive fabric substituted. A fashionable idea could become steadily altered as it travelled until a style that began among a relatively small and privileged group appeared in wardrobes many miles and several social steps away. The desirable image came first, while the question of how to achieve something similar was answered according to the means and resources of the woman who wanted it.

Photography Changed Who We Thought We Knew

The arrival of photography did something rather more profound than simply make fashion pictures more realistic because it gradually brought the person wearing the clothes closer to the audience. Developments in printing during the 1890s made it possible to reproduce photographs alongside text, while the twentieth century saw publications such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar increasingly use innovative photography to present the fashions of Paris, London and New York. Fashion was no longer represented only by an illustrator's ideal woman. Readers could begin to recognise real faces, real personalities and, eventually, people whose style became interesting in its own right.

The expanding popular press also gave fashionable society figures an audience far beyond the people who might ever encounter them in person. One particularly fascinating example is Wallis Simpson. Whatever one thinks of the extraordinary history surrounding the Duchess of Windsor, her appearance was carefully observed and photographed, and her relationship with fashion was far from accidental. Designers including Mainbocher created clothes for her, while photographers such as Cecil Beaton helped construct the polished public image that survives in photographs today.

This is where the idea of the apparently effortless “style icon” becomes interesting, because public images have been carefully constructed for much longer than we sometimes realise. The woman seen in a beautifully composed photograph may have looked wonderfully natural, but behind that image could be a designer, photographer, hairdresser, editor and an enormous amount of thought. The modern celebrity photograph did not invent that process; it simply made such images faster to produce, easier to distribute and eventually almost impossible to escape.

Photography alone, however, still did not give most women direct access to the clothes they admired. That required another layer of fashion history which is sometimes overlooked when the focus remains firmly on famous designers and their clients.

How Ordinary Women Got the Look

One of the easiest mistakes to make when looking backwards is to imagine fashion as a succession of famous designers and spectacular garments. It makes for beautiful museum exhibitions, but it leaves an enormous number of real wardrobes out of the story. Home dressmaking was once an important route into fashion, while local dressmakers allowed women to interpret current styles according to their own figures, budgets and requirements.

Commercial paper patterns made this process increasingly accessible, allowing women to reproduce fashionable silhouettes themselves, choose fabrics they could afford and adapt the finished garment to their own tastes and needs. The history of the commercial pattern industry stretches back through the nineteenth century and reflects enormous changes in technology, retailing and fashion, eventually producing the familiar full-sized packet patterns that became such a normal part of twentieth-century home sewing.

This meant that influence could travel without an original garment ever changing hands. A fashionable shape might appear in a magazine, be interpreted by a pattern company and then recreated on kitchen tables and sewing machines in completely different fabrics. Local dressmakers performed a similar role, turning fashionable ideas into clothes suited to the customer standing in front of them rather than the model in the photograph.

It is a part of fashion history that becomes particularly apparent when you spend years handling vintage clothing. Some of the most beautifully made vintage garments have no glamorous label inside them at all. They may have been made at home or by a skilled local dressmaker, and the absence of a famous name does not make them somehow separate from fashion. Quite the opposite: they can show us how fashion actually reached people.

After more than twenty years of working with vintage clothing, that is something I still find endlessly fascinating. An unlabelled 1950s dress can contain all the fashionable ingredients of its moment, from the shape of the skirt and neckline to the print and construction, while also carrying the individual decisions of whoever made and wore it. Real people rarely copied fashion perfectly; they interpreted it, adapted it and incorporated it into wardrobes that already existed.

As the twentieth century progressed, however, another powerful source of inspiration was entering everyday life. Cinema gave audiences not simply fashionable clothes to admire, but people whose entire appearance could become desirable.

When the Woman Wearing the Dress Became as Important as the Dress

Cinema transformed the experience of looking at clothes. A fashion illustration could suggest movement, but a film could show a dress actually moving. Audiences saw how a skirt behaved when its wearer walked, how satin caught the light, how jewellery looked against skin and how an entire outfit contributed to the personality of the woman wearing it. Clothes were no longer isolated objects but part of a story, a character and an imagined way of life.

