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Friday, March 29, 2024
The Observer

#adventuregrams

teaser- adventuregrams web
Cristina Interiano


What does your typical Instagram caption look like? Is it song lyrics? An inspirational quote? How about a multi-paragraph account of your most personal life experiences? If you’re Caroline Calloway — Cambridge grad and full-time author — you probably picked the last one. Calloway’s story started in New York with the Hudson Instagram filter and a “High School Musical” reference. She charmed her fan base — the #adventurefam — when she misused Instagram as a blogging tool and spent more time on writing her caption than she did on editing her picture.

For over a year Calloway blogged about the summer of 2013. In her teenage dream, spending two weeks in Europe was just the beginning of the yellow brick road. There were flower crowns and candy shops, Serena van der Woodsen look-a-likes and Sicilian aristocracy — and even an ecstasy/Altoids mix-up.

Just as we thought our adventures with her were coming to an end she arrived at Cambridge, everything except her witty prose changed, but the adventures only got better. The same youthful spontaneity existed; it was just against a different background. The New York skyline was replaced with 15th-century castles and her story turned into a storybook tale set in the whimsical British countryside. The world illustrated in Calloway’s photos could have easily come from the mind of J. K. Rowling.

With her Instagram posts, Calloway revealed the inner workings of one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Her time at Cambridge was a series of rooftop champagne toasts with her English love, masked and unmasked balls, and lots of flower crowns. The brand Caroline Calloway built has something for everyone; her Instagram’s target audience stretches from the “Gossip Girl” posse to Lana del Rey record collectors to your neighborhood’s Harry Potter book club.

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Since her first Instagram post in 2012, Calloway has expanded and dominated all forms of social media. She is the breath of fresh air in a sea of over-edited selfies and overused Drake quotes. Caroline Calloway’s still misusing social media daily; you can catch her posting vlogs to her Snapchat account (@adventuregrams). Make sure to check out her memoir “And We Were Like” when it comes out in 2017.