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By Brooke Bobb
Instagram is a discovery portal for fashion enthusiasts. It is a platform made up of millions of accounts committed to the progression of brands, large and small, as well as artists and designers that most of us have never noticed or heard before. It’s a position where strangers can make a call for themselves without any monetary or networked paint restrictions to hold them. Today, in the midst of a pandemic that threatens to dismantle many emerging brands and designers, Instagram fits into one of the tactics to position itself in the market and spread its paintings across the universe.
Ofri Cohen, a 30-year-old mid-forming mid-liner founded in northern Israel, has been supporting promising labels like these for more than seven years. He grew up in a kibbutz, far from major fashion capitals, relying on magazines around the world and falling in love with global taste in places like Mexico, Finland and Japan. She filed her Instagram account in 2014. Spotlight Time is a page committed to designers and creatives who are off the radar of all the world’s problems. In addition to the non-public emotion of her own discoveries, the concept of giving a scene to those strangers and advertising their paintings to the editors, buyers and stylists who stick to it. Today, Spotlight Time has more than 200,000 subscribers; among them, Naomi Campbell and Kylie Jenner.
“The turning point for me was early on when I came across a shoe designer from Peru,” Cohen explains. “Her name is Jessica Butrich, and I remember when I first saw her designs, I felt so excited and felt the need to get to know her, even if she was on the other side of the world. That’s really how Spotlight Time was born—out of a desire to promote and help young designers globally who are hoping to succeed in this industry.” A couple of years ago, Cohen also began posting images from the collection of local Israeli designer Shahar Avnet, which eventually caught the attention of Beyoncé’s stylist Zerina Akers. Her assistant reached out to Cohen via DM and asked if she could share contact information for Avnet, and as a result Beyoncé has worn Avnet’s confectionery couture gowns on more than one occasion, including on her last tour and for a scene in her music video for “Spirit,” from the remake of The Lion King last year.
Cohen has also been a representative of Italian Vogue, connecting the magazine with emerging skills and writing profiles of some of the designers he discovered. Although Cohen spends a lot of time alone and finds new names in fashion, lately he is also preparing for a nursing degree. She’s waiting for a midwiser.
In fact, hers is not the average fashion career, however, it is one that reflects the conversion nature of the industry and opens more doors for those like her and as the creators she discovers, who might not have made their way so freely without social media connectivity. And if, of course, placing a nurse and a midwiser is not the same as dedicating herself to a fashion task, Cohen sees similarities in his activities. “It sounds like a cliché,” he says, “but the link between fashion and nursing for me is that I can help and improve people’s lives. I need to make a difference.”
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