Follow Me: Kate Upton Leads the Charge of Models Who've Gone Crazy for Social Media

With Kate Upton’s selfie-made rise, models are making big moves on social media. But is all that tweeting selling any clothes?

Have you met Kate? Kate who? Upton!

This is how it all begins, in Paris, way back in October (an eternity on Planet Fashion)—spring 2014 Chanel ready-to-wear, Grand Palais, 10:00 a.m. The show has not yet begun, editors are staring into their smartphones, and I am standing this close to Kate Upton but have somehow failed to recognize her. To be fair, not only is she not in a bikini, but she is totally covered up! The honey-blonde hair is coiffed; the assets disappeared beneath a classic Chanel tweed jacket. The only thing missing is a briefcase. Trust me, you wouldn’t have recognized her either.

Well, hello, lady. I’m the guy who’s writing about you, I say. “Then I guess I shouldn’t say anything too offensive,” she says, four inches from my face, eyelashes aflutter. And that is when I notice: Her Miami-blue eyes are yellow at the center, like an egg yolk. “I have sunflowers in my eyes,” she says in a this-old-thing voice. She stares for a second to see if I am in on the joke yet. “My favorite flowers are in my eyes! I can’t help it!” and then lets out one of her loud giggle-honks.

In an instant, I get it: She is a modern-day Mae West–meets–Marilyn Monroe, the perfect larger-than-life avatar for our exhilarating (and vexing) social-media moment. Suddenly the lights dim and Upton, who is here as a front-row celebrity, scurries to her seat. Among the many peculiarities of this Insta­gram era is that one of the most famous models in the world almost never gets invited to walk the runway. When the music kicks up—bleep! bleep! bleep!—it’s like the sound of a million tweets going off at once. Around the perimeter of the football field–length room are send-ups of bloated, supersize modern art. The Jay Z song “Picasso Baby” booms from the speakers, and the procession begins. An editor sitting next to me leans over and says, “The art world is so horrifying right now—this is perfect.” One girl after another, robots in identical wigs and makeup, marches past, all but indistinguishable from each other.

I know that Joan Smalls and Liu Wen, whom I will chase after for this story, are in there somewhere, but I cannot make them out in the clone parade. Is fashion, at least as it is presented on the runway, really still doing this? The no-personality, samey-samey thing? Is it any wonder so many models have taken to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr to establish themselves as actual humans, with quirks, style, and interests all their own? No one should be the least bit surprised that Upton, who looks nothing like most models, has stormed the gates. The hunger for personality—for stars—in the modeling world is just that great.

On the runway, the women are carrying Chanel bags covered with graffiti, which puts me in mind of a time before the ubiquity of cell phones—the eighties—when the way for a model to become super was by dating a famous man (rock star, handsome actor) or by showing up at every A-list party and misbehaving. Or she could just be sassy and louche and say outrageous things to writers, like We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day, which, come to think of it, would have made the perfect tweet. Well under 140 characters, it was the quote heard round the world. Evangelista, Campbell, and Turlington were household names back then—and they did it all without posting a single selfie.

As the models make their laps, I grow distracted by the editor next to me, who is by now manipulating her phone with such intensity that she may as well be juggling chainsaws: Snap the look, type a description, post the look. Snap, type, post! Fully half of the faces in the front row are lit glow-stick blue from below by their iPads, which only heightens the sense that, like so many of us, the audience is torn between watching what’s happening right in front of them and participating in it in real-time, via their interweb machines.

The next day I catch Marc Jacobs’s spooky-great farewell to Louis Vuitton, where he reprises the carousel staging from his spring 2012 collection. (Back then, Kate Moss was the last model to dismount her horse and stalk the circular runway. Today, it is Kate Upton who rides round and round, the cherry at the center, although she never gets off.) Seeing the carousel again, this time in all black, reminds me of something Jacobs said to me back then: “This merry-go-round idea is such a simple thought. It’s like, You get on it, it’s a pleasure, and it just kind of never ends—as long as you’re enjoying it.”

The carousel—Planet Fashion—has been spinning at pretty much the same rate for as long as there have been Fashion Week schedules, which began in earnest by the 1930s. And while social media hasn’t sped up the wheel, exactly, it has caused the ride to be a lot more hectic. Snap, type, post! Once upon a time, Linda and Naomi could at least have a moment backstage after a show (and a glass of champagne and a cigarette) and share in the designer’s triumph: Genius! May-jah! Today, as Karlie Kloss puts it, models are required to be “almost like reporters,” documenting the scene with their iPhones. “Everything gets posted right away,” says Kloss, who has more than 700,000 followers on Instagram, where you might see her smiling in the Seahawks’ end zone during the Super Bowl or posing with Diane von Furstenberg after the designer’s fortieth-anniversary-of-the-wrap-dress show. “You can post what’s happening before something even happens!” she adds. “When I was live-tweeting the Victoria’s Secret show, I think I gained 60,000 Instagram followers in a matter of hours. It’s shocking, the power of having a presence on these platforms.”

