As far as a typical millennial goes, my best friend Lindsay and I are your basic ~Insta obsessed~ BFF college sophomores who are overly involved in the social media and the celebrity world. Cut us some slack though, what college girl isn’t?
While laughing over coffee at Starbucks one morning, a stranger approached us, apologized for intruding, and then asked if we thought we had a celebrity look alike. Excuse me? Obviously, we were taken back since clearly, this stranger (lets call her Kelly) had been staring and we hadn’t even noticed. As much as we followed major celebrities we never thought we looked like one!! Kelly asked us if we knew who Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid were. I mean with 47.4m million Instagram followers who wouldn’t know these supermodels?
“Well you girls look just like them” she said. We immediately exchanged the, uh yeah right, look because Lindsay and I are definitely not 5’10” feet models with perfect bodies. We thanked Kelly anyway and took the compliment. Then, we got an idea. Even if we didn’t look identical to the supermodels, attempting to copy and recreate the celeb best friend’s photos seemed like a fun idea. But little did we know just what we were getting into or how much we would end up learning.
With our squad of five other very talented and extremely dedicated friends, we spent a total of 4.5 hours that same night searching the Internet, deciding what pictures we thought we could pull off and recreate. We started making never-ending lists of what we needed and pulled clothing from a total of 12 different wardrobes. We set up each look and outfit as closely as we could, which was pretty good considering given our limited selection of our college closets.
The next morning, we excitedly spent two full hours on hair and makeup trying to perfect Kendall and Gigi’s look. We kept our makeup natural, which as every girl knows, is easier said then done. With bags of outfit changes and props in hand, our entourage took the Fairfield campus with our amazing photographer, Carly Fagan, to head the project.
The day included countless outfit changes and running around campus trying to find the correct backdrop while managing to hold onto the daylight. Trying to accomplish these effortless photos by Kendall and Gigi took cutting shirts (and some strands of hair too actually) to getting weird looks as we walked across the same crosswalk 7 times. We even asked a group of guys to stop basketball practice and act like fans to sit behind us to complete one picture. They surprisingly agreed. We stopped at nothing to recreate identical photos and it was challenging but after 5 long hours of sitting, standing, laying, pinning, running and smiling; we pulled it off.
In trying to recreate these photos, Lindsay and I learned 2 things. The first thing was recognizing the frustration of recreating photos, especially a celebrity’s. You spend minutes that feel like hours putting all the right fingers and toes in place. Then, you take the photo and review it. Attempting the half smiles were a nightmare because that natural no teeth smile is actually harder than you think and we found it to be anything but “natural.” Our patience was tested but we continued to enjoy ourselves through the process.
Not to mention, comparing the picture of your average little self to a celebrity’s… um self-confidence level? Shot down to 0% at times. We attempted photos that we didn’t even include in this article because they ended up disastrous. We could go on and on about our flaws and what was wrong with that one eyebrow or that one button on my coat but after reviewing hundreds of photos, Lindsay and I learned to laugh at ourselves. We cracked up over the unflattering photos and hugged it out at the good ones and that sums up our second and maybe the most important lesson we learned that day. We may not look like perfect celebrity supermodels but we do look uniquely like Lindsay and Victoria and we think that is pretty damn great.