Oscar weekend, with its cocktails and dinners and pre-soirees and, most importantly, parties—like Vanity Fair’s—is fashion’s equivalent to Super Bowl weekend. Every stylist is trafficking dresses from Paris Fashion Week, which just wrapped yesterday, to Los Angeles. Everyone in entertainment is looking for a party invite and an outfit, and those of us in the media are asking stylists and labels to disclose the stars they’re dressing. With the proliferation of fashion commentary on social media, it’s all about speed, about being the first one to clock who wore what and where, for talking head commentators and magazines alike.
The fastest of them all is Check the Tag, an Instagram account run by Brazilian sisters Kathleen Miozzo and Wenny Milzfort, which the fashion industry has adopted as its celebrity-style-credits oracle. “Did you get a Zara press release yet?” a magazine editor messaged me after Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl, for which he wore the Spanish fast fashion giant. She was trying to fact-check what the streets, and the internet, were saying about who had made his look.
“Check the Tag called it. They’re the People of pregnancy announcements,” she said. For those not in media, it’s known in the industry that celebrity PR teams will seed confirmations of such things to People, which is why it’s rarely wrong. Once it reports on something, it’s considered generally safe to do so as well. The same now goes for Check the Tag.
“It is mostly luck,” Miozzo says over Zoom about the explosion of Check the Tag, which is followed by more than 200,000 people, including celebrities like actor Morgan Spector, major stylists such as Law Roach and Brad Goreski, and top magazine editors like American Vogue’s Chloe Malle and Mel Ottenberg of Interview. “Many accounts do the same thing.”
Except that when they started in 2016, they were alone. The idea of credit-checking celebrity wardrobes was not new; it had been done on X, back when it was still Twitter, and before then on Tumblr and fashion blogs. But once conversation shifted over to Instagram, those who were first to translate successful formats to a new platform were able to grow their audience.
Miozzo and Milzfort, two studied fashion fanatics, recall watching a Brazilian TV program and recognizing that the host was wearing Versace. Miozzo started the account to post about it, using what has become its signature format: a side-by-side photo featuring the look and its runway or archival counterpart, with credits in the caption. Now the two include a poll in the comments for their very involved audience to vote on the outfit, but they don’t express opinions themselves. It’s part of their claim to fame: Check the Tag is practically a news service, and despite having many opinions of their own about fashion, Miozzo and Milzfort keep them to themselves. They’re fans, not critics.