Having a presence on these platforms may now be de rigueur, but, like the rest of us, most fashion designers did not immediately grasp the way social media were going to change everything. Prabal Gurung was an exception: He was one of the first designers on Twitter, which really caught on shortly before his career began in 2009. Demi Moore, another early adopter of social media (thanks, no doubt, to her ex-husband the Twitter enthusiast Ashton Kutcher), wore one of Gurung’s dresses to her perfume launch in Paris. “In a tweet she said, ‘Wonderful young designer to look out for Prabal Gurung!’ ” he remembers. “I signed up just to say thank you, and I went from eighteen followers to 500. So I talked to my very small team. ‘There’s something here. We don’t have the budget for marketing or PR, but I think this is at our disposal.’ ”

Four years later, when Gurung’s fall 2013 digital ad campaign featuring Bridget Hall was teased on Instagram in advance of his runway show, it sent a ripple through the fashion world. “It was just one piece at a time,” he says. “Twelve photos, and then finally we showed her face.” Other blue-chip brands have been catching on. Oscar de la Renta also rolled out his fall 2013 campaign on Instagram, thanks largely to his senior vice president of global communications, Erika Bearman, a.k.a. @OscarPRGirl. “She started her Instagram account a long time ago,” says Sara Wilson, who oversees fashion companies and public figures for both Instagram and Facebook. “She is the living, breathing embodiment of the Oscar lifestyle— but you also get this really amazing backstage view.” As Burberry’s Christopher Bailey, who’s celebrated for, among other things, the clever social-media spin he’s put on the classic English brand, points out, “Digital is part of the way we live, and it would be counterintuitive to pretend that it’s not— to do one thing in real life, and then have a business that didn’t reflect that behavior.”

For John Demsey, the group president at Estée Lauder Companies, it was Lady Gaga who t-t-t-telephoned with the wake-up call. Thanks to Gaga tweeting to her fans, MAC’s Viva Glam campaign raised $33 million for the company’s AIDS charity. “It was unprecedented,” Demsey says, which is why “today when we look to sign a modeling contract, it’s a prerequisite that our models are on social media.” Vicky Yang, who works for Elite, explains, “Brands are recognizing that models are the true middlemen between a young girl who might buy a bag and the brand itself. The models are communicating on social media: ‘Oh, I have this bag, and it’s cool.’ ”

Given the frenzy around the possibilities of social media, models, and branding, it should come as no surprise that Demsey sounds positively Donald Trump–like in his enthusiasm about some big . . . news: In July, Kate Upton will follow Katie Holmes as the face of Bobbi Brown, a mash-up that he sees as near-perfect brand-to-celebrity synergy. Brown herself has a huge social-media following, a persona that is “earthy and no-nonsense,” says Demsey, and embraces “all shapes and sizes.” Likewise, Upton “has capitalized on the medium like no one has ever done before,” has a “big personality,” and is not “überthin.” He goes on, “She took a risk by putting herself out there in a fun, sexy way while always looking bombshell gorgeous and yet still somehow like the girl next door— we love the notion of Bobbi Brown and the Bombshell.”

By the time I finally catch up with the Bombshell again, it’s early December in Los Angeles. We meet at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and find a table in the lounge. It’s freakishly cold outside, so once again, Upton is all covered up: black Viktor & Rolf jacket, big scarf, leggings, and buckle-y black riding boots.

You may not be able to tell from her Twitter feed, a high-low mix that occasionally veers dangerously close to soft-core, but social media’s favorite pinup girl used to be a serious equestrian, competing at a national level on the Paint Horse circuit. “It definitely relates to what I’m doing now,” she says. “At a very young age I was traveling the country. It was our life. You have to be so dedicated. And that’s exactly what I did with modeling. I had a goal, and it’s a passion, and it’s become my life.”

