At 24, Georgia May Jagger is sort of a rarity in the current model landscape. She’s maintained contracts over many seasons for several years. Jagger was the face of Hudson Jeans for at least five years and still represents British beauty brand Rimmel London, with which she first partnered in 2009. She’s worked with Sunglass Hut since 2012, and has been “the face” of Chanel, Mugler, and Versace. It's a hallmark of careers past, like from her mother Jerry Hall’s era. She signed on as brand ambassador for Thomas Sabo jewelry in 2014, and she was speaking on its behalf when we got on the topic of Instagram models.
“It’s kind of a weird thing. My whole theory is that [Instagram] shouldn’t be that important,” she said. “My little brother’s age group, which is like 18, thinks it’s really uncool. Older people tend to think that Instagram’s more important because maybe they’re the ones that come to it later. And then younger people—younger than me—think it’s really uncool to have an Instagram, would never have one.” (The recent Washington Post revelation that the teens are posting and deleting all but 25 pics might support her instinct.)
The “Instagram models” concept has at least one Lil Wayne song dedicated to it and countless reports exploring it as a phenomenon. The term can mean attractive people who have decent follower counts and are contacted by companies to shill their products, and can also mean models who were discovered on Instagram.
IMG has an Instagram-dedicated avenue for finding new models called We Love Your Genes, for example. Though the agency had crawled the platform looking for new talent previous to creating the dedicated hashtag and account, it got serious about its methods in early 2015. The company told Fashionista in January of last year, “We’ve been scouting via social for awhile now and have developed proprietary methods to help us identify the best possible talent. Those methods are now informing special tools we’re building in-house that will help us move quickly and decisively while tracking thousands of accounts.”
Follower counts on the We Love Your Genes girls are fairly modest—maybe over 1,000 but under 5,000. Models of the Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid ilk, who supermodel O.G. Stephanie Seymour called “bitches of the moment,” causing a minor ripple online, are a different story. These models can really leverage their follower counts for brand campaigns and are paid well to do so.
But Jagger senses a tide turning. “I really don’t think it’s as important as people think it is. . . . It just sucks for photographers and for makeup artists and for other people because modeling is obviously a visual thing, so Instagram works quite well for posting the campaigns. I think it’s sad that people are hiring people based on their followers because it doesn’t really make sense if people aren’t on it.”
Insta-famous modeling might go as quickly as it came, but there will always be another platform for people to garner large followings and turn it into a job. Brace for the wave of Snapchat models that surely are already in the making.
