Curiously, even those who appear to know that Shudu is not human continue to express their admiration for her beauty rather than for Wilson’s artistry. “So she represents them and is inspired by them.” One photo, in which Shudu appears nearly invisible against a dark background, brings to mind Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the porn actor Thomas Williams. “There’s a big kind of movement with dark skin models,” Wilson told the magazine. stunt.) Shudu Gram has courted a different kind of controversy, one originating from the fact that, as Harper’s Bazaar revealed, earlier this year, her creator is a twenty-eight-year-old white man, the British photographer Cameron-James Wilson. (It was recently revealed that Lil Miquela was created by the Los Angeles-based startup Brud, which also staged the hacking of her Instagram account as a P.R. model to become an “influencer”: the freckled young Brazilian-American Miquela Sousa, or Lil Miquela, has modelled merchandise and promoted social causes on social media since 2016 she now has a million-plus Instagram followers, and her song “Not Mine” has nearly 1.5 million plays on Spotify. That commenter knew something that many of Shudu Gram’s thousands of followers hadn’t realized: that she was not a human model but a computer-generated character. “I feel like you should tell me when the ‘people’ modeling your clothes aren’t actually people,” one commenter wrote. Most viewers on Instagram expressed awe at Shudu’s beauty, although there were some voices of dissent. “I can’t describe how grateful I am to for sending me this beautiful t-shirt,” the caption to one of the photos read, and tagged the company’s designer, Semhal Nasreddin, who then reposted the image on her brand page. In one pair of photos, posted in August, Shudu wore a vibrant yellow T-shirt from the apparel brand Soul Sky. Soon, her otherworldly beauty attracted a following, with her photos shared on pages celebrating women of color, accompanied by laudatory hashtags such as #blackisbeautiful, #melanin, and #blackgirlsrock. She had luminous dark-brown skin and perfectly symmetrical features, and, in a series of photos, wore iindzila, the neck rings associated with the Ndebele people of South Africa. A year ago, photographs of a model named Shudu Gram began appearing on Instagram.
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