Harajuku, Age Six

Coco is six years old, lives in Harajuku, and has more Instagram followers than I’ll accumulate in my entire life of posting things I genuinely think are worth looking at. I’ve made peace with this.

What she posts is streetwear—layered, considered, occasionally absurd in exactly the right way, the kind of outfits you’d expect from someone who’d been absorbing Tokyo street style before they could read. Piece after piece, rotating through whatever the local scene is currently fixating on, documented on her Instagram with the casual ease of someone for whom dressing well is simply how Tuesday works. She gave an interview to Vice about fame and her process for finding pieces, and the whole thing has the slightly surreal quality of a serious fashion conversation conducted with someone who is still in first grade.

There’s clearly adult involvement in the curation—the photography, the account’s aesthetic coherence—and that raises the obvious questions about what it means to build a public identity around a child this young. But Coco herself seems to be having a genuinely good time, and whatever you want to say about the machinery around her, the clothes are interesting. The Harajuku scene has always been partly about this: personal style as declaration, made regardless of age or income. The declaration just has a bigger audience now.

The real joke the internet is savoring is on everyone who convinced themselves Instagram rewarded taste on its own merits. It doesn’t. It rewards being charming in the specific way the algorithm currently favors. Coco has that. I’ve been at this considerably longer and have considerably fewer excuses.