Film stars consequently became powerful fashion reference points, although their influence is sometimes simplified into neat tales of one actress wearing one thing and millions of women instantly copying it. Reality was usually more complicated. Screen costume existed primarily to create character and visual impact, and many Hollywood clothes were far removed from what an ordinary woman could realistically buy. What audiences could take away, however, was an idea: a silhouette, hairstyle, neckline, colour combination or simply a new impression of what glamour looked like.

Audrey Hepburn's relationship with Hubert de Givenchy is a particularly good example. Givenchy created the famous black dress associated with Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and their long collaboration helped establish an image of understated elegance that remains instantly recognisable. Most women admiring Hepburn were never going to own Givenchy couture, of course, but that did not prevent elements of the look from being interpreted elsewhere.

We see this repeatedly throughout fashion history. The original garment is often far less important to mass fashion than the thousands of interpretations that follow it. Designers and stars created desire, magazines explained and amplified it, while manufacturers, retailers, pattern companies and dressmakers worked out how to offer something attainable that captured part of the same mood. By the middle of the twentieth century, that chain was becoming remarkably efficient, and the arrival of a distinct youth market would speed it up considerably.

The Age of the Fashion Personality

The 1960s changed the balance because youth itself became an enormously valuable fashion commodity. In Britain, young people's growing spending power helped create a market that no longer wanted merely to inherit the clothes and tastes of the previous generation. The fashion industry responded with clothing deliberately aimed at young consumers, while Mods, musicians and other youth groups were themselves helping to shape what designers and retailers produced.

This was also the era when the fashion model could become a celebrity rather than simply an anonymous figure displaying somebody else's clothes. Jean Shrimpton is particularly interesting because we can hear some of this transformation in her own words. In her 1964 writing about modelling, she recalled deliberately wanting not to copy the established models who had come before her. Her career with photographers including John French and her appearances in Mary Quant designs helped make her one of the defining faces of the new British fashion world.

Twiggy soon became another instantly recognisable face of the decade, with her cropped hair, enormous eyes and slight figure becoming almost inseparable from the popular memory of 1960s fashion. Yet neither woman single-handedly created the styles she wore, and that distinction is important. The history of the miniskirt demonstrates exactly why. Mary Quant is frequently credited with “inventing” the mini, but fashion rarely provides us with such convenient moments of invention. Shorter skirts emerged through a broader change in youth fashion, with designers including Quant and André Courrèges associated with rising hemlines. What Quant unquestionably did was help make short, energetic, youthful clothes enormously visible and desirable, while models and pop stars carried those ideas to an even wider audience.

This is perhaps a better way of understanding fashion influence altogether. The influential person does not necessarily create the trend. Their power can lie in making an emerging idea visible, memorable and desirable enough for other people to begin imagining themselves wearing it.

Jacqueline Kennedy provides a rather different example from the same period. Her clothes as First Lady were scrutinised internationally, and her collaboration with Oleg Cassini helped establish a distinct public image. The commercial response was remarkably direct: the Smithsonian records that copies of Cassini's designs for Kennedy were sold in American stores on mannequins resembling her, while the association with the “Jackie look” helped sell hats and costume jewellery as well as clothing. Consumers were not being offered Jacqueline Kennedy's actual wardrobe, but an attainable piece of what her carefully cultivated appearance represented.

From Magazine Page to High Street

For an influence to become a genuine mass fashion, admiration alone is not enough; somebody has to make the desired look available. This is where the story becomes less about famous people and more about the machinery surrounding them. Fashion editors decided which clothes deserved attention, photographers created the images people remembered and newspapers and magazines placed those images in front of enormous audiences. Pattern companies provided one route to recreation, while manufacturers and retailers provided another. Department stores, catalogues and shop windows then put the resulting fashions in front of people who might never have encountered the original source.

Sometimes we can see that machinery working with extraordinary clarity. In 1964, Daily Mirror fashion editor Felicity Green featured a pink gingham Biba dress by Barbara Hulanicki in the newspaper. Around 3,000 sales had apparently been anticipated, but more than 17,000 orders arrived. The response provided Hulanicki with such strong evidence of demand that she went on to open Biba's first physical boutique.

There is something strikingly familiar about the story: one piece of media exposure, a desirable and relatively accessible garment, and demand that vastly exceeded expectations. Yet describing Hulanicki or Green simply as an early “influencer” would miss the most interesting part. The success came from the connection between the editor who selected the dress, the newspaper capable of placing it before a mass audience, the designer who understood what young women wanted and the customers who were ready to buy it.