Thanks in large part to her canny use of social media, Upton, 21, is probably the closest thing that fashion has to a supermodel right now, and she’s done it with her own distinct body type and in her own distinct way. Though she’d signed with Elite at fifteen and made a splash in Sports Illustrated, it wasn’t—as everyone knows by now—until dippy videos appeared on YouTube of her doing the Dougie and the Cat Daddy that she truly became a sensation. (“A booby-star,” as a friend of mine likes to say.) When I ask about her unusual route to the top of the fashion heap, she insists that it was not calculated. “I had no clue,” she says. “I wasn’t the target audience. I grew up in Florida, where you walk around in flip-flops and jean shorts. I didn’t know the fashion world. It really happened in an organic way, wanting to do jobs that I loved.”

Given her 1.26 million Twitter followers, I had assumed that Upton had been a kid who always had a phone in her hand. “Who would I call?” she says. “I was out at the barn every day. I barely watched TV. People think I am an expert on social media, but I am still trying to figure it out, too. How much do you want to put yourself out there?” She lets out a honk. “Well, I am out there. There’s no turning back for me.”

Upton sometimes worries that one of the things that made her a star—her refreshingly unfiltered voice on Twitter— is being compromised by the success that her social-media persona has brought her, especially now that she is about to become the face of a major cosmetics brand. “Now I overthink it. Like, ‘Ugh, are people going to understand this joke?’ Before, I had no filter because I had, like, 100 followers.”

From her self-deprecating humor to her game-for-anything spirit, Upton radiates an authenticity that has clearly struck a nerve. Despite the fact that she was raised in Florida and now has an apartment in New York, she has a very pronounced Midwestern aspect—that “nice” thing. Sure enough, her big extended family all now live in the same neighborhood in the same town in Michigan. Kate’s uncle, Fred Upton, a Republican congressman, lives next door to her parents, Jeff and Shelley. It’s hard not to think about all of that when one watches some of her more notorious YouTube videos, not least of all the banned Carl’s Jr. ad in which she appears to be making love to an extra-spicy patty melt.

Historically this hasn’t been an easy thing to pull off. Earlier we had walked by the famously weird statue of Marilyn Monroe outside the hotel in which she is shown at the peak of her wily-airhead-bombshell glory. I bring it up to Upton and suggest that, as a culture, we are still puzzling over whether or not it was Monroe’s volcanic sexuality that destroyed her— and if, as consumers of it, we were complicit. Upton leans in and looks me square in the eye: “Maybe it was drugs and alcohol that destroyed her. Maybe having no family support destroyed her.” She leans back. “What I try to do—and it took me a little while to learn—is to only do things I really believe in so that it’s more of a collaboration. That way, I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not. I’m not putting out this, Look at me! I’m sexy! and then feeling like a fake, which would lead to feeling depressed and empty inside.”

Making a movie that trades off her smokin’-hot goofiness would certainly appear to be a sign that, having conquered media old and new, Upton is ready to take her career to the next level. She’s had cameos in a couple of small films, but later this month, she will star in the Nick Cassavetes comedy The Other Woman, alongside Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann, in which all three women discover they are being cheated on by the same man and plot revenge against him. When I saw the trailer in a packed theater over the holidays, the air got sucked out of the room as Upton, in a bikini, came bouncing down the beach in slow motion. It’s not exactly the role of a lifetime— more Bo Derek in 10 than Cher in Silkwood—but it’s a start. After all, Monroe had to take a lot of laughing-at-me-not-with-me dumb-blonde parts before she got to Some Like It Hot.

Let’s admit it: Not everyone can be Kate Upton. So many of the girls who go into modeling are plucked from obscurity when they are very young, and most of them never make it anywhere near the top. As Elite’s Vicky Yang put it to me, “I think she’s an outlier. The group you are interviewing are 0.1 percent of the business.” Having written about the supermodels in the early nineties and then having looked at the industry again in 2007, I have sometimes worried that modeling was turning into a glamorous form of indentured servitude, with so many nameless, faceless women from the Czech Republic or southern Brazil walking show after show, with no real role other than to look exactly the same: mannequins, the worst cliché of the business.

For models these days, social media offer the promise of a different kind of career: one that is more connected, more fulfilling, and, if they are lucky (and want it), lasts longer than three or four years. And while there’s nothing surprising about the fact that this new crop feels comfortable on social media—they are part of the generation that’s grown up on them—it still takes a certain mastery of the form (your own jargon, an irresistible personality) to really stand out. Even then, the top models might have only one million followers, as opposed to the tens of millions that actors and pop stars have.

In the wake of Kate Upton’s social-media-fueled rise, models are grappling with exactly how to present themselves. “It’s a really interesting opportunity for them,” says Lara Cohen, Twitter’s head of TV and film talent, “because it gives them a voice and makes them more three-dimensional. There’s no shortage of pictures of Coco Rocha out there, but to know that she likes watching New Girl humanizes her.”

