A Mercedes Super Bowl spot is mostly just her walking in slo-mo, save for the single mic-drop line she purrs to some googly-eyed schlubs washing a Benz: “You missed a spot.” (Both commercials may as well have been selling lacy black lingerie.) In an ad for a baseball video game - on the set of which she met her husband of two years, celebrated Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander (with whom she welcomed daughter Genevieve last year) - she gamely squeezed into a mini bandage dress and invited the dumbfounded stares of four MLB pros. commercial where she basically deflowers a patty melt, she’s silly and ragingly uninhibited. By her early twenties, her career had taken off, with advertisers hungry for a taste of her rarefied, paradoxical appeal: cheeky yet refined, goofy yet glam, girl-next-door meets “I’m just drawn this way.” A sprinkle of Malibu Barbie, a dash of old-Hollywood pinup - who you might spot on Instagram outfitted with a fluffy robe, sparkling rosé and a red lip (“Makes me feel fancy,” she says.) In the Carl’s Jr. Truly, Upton couldn’t have predicted the sonic boom that came next. “I had no idea what was going to happen.” “It was all very innocent and silly,” she recalls of the video. Then she did the Dougie, and the following year, she landed the magazine’s cover.
Simple as that, she was signed, and quickly nabbed coveted real estate inside SI ’s swimsuit edition. “Like, how else would I meet with them without scheduling a meeting?” “I still, to this day, don’t know what the alternative is,” she says. To Upton, it was simply the most obvious move on earth. To a less confident teenager, it might have seemed too ballsy a crapshoot.
An open call at age 15 scored her modeling representation, but she decided to cold-dial a major agency’s office on her 18th birthday, the very day she was eligible to be shot for Sports Illustrated. Two months before the video hit, Upton, then 18, had already secured a tenuous footing in the industry, having been scouted at an equestrian competition (a beloved childhood sport in which she racked up five championship titles). Or maybe it was more revelatory than that: a beautiful woman knocking at the door of an industry that preached perfection, while daring to be - gasp - herself. Or a case of perfect timing: a fresh face, in every sense, to modeling bigwigs who’d signed enough gaunt, expressionless mugs to last a lifetime. You could say it was just a lucky case of lightning in a bottle: a viral video before the concept of viral had fully gone viral.
In the lore of Kate Upton the Supermodel, this is the video - no bikini, no Ferrari covered in suds - that famously launched her career. She’s relaxed and unpracticed, her beachy blond locks swishing like a hula skirt, her camera-wielding friends laughing hysterically. Clippers game, attempting a hip-hop dance she’d learned just minutes earlier. The first autofill - “does the Dougie,” from 2011 - is a minute-long video of a then-unknown Floridian swimwear model at an L.A. Type “Kate Upton” into YouTube and see what comes up.
0 kommentar(er)
