As a mark of pure intent, going Instagram official has become a firmly entrenched dating marker. To post a picture of you and your new partner on Instagram – on the grid, mind you, not hiding behind the cowardice of a story – is to not only declare that you are in love, but also that you are confident enough in your future to share it with the world.
As such, Katy Perry’s decision to go Instagram official with Justin Trudeau is a classic of the genre. Long dogged by rumours that they might be together, Perry this week debuted a sanctioned image of them both. They are cheek to cheek. They are smiling, albeit in that slightly strained hurry-up-and-take-it way you do when someone decides to shoot a whole reel of photos. Katy Perry is pulling the exact same face she did when she stared into the camera that time she sort of went into space, which is how you know that it is really serious. Good luck to the pair of them.
Luckily, if you’d like to go Instagram official with your new squeeze, celebrities have given you a range of options. However, some are more successful than others …
The embarrassed hide
Last year, headlines around the world screamed things such as: “Ariana Grande finally goes Instagram official with Ethan Slater with loved-up display”. The problem is that you wouldn’t know this unless you looked really really hard. Last November, Grande posted a carousel of pictures to her account with the caption: “Sydney, you have stolen our hearts”. The first picture was of her with Cynthia Erivo. The second picture was just of her from behind. The third one was of her from the front. The fourth one was of her and Erivo again. Number five, literally a bubble. I won’t describe all 19 photos she posted, but one – and only one – of them is of her and Ethan Slater. They are on a stage with four other people. This does not count. Try harder.
The panicky delete
In January 2017, singer and actor Selena Gomez went to Italy with alternative R&B star The Weeknd. We know this because Gomez posted a short black and white video of The Weeknd to her Instagram, captioned with a heart eyes emoji. But after a couple of hours, she deleted it. Nobody knows why. Maybe she intended for the relationship to maintain some mystique, or maybe she was asked to take it down. Either way, the relationship didn’t last. The world learned of its demise that November when, in a thematically just manner, The Weeknd deleted every picture of Gomez from his Instagram.
Doing it in costume
Going Instagram official while in fancy dress is a bold move. It not only signals to the world that you are together, but also that you’re both comfortable enough in each other’s company to dress like a couple of silly geese. This is the approach that Channing Tatum and Zoë Kravitz took in October 2021, when they posed together in their Halloween costumes. He was Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and she was Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver – which seems like a weird dynamic to show the world that you’re in love, but I don’t make the rules.
Confusing everyone
This April, Elizabeth Hurley decided to go Instagram official with Billy Ray Cyrus, with a photo of them smooching in a field. “Happy Easter!” read the caption. And this would have been adorable, had the post not been met by total befuddlement from the entire world. “Wait, what?” someone replied. Others wrote: “Well he moves on quick”, “OMG Elizabeth’s gone Cray Cray” and ”It just makes no sense”. The moral here is clear – it’s one thing to go Instagram official, but if you just surprise everyone out of the blue, expect them to have to endure a moment of adjustment.
The retaliation
For years, Shakira and footballer Gerard Pique seemed like the perfect couple, able to weather busy careers and colossal tax evasion trials like they were nothing. But, when the couple broke up in 2022, after 11 years together, things suddenly looked a lot less rosy. First Shakira released a song about how much she doesn’t like Pique’s new girlfriend, including the lines “I’m worth two 22-year-olds,” and “You swapped a Ferrari for a Twingo”. Then, a couple of weeks later, Pique went Instagram official with the aforementioned girlfriend, Clara Chia Marti. Which is fun, because everyone wants to be used as a retaliatory device for their boyfriend’s ex, don’t they?
The differing eyelines
One of the problems with the Perry/Trudeau shot is that they’re both looking directly into the camera, because they both want the viewers to see how happy they are. However, those experienced in going Instagram official will know that what Katy Perry really wanted was a photo of her looking at the camera and him looking at her. This pose has been done countless times, but the one of Bella Thorne and her boyfriend Mark Emms is textbook. She’s looking at us. He’s looking at her. He can’t believe his luck, and she knows it. She’s even tickling him under the chin, like you would a dog. I’d put money on Perry and Trudeau copying this pose exactly when they post their next shot.
The parasocial overdrive
Tom Holland plays Spider-Man in the Spider-Man films. Zendaya plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend MJ in the Spider-Man films. So when they decided to tell the world that they were actually together in real life in 2021, they decided to do it with a photo of Tom Holland dressed as Spider-Man. Also, the caption was dedicated to “my MJ”. The bad news is that deliberately conflating yourselves with the fictional characters you play in films is an extremely weird move that plays to the very worst instincts of all your already-overzealous fans. The good news is that, since you have never played Spider-Man in a series of successful movies, you are unlikely to copy this one.
The goofy montage
In early 2023, Chris Evans – another Marvel star – chose to go Instagram official with his new partner Alba Baptista. However, he did this by posting a short film of the pair of them playing pranks on each other throughout the duration of the previous year. These pranks predominantly consisted of the couple surprising each other by screaming at them as they entered a room. If you’re charitable, you could say that this method shows the couple at their most unguarded. If you’re not, you could say that this is the sort of thing the worst couples post on TikTok because they’re desperate for engagement.
The mid-kiss snap
An absolute stone-cold classic. Forget the face-to-face straight-to-camera smile. If you really want to show the world that you are absolutely together with someone, then you need to take a picture of the pair of you kissing. In 2021 this is exactly what singer Lana Del Rey did with her new boyfriend, former Stereo Skyline musician Clayton Johnson. It’s a photo of them kissing, except Del Rey has held her phone up to capture the moment in a conveniently placed mirror. Forget that it probably took a painstaking amount of setup to get right, and that it did look a bit presumptuous a few months later when they split up. As a template for going Instagram Official this is hard to beat.
The namecheck
Inevitably, however, Taylor Swift beat it. Because when she went Instagram official with her boyfriend Travis Kelce last year, she did it in such an aggressively ostentatious way that it’s hard to know how to react. On one hand, the pair did it with a photo taken backstage at one of her concerts. On the other, they also decided to share the frame with Prince William and his two eldest children. Imagine doing that. Imagine roping in the two next kings of England and a princess to stand there so that they can be deliberately overshadowed by the knowledge that you’ve got a new boyfriend. It is, as the young people say, a hell of a flex. A couple of centuries ago it’s also the sort of behaviour that would get you decapitated, but times have changed.
