Within the vast community of influencers who dissect their outfits on social media, there are various profiles and many neuroses. The most brazen enjoy listing the exorbitant prices of what they're wearing. The most skillful boast about their latest bargains. The snobbiest love to rattle off the names of obscure designers, losing their audience just to impress them. But the most rigid? Their quirk is more subtle. And more depressing.
In video after video, they take pleasure in pointing out, obsessively, the color coordination between different parts of their look. It is not uncommon to hear: "the orange in the scarf matches the orange in the sneakers," or "the turquoise of the beanie echoes the turquoise of the ring." We have even had the misfortune of hearing a couple celebrate the coordination of their respective outfits: "The green of her cardigan did indeed match the green of his belt."
The phenomenon does not inspire much confidence – and not only because it brings back the trauma of those kits for men, packaged in black cardboard boxes with plastic fronts, offering a matching tie, pocket square and cufflinks of appalling quality.
While fashion can accommodate a few basic rules and principles, especially in tailoring, this "matchy-matchy" culture mainly reflects a cultural and aesthetic impoverishment. Worse still, it is part of a broader movement to solve every deeper need with a quick fix – what is now called a "hack."
According to some self-proclaimed experts on social media and some of their followers, all it takes is a sip of apple cider vinegar before each meal to lose weight, talking to the Duolingo app for 30 seconds a day to learn a language or dabbling in a few bitcoins to become a millionaire. Of course, all that is as futile as hoping to achieve style and elegance by matching your suspenders to your socks. Sorry, it doesn't work like that.
Find all the 'Is it ever a good idea…' columns here.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.