Everyone agrees that Rocha was the first high-fashion model to embrace social media across every platform. And you can tell from one look at her constantly updated Tumblr or Instagram feed that she unequivocally loves it. So does Liu Wen. “It’s just part of my life,” she says. Liu is not only China’s first supermodel, she is America’s first Chinese supermodel—the first Chinese woman to walk the Victoria’s Secret runway, the first to become a global face of Estée Lauder, and also, along with Kloss, the current face of Coach. With 6.8 million followers on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter), Liu also has, by far, the biggest social-media audience of any model—and, perhaps uncoincidentally, she seems to be the least conflicted about it: “Before, on Instagram, only a thousand people like me. Right now it’s 280,000. I am very happy about that. Chinese people have a word. We say, Not you happy—you have to make everyone happy. To share the happy. That is very important.”

Not every model finds it so simple. Perhaps the most in-demand model in the world, Joan Smalls is ranked number one on models.com but had only 170,000 Instagram followers when I met her in Paris at Hôtel Costes during Fashion Week. Many of her adoring fans have no idea that she is Puerto Rican, the daughter of an accountant and a social worker who grew up in rural Hatillo. Smalls, wearing a camouflage button-down, a black trucker’s cap, supertight jeans, and a pair of boyish Céline shoes, tells me she is determined to change all of that with her presence on social media (and in fact her number of followers has since grown to more than 340,000). Like most of the models I spoke with, she resisted Twitter at first. “Some people are so good at it, and I kind of envy that,” she says. “How are you so cheeky?”

It is true that Twitter is not for the faint of heart—or the less verbally inclined. “There’s a reason why comedians and musicians have been the early adopters,” says Cohen. “They’re the ones who are most comfortable in front of an open microphone, which is basically what Twitter is.” Putting yourself out there as a model now means exposing yourself to an unprecedented level of scrutiny and criticism. Many models no longer read the comments on their feeds. And can you blame them? Scroll through and see if you feel better about humanity. “You have to kind of detach from what people think of you,” says Smalls, “because sometimes it’s just too hurtful. Opinions are like belly buttons: Everybody has one.”

Especially when it comes to in-your-face sexuality. If Upton is a potent reminder that Sex Still Sells, not every model feels entirely comfortable with that equation. “You see some models’ profiles and what they post,” says Smalls, “and it can be oversexualized to get more followers—and more jobs. I’m like, Now, was that necessary?” Thanks to social media, models have a whole new set of lines to draw. “I will do topless in pictures but not topless in video,” says Smalls. She gestures toward her breasts and mentions the ever-popular GIF memes. “I do not want to see these in motion!” But video is now often part of the fashion picture, literally. As Stuart Vevers, who recently left Loewe to be executive creative director at Coach, explains, social media has allowed for “campaigns to be much more 360,” he says. “It’s important now to tell a story, whether it’s with video or a hashtag or an Instagram post.” Models are often the lead characters in these stories.

To tell their own stories, Instagram really has become the Twitter feed for those who prefer to say it with pictures. So whether it’s Cara Delevingne showcasing her new grillz and posting fifteen-second videos of herself partying on New Year’s Eve with Rihanna, Karlie Kloss, and her boyfriend visiting shrines in Myanmar, or Joan Smalls relaxing with her mother in Puerto Rico, Instagram offers a glimpse of these models’ peripatetic lives—and a hit of the voyeuristic thrill that is the strange pleasure of social media. “I follow all these girls,” says Prabal Gurung, “and when you see them together backstage or at an after-party, it brings you back to that glamorous world of fashion.”

There’s no such thing as living in the moment anymore. Thanks to social media, every event, from the Super Bowl to the State of the Union, from the Olympics to your best friend’s wedding, now happens in real time and “real” time. It certainly has completely transformed our experience of Fashion. As Zac Posen says, “I think the big transition started almost a decade ago, with the realization that fashion had gone beyond the industry and had become fashion-tainment.” Posen, of course, is a judge on Project Runway, a show whose success has served to point out that, surprisingly enough, untold millions are fascinated by how dresses are made—and how someone from Kalamazoo gets to Fashion Week.

Last fall, things felt palpably different at New York Fashion Week by virtue of the fact that a giant screen at the tents at Lincoln Center “surfaced beautiful Instagram images from across the city,” says Instagram and Facebook’s Wilson, who is part of a whole new cadre of tech-savvy fashion people who make the rounds during the shows interfacing with brands, bloggers, and models. “The idea was to bring what was happening inside the tents, these rarefied places of fashion, outside to the public and vice versa. It was like this giant beautiful feedback loop.” The Instagram screen at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week this February was 27 feet wide.

