Yes, Indeed, Kate Upton Is on The Cover of Vogue
LatestKate Upton is, as rumored, on the cover of American Vogue. That honor is normally reserved for whichever white, skinny, female celebrity has a movie out, Kate Moss, and Gisele. Upton, a swimsuit model and a relative outsider to the world of high fashion, doesn’t really fit that mold.
(As Vogue puts it, “Descriptions of her figure tend to involve euphemisms for a single word: breasts.“) The ladymag got New Yorker writer Lizzie Widdicombe to profile its cover star. She reports:
The fact that Upton has become our Girl of the Moment is all the more remarkable given that she’s done it in her own digital-age way. She wasn’t championed, early on, by a photographer like Steven Meisel or David Sims. Riccardo Tisci didn’t put her on the runway at Givenchy à la Joan Smalls. She even bypassed the Victoria’s Secret runway show—which has proved to be a launching pad for the likes of Candice Swanepoel and Miranda Kerr. Instead, Upton has accumulated Sports Illustrated covers and buzzy television ads and—above all—has made canny use of social media.
The Upton legend begins on YouTube. She broke out in 2011, dancing to Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie” in footage shot by a friend at a Clippers game—her appeal a mix of blonde bombshell and homespun girl next door. (The video has two million views and counting.) A subsequent clip was more risqué: Upton dancing the Cat Daddy in a skimpy bikini for Terry Richardson—and yet here, too, she’s goofy, disarming, improbably wholesome (that video has nearly sixteen million hits). Meanwhile she’s a regular on Twitter (more than 900,000 followers), and was an early adopter of the video-sharing app Vine. “It’s just me sharing my life,” she says about tweeting. “I like it if it’s authentic and in the moment and happening.” Growing up, she adds, “I didn’t buy the magazines that had models on the covers, because I didn’t know them. So I think this kind of gives me, as a model, a personality that people can connect with.” It seems to be working. In 2012, she was the fourth-most-popular search on Yahoo—just behind Election, iPhone5, and Kim Kardashian.
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