The shop itself was becoming influential too. Mary Quant's Bazaar deliberately rejected the formality of conventional fashion retailing. The V&A records its loud music, free drinks, witty window displays and extended opening hours, all of which helped turn shopping into an experience and the boutique into a destination. Quant was also absorbing ideas from around her, with dancers, musicians, Beatniks and Mods feeding into her developing aesthetic.

That last detail begins to turn the traditional story of fashion influence on its head. Fashion was no longer simply travelling from the socially powerful person at the top to everybody below. Designers were looking at the street, musicians were borrowing from subcultures, young people were influencing shops, shops were influencing young people, and magazines were photographing the results and circulating them again. Influence had become a conversation rather than a set of instructions.

Fashion Goes Faster

By the later twentieth century, television, popular music and youth culture accelerated this exchange still further. A young person could see a musician perform on television, encounter the same face on a record sleeve, read about them in a magazine and see related clothes appearing in shops. Fashion and music became increasingly difficult to separate, particularly within youth movements where belonging could be expressed through a haircut, jacket, shoe or trouser shape as clearly as through the records somebody bought.

This did not mean that everyone suddenly dressed like a pop star, and one of the dangers of using photographs to understand vintage fashion is that the most memorable images are often the least ordinary ones. A photograph of beautifully dressed young people on Carnaby Street tells us something valuable about fashionable London, but it does not tell us what every twenty-year-old in Britain was wearing that afternoon. The spectacular survives in books, archives and exhibitions partly because it is spectacular.

The clothes themselves provide a useful corrective. Real vintage wardrobes are full of compromise and individuality: fashionable dresses worn beneath extremely sensible coats, daring prints cut into thoroughly practical shapes, home-sewn versions of expensive styles and older garments altered to accommodate a newer silhouette. People kept clothes, repaired them, borrowed them, remade them and combined new purchases with things they already owned.

That is why the idea that people simply “copied” famous women has never quite satisfied me. Influence is much more interesting than imitation. A woman might admire Jacqueline Kennedy without ever owning a pillbox hat, while a teenager could love Jean Shrimpton's look without possessing a single Mary Quant garment. These images expanded the vocabulary of what people could imagine wearing, but what eventually appeared in an individual's wardrobe depended upon money, availability, age, location, lifestyle and, crucially, personal taste. Fashion may have supplied the inspiration, but the wearer still decided what to do with it.

So, Did Influencers Exist Before Social Media?

Not in the modern commercial sense of the word. An eighteenth-century society beauty, a 1930s film star and a 1960s fashion model were operating in completely different worlds, and forcing the modern job title “influencer” onto all of them would flatten some fascinating differences.

What they shared was an ability to make other people notice how they looked. The means by which that influence travelled changed dramatically over time. Fashion plates allowed an image to circulate, photography attached fashionable images to recognisable people, cinema gave those people movement and personality, and magazines delivered them regularly into the home. Patterns and mass manufacturing made elements of their style obtainable, while television and popular music increased the frequency with which fashionable personalities appeared before us. At the same time, youth culture increasingly allowed trends to travel upwards from the street as well as downwards from elite fashion.

Social media has compressed that entire journey almost beyond recognition. The person wearing the clothes can now photograph herself, publish the image, speak directly to an audience and provide a way to buy what she is wearing almost immediately. A chain that might once have involved a designer, photographer, editor, publisher, manufacturer and retailer can sometimes collapse into a single person holding a phone.

Yet there is something reassuringly familiar beneath all that technology. We still notice people whose style intrigues us and borrow rather than simply copy, taking a colour, silhouette or idea and fitting it into wardrobes that already contain other clothes and other influences. However loudly fashion industries have sometimes tried to dictate what everybody should want, real people have always had the final say about what actually makes it onto their backs.

Perhaps that is one of the loveliest things that more than twenty years of handling vintage clothing can teach us. When we look at the garments that have survived, we are not seeing fashion exactly as a designer intended it, a magazine photographed it or a famous woman wore it. We are seeing what somebody chose from all those competing messages, what she could afford or make, what suited her life and what she ultimately decided was worth wearing.

Long before we had likes, follows and algorithms, fashion was already travelling from person to person. It simply took the scenic route.