Along with lifting the curtain on fashion, social media have fundamentally altered its process. Jason Wu cast Christy Turlington in his last campaign after “getting to know her” on Instagram. They didn’t actually meet in the flesh until the day of the shoot. “She’s the kind of model I’m attracted to,” he says, “women who have a story behind them. It brings something to the clothes.” Designers are also responding to social media as a source of inspiration—Instamuse! “You see things that you wouldn’t have been privy to before,” Wu says. “It’s like you get to flip through everyone’s photo albums constantly.” All of these mid-career designers are having to adapt, learning by necessity to work with the tools of this new era. “When I was younger, the only thing I went to were magazines,” says Thakoon Panichgul. “I’d go through them and see these beautiful images from Bruce Weber or Avedon. But the way that I absorb information now is through Instagram. And that is sort of translating to the way that I’m designing. The clothes are a bit more reflective of that attitude of the street because of it.”

There’s no doubt that social media have opened fashion up to new influences—and influencers, as stylish people are now called. But do selfies sell clothes? So far, the answer seems to be, not so much. Last August, the social media–news Web site Mashable posted a piece with the headline social media fails to drive sales for fashion brands. now what? Based on a study of nearly 250 “prestige” fashion brands over the last four years, the article revealed abysmal numbers: “Less than 0.25 percent of new customers have been acquired through Facebook and less than 0.01 percent from Twitter.”

How to monetize fashion content on social media is a big topic these days at all the social-media platforms, where fashion represents no small percentage of their content. Of the more than 170 million blogs on Tumblr, for instance, posts tagged #fashion have generated 23.7 million notes in a single month. But so far, no one seems to have found an exact correlation between chatter and sales. As Twitter’s Cohen tells me, there’s a lot of talk around the halls about “what tweeting signifies in terms of ‘intent to buy.’ ” Indeed, there are now tech companies like ShopSense and RewardStyle that are focusing all their code-writing know-how on figuring out how to turn tweets and likes into dollars and cents. Amber Venz created RewardStyle with her partner, Baxter Box. The nut they seem to have cracked is how to bring a “like” one step closer to a “buy” through an instantaneous e-mail of a product that has been liked. If the “liker” buys the product, the blogger or the magazine where it originally appeared gets a percentage of the sale. It’s a big if.

Which also raises the question: Are models actually moving merchandise? “Interestingly enough, no,” says Venz. “It’s really the personal-style bloggers. And we’re talking about a 22-year-old girl from Utah who’s excelling as far as driving revenue for the brands.”

One of the many strange paradoxes that the collision of fashion and social media has created is the so-called democratization of something that has for so long been built on exclusivity. “It’s kind of cool to be nice right now,” says social media–ist and Lucky editor in chief Eva Chen. “Look at Prabal Gurung and Alex Wang. Everyone feels like they can be part of their cool-girl clique. If you look at the brands that everyone’s talking about—Warby Parker, Toms shoes—there’s a sense of openness and transparency. It’s the Obama generation.”

When it comes to modeling, this new mood has left room not only for Kate Upton to begin to grab magazine covers and beauty contracts back from pop and movie stars but for other outliers to dare to dream as well: girls like Charlotte Free, a.k.a. “Tumblr girl,” who has hot-pink hair; Soo Joo Park, a platinum-blonde Korean-American who just hit 100,000 followers on Instagram; and Kelly Mittendorf, who updates her Tumblr seemingly every fifteen minutes. “It’s usually girls with a really striking look,” says Chen. “You see pictures of them at Coachella; they answer questions on Tumblr. They’re relatable. ”

But even in this social media–besotted world of ours, mystique still has value, doesn’t it? If, when it comes to models, Kate Upton is the bodacious—and gravity-defying—Marilyn Monroe and Cara Delevingne is the let-it-all-hang-out Lena Dunham, Kate Moss is the never-let-’em-see-you-sweat Greta Garbo. She has not once tweeted or “liked” a single thing in her fabulous life, and yet she is, arguably, the most intriguing person modeling has ever known. “Kate is Kate,” as one fashion person put it to me. “She can do whatever she wants.” Like that pitch-perfect cover of Playboy that seemed to sell out on New York newsstands in one day. When I took my seat at Marc Jacobs’s Louis Vuitton farewell show back in October, I picked up the requisite folder off my chair and flipped through the list of models and looks. Included among the sheaf of exquisite black stationery was a letter from Jacobs. Its theme: “the showgirl in all of us.” Among the list of the 34 women who inspire him, Kate Moss was the only model who made the cut.