From HIDDEN.NY to JJJJound: How Instagram Mood Boards Are Shaping Streetwear

If you’ve spent any time on streetwear-centric social media, chances are you’ve come across a mood board account like HIDDEN.NY and yungwatergun. These carefully curated feeds of aesthetically pleasing products and imagery; hyped sneakers, Seinfeld screengrabs, vintage cars, and Kanye West tweets are all over Instagram and boast hundreds of thousands of followers at a time.

However, a quick scroll will reveal that the content is rarely ever anything original or new - instead, these are images you’ve seen time and time again, given a new lease of life when grouped together with other images and memes that all together build out the page to become a heady mix of things we can relate to, identify with – and even buy into. But amongst the pop culture references, aspirational imagery, and funny and relatable slogan graphics, these mood boards seem to be having a noticeable effect on how our tastes are shaped and why we purchase products – whether that’s by slipping an upcoming release into the feed or collaborating with a well-known brand. Here, we dive into exactly how mood board accounts are shaping the future of streetwear.

In its simplest form, a mood board is a visual representation of ideas or concepts, put together in a well-thought-out way, and communicative of a particular style or aesthetic. Of course, mood boards have never been exclusive to Instagram – brands and designers have always used them in the early stages of their collections, and internet users have always had visual platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr to allow them to create a visual catalogue of their interests.

For brands especially, a mood board is an essential stage in the creative process, but the lines between behind-the-scenes previews and public sharing have become blurred in recent years - especially when you consider that designers behind the brands have started to become just as (or even more) popular than the brands themselves. For those brands and designers that already leaned heavily into an Instagram-friendly aesthetic, allowing a sneak peek into their process and inspirations has allowed them to build out the brand enough to have become a lifestyle, instead of just selling products.

Take Jacquemus, for example. Designer Simon Porte-Jacquemus runs his own personal account in a similar way to how an Instagram influencer would run theirs: a mix of product-centric photos, aspirational imagery and lifestyle content. And then of course there’s Teddy Santis, the brain behind grown-up streetwear brand Aimé Leon Dore and creative director of New Balance’s Made in USA line. Santis’ taste in visuals is conveyed on the Aimé Leon Dore-run visual blog “Source,” which displays a selection of curated images within ALD’s website. Amongst the selection you’ll spot Eames furniture, basketball imagery and retro Range Rovers, once again allowing customers to lap up other aspects of an inspirational and covetable lifestyle as they shop for clothes.

The thing about the mood board formula though, is that it works both ways. Emily Oberg describes her brand, Sporty & Rich as being a ‘mood board for (her) life.’ The athleisure brand was started in 2014, off the back of an Instagram account of the same name, and now Sporty & Rich has expanded into a clothing line and wellness blog, with the ultimate goal of opening fitness spaces under the Sporty & Rich banner. Using the internet, pretty much anyone can create their own personal brand, the next step is to make something tangible out of it.

Having started off as a digital mood board in 2006, Justin Saunder’s JJJJound has managed to leverage its aesthetic to become of one the most sought-after collaborators of the moment. At the time, JJJJound was different from other lifestyle blogs in that it was purely based on imagery, however, the carefully curated mix earned Saunders attention from the likes of Ye and Virgil Abloh, validating his taste and vision, and later earning him the opportunity to collaborate with brands such as New Balance, Reebok and BAPE. Like Sporty & Rich, JJJJound has successfully transitioned from a digital mood board to a fully-fledged brand. But, as brands search for potential collaborators, mood board accounts are quickly becoming a go-to option thanks to their engaged audiences and carefully curated visual identities.

HIDDEN.NY, run by an anonymous 20-something in New York and listed as a ‘personal blog’ on Instagram, is another account that has managed to carve out its position as a legitimate collaborator, after it was originally set up as a mood board for the founder’s design work. Followed by Takashi Murakami and Ronnie Fieg among others, HIDDEN.NY is a curated page that looks back at the history of streetwear, whilst mixing in a good number of upcoming products and lifestyle imagery. HIDDEN’s founder has also worked with resale platform GRAILED on a curated collection of archive garments that were sold via their marketplace, as well as acted as a personal shopper for Drake. Whilst HIDDEN.NY’s run of projects is already impressive, the mood board recently collaborated on a capsule with Salomon, which put both brands’ logos front and centre. Similarly, liljupiterr got its own K-Swiss collab back in 2019, before its creator later started the brand Designer Humans in 2021.

When it came to monetising the mood board, JJJJound was the blueprint: paving the way for boys in their bedrooms to become the next generation of tastemakers by using the internet to repost things that give the illusion of a certain lifestyle. As mood boards are becoming more heavily ingrained within the culture, there’s no doubt that they influence what we like and buy. In the same way social media algorithms are designed to show us what they think we’re interested in, the curators behind mood board accounts understand what their audience wants to see, no matter how much they say their account conveys their own personal taste. The issue here though, is that the majority of these accounts are actually posting the same things. So, who is really dictating the trends if the trends are all being followed by the same groups of curators? And what’s the value of taste when everyone’s taste seems to be exactly the same?

Taste and status have always been interlinked, pulled together by a term called “cultural capital.” A similar phenomenon called “content capital” describes how a deep understanding of how and what to post online can determine the success of an artist’s work. Although the term was originally coined in relation to influencers, judging by the follower numbers these accounts are racking up, it’s no stretch to be able to apply it to these mood board accounts, too. Although it’s near impossible to track exactly how much a repost from one of these accounts can influence sales, you only have to look at HIDDEN.NY’s sold-out Salomon collab or GRAILED edits to see that the account wields power. But being encouraged to buy something by a mood board account still feels different to being sold to by an influencer – and maybe that’s why we like them so much. Whereas buying something off an influencer’s sponsored post can sometimes feel a bit cringe-inducing, the far-removed feeling of buying based on anonymous curation feels much more like you’re buying into a vibe than copying an original.

Ultimately, mood boards serve to validate as much as dictate our taste, and this goes well beyond fashion. There is obviously cross-category appeal: a quick scroll will show a mix of film, music and cultural references too, but even across the different accounts these are always the same – it’s almost as if there’s a pre-approved list that the curators are allowed to pick from. These cultural cues are posted so frequently that they quickly become familiar to their audience, reaffirming their taste in a bid to keep them engaged. And, instead of driving trends forward, as they have the potential to do, the accounts seem to be stuck in the past – an endless loop of George Costanza ‘fit pics and vintage New Balance ads. What started with the potential to genuinely curate taste has turned into a homogenised engagement-farming exercise, with each page competing for the attention of the same brands in order to collaborate and sell stuff to the same (heavily engaged) audiences.

As a fairly new phenomenon, it’s hard to know exactly where mood board accounts will go from here. When we think back to streetwear eras like 2016, which were largely defined by a particular aesthetic, the similar accounts that were around at the time failed to adapt to changing trends, and have since died a slow death. This begs the question as to whether the people running the accounts are tastemakers, or simply products of the current zeitgeist. With the opportunities for monetisation becoming more and more prominent, it’s fairly likely that we’ll see these accounts switch up their aesthetics as trends change – but when the brains behind the accounts are as young as 20, is this not to be expected anyway?

Now more than ever though, it’s clear that both new and established brands have to prove that they’re culturally relevant in order to win over their customers. In an industry where the product has always been king, identity, knowledge and belonging all contribute to the new currency.

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