The Rise And (Maybe) Fall Of Influencers

I never really expected to write these words, but: It was Kendall Jenner who did it for me. Or, to be fair, not Kendall Jenner herself — or not entirely Kendall Jenner — but rather the 10th-anniversary Indian Vogue cover that featured Kendall Jenner, as conceived and photographed by Mario Testino. When released last week on the magazine’s social media accounts, it almost immediately became the center of a storm of social media ire, most of it along the lines of this tweet: “Disgustingly inappropriate. Were ALL the Indian women unavailable??” Which was then followed, as these things so often are, by a host of headlines like CNN.com’s “Vogue India Cover Lands Kendall Jenner in More Trouble.” But here’s the thing: Was it really Ms. Jenner’s fault? Was she in any way culpable for this bad choice? After all, she was being used as work for hire: a body and a face to sell a magazine. Or was she? Therein lies the problem. Because the obvious assumption — the one made by all the worked-up folks in the Twittersphere — was that she had been employed not just as a clothes hanger (as models used to be known), but, at least in part, as herself: a public figure with an immediately recognizable name and face and family back story, along with approximately 80.3 million Instagram followers. An — and I cringe at the word, but it is in the Cambridge English Dictionary — Influencer. And that influence was part of what Indian Vogue was paying for by paying her to be on its cover. Read more at The New York Times.