Who Curates When Algorithms Sell?

Curation disappeared somewhere between the third influencer haul and the moment you realized your feed looks exactly like everyone else’s.

Nobody is curating what you see anymore. An algorithm is, and it's optimizing for clicks, not quality.

What Curation Actually Was

Curation was editorial judgment. It was buyers and editors spending decades learning what quality looked like. People who understood construction well enough to recognize when a garment would endure versus when it would fade within a season. They earned their taste through repetition by seeing thousands of collections and being wrong enough times to refine their eye.

They could walk into a showroom and immediately tell whether a designer understood fabric, proportion, and craft. Boutique owners built entire businesses on knowing their clients. Not demographics. Not data points. Actual people. How they lived. What they reached for repeatedly. What they would never wear no matter how on trend it was.

That was curation. Informed judgment deciding what deserved attention. Now attention is decided by yesterday’s engagement.

What Actually Replaced It

The algorithm does not care if a blazer fits your body or your life. It cares whether you paused long enough to watch. Whether you tapped. Whether you converted. It favors repetition. The same silhouette. The same fabric. The same must have framed slightly differently across countless screens. It loves what it can recognize, categorize, and push at scale.

What it does not love are clothes designed for specific bodies. Brands that require context. Pieces that make sense only when worn, moved in, lived with. Anything that resists instant legibility disappears.

What This Costs *Algorithms Sell*

The algorithm places fundamentally different garments side by side and treats them as equivalents separated only by price. It cannot explain why one will age beautifully and the other will not survive repeated wear. It does not teach you how to recognize quality. It only shows you what is circulating.

Bodies become another oversight. Shorter bodies, longer torsos, different proportions are all flattened into the same recommendation loop. The same trending pieces are pushed universally regardless of how they actually sit on real people. When something does not work the fault appears to belong to the body not the system.

The algorithm does not understand bodies, it understands metrics.

The Influencer Economy

What looks like recommendation is often commission.

When multiple people suddenly declare the same product essential, that is not curation, it is coordination. The selection is not based on fit longevity or relevance. It is based on performance and payout.

Taste becomes transactional and judgment becomes monetized.

What Gets Designed Now

Design increasingly responds to visibility. Clothes are built for the image before they are built for wear. For the flat lay. For the mirror selfie. For the single frame that might circulate widely.

This prioritizes immediate impact over proportion movement or endurance. Construction matters less than recognizability. A garment’s entire value is often decided by how it appears in one image not how it functions over time.

The algorithm rewards immediacy. It does not reward patience.

Where Real Curation Went

Real curation still exists. It is just no longer ambient, it lives in private wardrobes built intentionally. In small spaces where selection is narrow and considered. In expertise that is not free scalable or subsidized by links.

It survives through human judgment through people who still know how to look at clothes slowly critically and without chasing visibility. For most people that layer has been removed and what remains is access without guidance.

The Bottom Line

The algorithm curates for the masses, optimizing for engagement and sales volume. Real curation happens in smaller spaces, for people willing to seek it out.

The question isn't whether algorithms will keep selling. They will. The question is whether you're going to let them curate for you, or whether you're going to find the humans who actually know what they're talking about.

Because the algorithm doesn't care if you look good. It only cares if you keep scrolling.