High fashion designers are looking at Instagram to find models instead of professional modeling agencies.
When you think of models, you probably start thinking of women like Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid or Tyra Banks. However, the fashion industry is undergoing a major paradigm shift and changing from professional models to real models, or as the writer and founder of Slutever points out, “nodels” (not a model). In fact, Kate Spade New York’s most recent fashion campaign featured “nodels”, real women with large social media followings, instead of traditional models.
Slutever’s Karley Sciortino recently sat down with Harper’s BAZAAR about the major changes in the fashion industry. She argues that, “In the age of social media, we don’t look at people because they’re pretty-we look because we’re interested in them, because we want to follow their story.” Consequently, fashion designers are choosing real girls instead of models for the modeling campaigns. “We’ve been seeing the same whitewashed, stick figure model since we were in middle school, and we’re bored now,” Karley Sciortino argues.
And she’s probably right. San-Francisco based retailer Lisa Says Gah is using more real girls instead of professional models.”We launched a year and a half ago with a limited budget that only allowed us access to ‘real girls’. But as our business began to burgeon, we thought we should try the more ‘professional’ route by hiring a model in a studio setting. The result felt inauthentic to the Lisa Says Gah brand, so we quickly switched back and have had more success since.”
If you’re an aspiring model, then you may want to ditch the traditional pathway to becoming a professional runway model and focus on your “social media currency” – how many followers you have on social media. Brands are looking for real people who have learned to market themselves on social media. “If someone is a size 10 and has 100,000 followers on Instagram, is doesn’t matter if they can’t fit into a sample size. They’ve proven that their image resonates with people.”
This news should not be that surprising. A 2014 study found that larger size models actually increased sales instead of traditional size 0 models. Researchers found that average sized models do not affect a company’s brand. In addition, researchers argue that new fashion brands should use average sized models in their campaigns. “This is because new brands are not associated with any particular cues,” says Wang. “Consumers tend to use accessible information (people around us) to make a judgment. Thus, they like average size models more than super-skinny models.”
Via Harper’s BAZAAR
Related:
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