Gracing a Vogue cover is every aspiring model’s dream. Appropriately enough for a superstar online celebrity, and member of the Kardashian clan, Kendall Jenner has made it on to the front of a special subscriber’s edition of the magazine.
“The Kendall Effect, 64 million followers and counting” reads the text on the cover in reference to her massive social media following. With those kind of numbers, you really start to question who needs who more in this publication-subject relationship. Nonetheless, Jenner can be seen on the cover in all her youthful glory, wearing black underwear and a polka-dot patterned top.
Alongside the cover is an in-depth profile of the second-to-youngest Jenner, in which she reveals the secret to her success on social media. In a piece that fawns over her celebrity, comparing her to film and fashion icons from Ali MacGraw to Twiggy, one thing is made clear: her digital brand is integral to her career.
“Her social-media reach is just incredible,” Francisco Costa of Calvin Klein tells the magazine. “As a [fashion] house, you become part of the culture by embracing someone like her.”
What most people will be wondering is if there is actually more to her social media success than the fame she has inherited through her family. Well, apparently she has a game plan, and it has worked out extremely well for her thus far.
The first secret, according to Jenner, is that your Instagram strategy “has to be organic.” When prompted to define what she means by the term, she replied: “It means you can’t totally plan it out.”
Elaborating further, she explains the context behind her Instagram post that received the most likes of 2015 on the photo-sharing app – a staggering 3.5 million to be precise. In the post, she is photographed lying on the floor. Jenner states that the photo was taken on a yacht, anchored off Monaco, with her hair arranged into heart-shaped patterns by her sister Kylie, and friends Gigi and Bella Hadid, and Hailey Baldwin. She insists that no planning went into it; in fact she was not thinking about “likes” at all.
“I was having a bad day. I wasn’t in the flow. I was like, everyone sucks. That’s when I did my best image,” she told Vogue. She adds that, like most of us who depict our lives on social media, she even debated the merits of the image before posting it. “I was lying in bed and messing with it. And I thought, is this good? And I just posted it, and I remember looking at it right away and having a lot of likes and saying, ‘Huh.’ ”
Her other nuggets of advice are “restraint” and “mystery.” “You don’t want to do too many posts,” she told the publication. “You want to leave them wanting to come back.”
When someone who has had her entire life exposed in the public eye is telling you to practice restraint online, you should probably take her advice. Therefore, next time you’re searching for the perfect filter to go with your brand spanking new photo of your microwaved pasta, maybe do what Jenner does and take a step back to ponder your decision. Or be spontaneous, and seek out some help from your friends in creating your next image. Who knows, you may end up getting more likes than ever before.
