Photo: Getty Images
While I have yet to successfully wean myself off of social media, try as I may, I’ve become quite good at figuring out what kind of Instagram behavior most makes me want to delete my account. Maybe I’m a traitor to my generation, but I just can’t stand how curated yet faux-spontaneous half the posts clogging my feed tend to be, with their perfectly posed photos captioned by purposely self-negging little captions like “recent dump” or “life’s ok.”
Am I a hater? Yes, absolutely. But I don’t hate it all: Over the last few years, I’ve become enraptured by what I like to call “boomer Instagram,” in which people over the age of 60 take to the platform and make it their own in a way that we millennials can only dream of.
Obviously, the father of boomer Instagram is none other than restaurateur Keith McNally. While I can’t wait to dive into McNally’s new memoir, I’m catching up with old posts on his completely epic Instagram, on which he slams a recent Telegraph profile of him as “poorly written and woefully inaccurate” (get ’em, Keith!), delves into what can only be described as soft erotica about sexual opportunities gone by, and, of course, weighs in on the issues of the day in his own inimitable style. I’ve never had the opportunity to spend IRL time with McNally, but I can’t imagine the experience is all that different from reading his Instagram; each post feels like he’s coming up next to you to whisper something snide and right on the money in the middle of weekend brunch service at Balthazar, and I absolutely can’t get enough.
Of course, McNally isn’t the only social media poet who’s endeared me to boomer Instagram. No less a film authority than Francis Ford Coppola himself is quite online too, charmingly describing himself in his bio as “Film Director, Writer, Producer, Great-Grandfather” and posting extremely dadcore (or, indeed, great-grandpa-core?) shots of himself vacationing at waterfalls in fun, printed shirts; impromptu odes to Noël Coward; and fangirl-ish tributes to granddaughter Gia Coppola after the release of her film The Last Showgirl.
Not to be outdone, Kyle MacLachlan is also out there with his little “hi! i’m kyle” bio, adorably dancing to Haim songs and posting thirsty odes to Lactaid. (He’s so babygirl for that!)
But obviously, you can’t really talk about the highs of boomer Instagram without mentioning Isabella Rossellini. If you’re only familiar with the legendary actress for her roles in films including Conclave, Blue Velvet, and Death Becomes Her, her Instagram is likely to come as a delightful surprise. On it, she catalogues her interest in everything from the pigeons that helped Charles Darwin come up with his theory of natural selection to a mother elephant in Kenya named after her and, of course, her bee hives. If there’s a better way to forget your troubles than logging onto Instagram and watching Isabella goddamn Rossellini tend to her bees, I don’t know it.
You likely won’t hear me saying this again, but from the bottom of this whiny, entitled millennial’s heart: thank you, boomers. You may have tanked the economy and the climate and you may consistently make me feel bad about my tattoos at public pools, but you can really narrate the hell out of an Instagram caption. Maybe I’ll even take this moment to humble myself and patiently teach my own 70-year-old mother to post. (Or maybe…not?)
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.
