Springs me to a little mini rant. It's not really rant, really. It's just a fact. Fashion week is a fucking bore. I am ready to gouge my fucking eyes out. How can it be that fashion bloggers are just going to Paris once a month now? I feel we're doing Paris a disservice here, people. It is just relentless. It is so boring. Influencers that I love. I am just hard swiping, hard swiping past their stories.

I think that there is no sweet spot of number of stories that is too many and number that is not enough. I will say sometimes if it looks like a perforated edge on the top like you tore a little piece of paper off like it's too many, but when Jamie Beck does one of her exhaustive tutorials that's all interesting content. There's no reason that in that case 30 frames is not too much. Maybe if you're just storing your eggs and then you walk and then you're going to the gym and you're like, "Go to gym," then you fucking work out. Can we please please please, for the love of God and all that is holy, stop filming your fucking workouts.

I'm not alone in this. There are people I respect very much who are like, "This is going to be the thing that this generation regrets. It's filming all of their workouts. It is so boring." if I have to look at another leg lift when I wake up in the morning, I'm going to scream. You might be saying yourself, "James, you film yourself riding your bike all the time." That is a very different thing. That is me on a bicycle showing you Central Park being all beautiful, not me in a gym showing you my crunches.

I don't know how to do a crunch. Anyway, I digress. The fundamentals are the same that we always talk about. Ask yourself, "Is this entertaining, educational valuable for my audience or am I bored? Do I want to flex or am I just not thinking?" If it's this hand the board not thinking, want to flex, then you shouldn't post it. I think that a lot of the Fashion Week's stuff I'm looking at, there's just no thought and I understand those are very busy times. I can't imagine going to six shows in a day and running to five different events with brands. You don't have to do all that. No one's got the gun in your back saying, "You have to go to the Dior breakfast and then you have to go to the Chanel show." Those are amazing opportunities and things that you definitely shouldn't turn down if you get to do it. How do you show it to your audience in a way that is interesting, because for most people, I think, there's six weeks now out of the year where you just want to shut Instagram off because it's the same shit every day. It shows. I think when this all started eight years ago or so when influencers, bloggers started going to shows, it was exciting because it was new.

It's like my Positano rant. Positano was amazing. It is an incredible place and one of the most beautiful special places in the world. As it relates to Instagram, it's just played out and it's fucking boring now because you can't do anything special or interesting, so you're just there doing the same shit. Now, it's like every Fashion Week, I'm just seeing the same exact content. Everyone's at the same cafes in Paris. They're going to the same shows. It's all about the influencer. It's nothing about what is interesting to their audience. I think there is no magic number of stories.

If you have compelling interesting content, throw 30 up a day. Fucking go for it. If you have a big personality and people love seeing that and there's no end to the amount of stories they'll watch, then story all day. I implore you. Especially if you're in Fashion Week, you're just posting stuff mindlessly. I think you do yourself a huge disservice. I think that most influencers could definitely benefit from cutting down the amount of things they're saying "yes" to, especially around Fashion Week and cutting down the amount they're posting and stepping back at the end of the day and thinking about how to tell that story.

If you're starting to feel like, "My stories feel like they're kind of getting away from me, I'm just throwing stuff up," maybe step back for a few days and switch to publishing them all at once and at night and really thinking through that story and doing something interesting. If the idea is to educate, entertain, inspire, there are different ways to do that. Stories for so long, was this off-the-cuff "just do it in the moment" thing. I think especially in times like Fashion Week where there's a lot of content, I think you have to step back and do something different.

I've talked about my friend Aaron and his stories. I think he's done a really good job at this of stepping back and creating little almost short films. He did one for Fashion Week. If you go to Aaron's profile, Aaron is not cool. He's got a Fashion Week highlight. You can see what I'm saying. I think there is a case to be made for stepping back and doing something more thoughtful and mindful with your stories. Don't just do story vomit on your audience. We also just had Cass on Fohr Ground. She touches a little bit on this, but you have to find what works for you.

I don't know and I might change my mind on this six months from now, but I don't think now you have to have consistent quantity of stories day to day. I think some days you might have one story. One single frame that's interesting. One day you might have 30. I think it should be driven by what you're interested, inspired by and then what you think your audience would be interested in. It's not supposed to be a live stream of your life. At least, I don't think so.