Last we checked (a few minutes ago), Cara Delevingne had 9.2 million followers on Instagram. Kendall Jenner had 18.4 million. We all know that the modeling industry today requires a certain social media savvy, a grasp of the importance of the personal brand, but what do supermodels of the past think about the way the fashion world is changing? Naomi Campbell—icon of the ’90s pre-Internet supermodel heyday—has an opinion about the whole “Instagirl” phenomenon, and she made it known on The Meredith Vieira Show on Friday.
“It’s amazing,” Campbell said. “I mean, good luck to them. I just feel my generation of women, like Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Claudia [Schiffer], we had to earn our stripes and take our stepping stones to get to where we have gotten to accomplish what we have achieved to this date. I kind of feel like, ‘My God, we’ve worked so hard and we are still working at it—then it just comes like that for them.’ But I sometimes believe easy come, easy go. So I am actually grateful for the way I had my career. I wouldn’t want it any other way. So that’s for them, this is me.”
Does it come easy? Are models today bypassing the rules or creating their own? Does the decline of the supermodel correlate with the rise of social media? Lots of questions, but one thing is for certain: Social media is changing the modeling game, for better or for worse.
—Austen Rosenfeld, Style.com
