Fashion’s first avatar supermodel could mean the most beautiful people in the world may no longer be human
Shudu is the world’s first computer-generated Instagram model, with 130,000 followers, while virtual-reality model Lil Miquela sells merchandise for the likes of Martin Margiela and Prada. Are they perfect faces for brands of the future?
In the hyper-competitive world of modelling, fateful discovery stories are part of the industry’s lore.
Gisele Bundchen was eating at a McDonald’s in southern Brazil when her life changed forever.
Natalia Vodianova was selling fruit at a market in Russia and Adriana Lima was spotted at a shopping mall at age 13. But what if major companies and fashion brands did not have to rely on chance – be it a fluke encounter or scrolling through strangers’ Instagram feeds – to find the perfect face for their products?
Cameron-James Wilson maintains that some of them no longer need to. The 29-year-old London-based photographer is the creator of Shudu, a striking Instagram model from Africa with more than 130,000 followers.
Instagram posts about Shudu
Despite her entrancing beauty, Shudu is a purely digital being, a fact that Wilson revealed after Shudu’s image went viral, ending months of frenzied speculation about her origin earlier this year. Shudu has been called “the world’s first digital supermodel” and the obsessive fawning her lifelike features provoke suggests she will not be the last.