UNTIL very recently, which model was booked for a job was based only on things that the client could see before them: her face, her hair, her body, how she moved, her personality — but now there are more important things to consider. Kendall Jenner’s appointment as the face of Estée Lauder was accompanied by a statement about the company’s hope that it could «leverage her image, voice, energy and extraordinary social media power to introduce Estée Lauder to millions of young women around the world». Supermodel Christy Turlington agrees that something major has changed.
Karlie Kloss, pictured at the 2014 Vogue Festival with fellow Insta-girls Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Jourdan Dunn and Edie Campbell
«I’ve got to know Karlie Kloss a bit and she says it’s very different in the sense that when you commit to something there’s this whole other expectation now in terms of social media,» Turlington told us. «We didn’t have that. There are good things about that and negative things about it. Then you just went and did you job, which then made it easy to do a lot of other things that I was interested in. There was something nice and finite about it.»
Seasoned model agent Sarah Doukas, of Storm Model Management, told this weekend’s Financial Times that the naivety once associated with social media is gone, and the accounts of models are now monetised in the same way as with any brand.
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«Looks are obviously still first and foremost, but if you have two girls who are both perfect for something, without a shadow of a doubt the one with the bigger social following would win the job,» Doukas said. «If Cara does a big campaign, you quote for her to model and then you quote separately for the fact that she has 13m followers.»
If Cara does a big campaign, you quote for her to model and then you quote separately for the fact that she has 13 million followers
Sarah Doukas
«This is a media space that belongs to that person — it’s an asset and if a brand wants access to that, then they have to treat it like buying media,» Storm’s Simon Chambers added. «The cost grows as the girl’s following grows.»
But the growth of social media isn’t all bad, Turlington insists, with Throwback Thursday in particular brightening her day.
«Instagram has been fun because I see stuff that I’ve forgotten about completely, that people will send to me or I’ll see my name tagged — it’s kind of fun,» she smiled. «There’s a lot of junk, after so many years, because we were so productive during that time, and when you look back over the body of work over 30 years you realise it’s not all bad. Sometimes you look and think ‘Well the Eighties were terrible for fashion, and the Nineties were terrible for fashion,’ but then a classic image will come up and you’ll realise it wasn’t all horrible.»
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