Digital Scrapbooking with She Comes In Technicolor

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We speak to the innovative woman behind one of our favourite new Instagram accounts

Since last October, Instagram account @she_comes_in_technicolor has been enlivening our feeds with a brilliant stream of archive fashion, from early-days Margiela to Miguel Adrover and Romeo Gigli. Interspersed with the runway shots are an abundance of reference imagery, meaning that scrolling through the pictures is evocative of taking a look at someone's (very well curated) moodboard. We reached out to the woman behind the account – Sarah Shikma, a Chicago-based jewellery designer – to find out what it is about 1989 Prada that fascinates her and how digital-era referencing is the evolution of her middle school scrapbook.

On archiving through Instagram...
“I come from a fashion background; I studied fashion and my mother was a model in the 70s, so I’ve been collecting magazine clippings since middle school. I started the Instagram account in October as a way for me to sort archive images for myself, things that inspire me. For example, I just came across this website that has archived all of the old hard-copy Jalouse magazines and I started going through those, and Instagram gives me a way to keep the images somewhere to look back and find them.”

On connecting with her heroes...
“Instagram is really interesting because it’s a platform where you can connect with these amazing people – and I’m really excited about the possibilities of the people I get to interact with; I've ended up with followers like Camille Bidault-Waddington and Jacquemus, people who I find really inspiring. That's the great thing about social media; it's an amazing platform where you can put out whatever you find, and you have people who like you who live across the country or even the world."

On the cyclical nature of fashion...
“Fashion rotates itself and a lot of pieces are coming back in style or becoming present again at the moment. I find it so fascinating when things are recreated or interpreted differently – for example, I’ve posted a lot of old Prada recently and the collections feel so modern that they could be shown now. I think it’s hard with fashion these days because there are images thrown at us every second and I have a hard time trying to catch up because everything happens so fast. How are we going to categorise the fashions of the 2000s? I look at stuff from the 80s or 90s and there is a specific aesthetic. I feel like now it’s congested and people are pulling stuff from all over the place."

On vintage versus modernity...
"I post mostly retro imagery and fashion because I have more of an appreciation for it. There are only a few designers I feel really excited about right now – so much that comes out of fashion school just seems really showy, but people like Grace Wales Bonner and Eckhaus Latta are doing things that are really innovative and refreshing. I suppose that, at the moment, I feel more inspired by the past than the present – but in terms of how the present is presented, it's happening so fast that I think that is fascinating, too."