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Quen’s not the only one shaking the table. Meet seven more electrifying artists pushing boundaries in their fields.
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On a cliffside in Corsica, Quenlin Blackwell is staring out at the ocean. The view is majestic, and Blackwell, shimmering in a blue silk dress that flutters in the wind, her hair shiny, her skin flawlessly moisturized, knows a photo op when she sees one. She pinches her nose with one hand and flaps her arms and legs, a preview of the six-second routine that racks up more than 4 million views on TikTok after she posts it later that day.
“I thought for so long I had to have an interesting joke, a punch line, a setup. Baby, I’ve been doing this dance, and this dance is it,” says Blackwell, making it sound like the only thing separating you or me from getting nearly a billion likes on TikTok is that we never learned the scuba dance.
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A former teenage Vine hitmaker whose early viral videos involved throwing herself on the ground and squealing about her obsession with hot pickles, Blackwell is now 25 and has almost 20 million followers across social media. Her YouTube cooking show, Feeding Starving Celebrities, a Gen-Z cross between Martha Stewart and The Eric Andre Show, is a key stop on the young-celebrity promo circuit — Charli XCX came by to chitchat over bangers and mash; Steve Lacy had some fried catfish — with 3.5 million subscribers. Over the past year, Blackwell has broken out of the social-media bubble, playing a version of herself on Rachel Sennott’s HBO influencer comedy I Love LA and Sombr’s love interest in the music video for his single “Homewrecker.”
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ISSEY MIYAKE Bustier and Skirt, at isseymiyake.com.
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Fashion brands have been paying attention. It’s late June, and she is in Corsica for the label Jacquemus, which invited her to its spring-summer runway show. Some content is expected, and Blackwell, who always seems like she’s running at 1.5x playback speed, is cracking jokes while working the scene. “When they take my brain out after I pass away, baby, the folds are going to spell out A-D-H-D,” she says.
Before the show, Blackwell glides up to Sarah Benady, the label’s chief executive, with a big smile and compliments her on her outfit. “Oh my God, an ambassadorship is beautiful,” Blackwell tells me. She has recently partnered with Nike and Chanel, which brought her on with a deal that covers jewelry, beauty, and fragrance. “For Chanel to be like, ‘We like you so much, Quenlin, that we’re going to create something new, this bespoke contract,’ is literally insane. To say that I have a Chanel contract and I’m, like, making jokes and doing flips and throwing myself into walls. I, the YouTuber; I, the girl who just started acting; I, the person from Texas who doesn’t have any entrée into the industry except for what I’ve created myself, have a Chanel contract? That’s insane.”
GIVENCHY BY SARAH BURTON Dress, at givenchy.com. NEW YORK VINTAGE Hat, available upon request. WING & WEFT Gloves, at wegloveyou.com. CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN Shoes, at christianlouboutin.com. Photo: MAR+VIN.
GIVENCHY BY SARAH BURTON Dress, at givenchy.com. NEW YORK VINTAGE Hat, available upon request. WING & WEFT Gloves, at wegloveyou.com. CHRISTIAN LO… more
GIVENCHY BY SARAH BURTON Dress, at givenchy.com. NEW YORK VINTAGE Hat, available upon request. WING & WEFT Gloves, at wegloveyou.com. CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN Shoes, at christianlouboutin.com. Photo: MAR+VIN.
The fashion sponsorships are part of a broader effort to turn the glossy goofball Blackwell plays on the internet into, as she puts it, a “multi-hyphenate Slay Bitch 3000.” In October, she walked the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. And in May, she was in New York for the annual advertising upfronts, where she spoke during a YouTube event that also featured Alex Cooper, who has her own media company and a $125 million deal with SiriusXM. “Alex Cooper was there being like, ‘We’re starting six new verticals!’” says Blackwell. “My business is literally me, the homie who used to do splits on the dance floor. I would like to have a business partner, someone I can strategize my career with, but I haven’t found that person. And God, please, let that person come. If you’re reading this, send an email.”
A week before the Jacquemus show, Blackwell was again jockeying for advertising dollars at Cannes Lions, the trade conference of sweaty keynotes and rosé-fueled partying up and down the Croisette. She didn’t get to see much of that. “I was in Roku City,” she says jokingly, meaning she was stuck fishing for new series sponsors just like the streaming platform. The old-guy marketers were tripping over themselves to meet and get selfies with the young woman who seems to have a direct line to their most coveted demographic. “It was honestly the Quen special,” says her friend Larri Merritt, better known as Larray, a 28-year-old YouTuber who frequently pops up in her videos. “The trip was me watching everyone from the CEO of Spotify to the CEO of every agency you can imagine being enamored with her.” At one point, Merritt found Blackwell surrounded by a gaggle of executives. “I had to take a photo ’cause I was like, Oh my God, I think I’m watching, like, Martin Luther King make a fucking speech right now.”
Blackwell, who was also seeking a backer for a new travel series that sounds like her answer to Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, doesn’t know whether her Cannes schmoozing has paid off yet. “Fingers crossed I secured the bag,” she says. “It was nice to be in front of people instead of in a damn email. In the email, you can manipulate me, but in real life I can see through it. Hopefully I found enough money to make a new set and produce more episodes.”
Still, she tells me, she found the week intimidating. We’re outside, where a heat wave sweeping through Europe makes the late morning feel like a thousand degrees, and for a second she drops her online persona. “I get so scared to talk in those situations because I didn’t go to college,” she says. “I don’t know the big business words that they all know. I just know what I know, and what I know is how to entertain.”
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The first time Blackwell went viral, she was 12. She tried to do a cheerleader kick-jump off a chair, fell backward, and posted the clip on Vine. It went “triple platinum,” she has said, with more than 5 million views. That was when she realized she could reach a massive audience by being funny on-camera. The second youngest of seven siblings, Blackwell was born in Cincinnati but grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, a “Friday Night Lights, Euphoria type of Texas.” Her mother was a registered nurse, and her father was incarcerated for a period during Blackwell’s childhood, getting out when she was in fifth grade. “I was around all these rich kids, but we didn’t have it,” she says.
Like many children of the aughts with a family computer in the living room, she spent a lot of her formative years on the internet. “My sisters are a decade older than me. They were in their own world, and I had no one to talk to, so my mom got me a webcam,” she says.
The YouTube account she opened around the time she was 9, which is still up, though she lost the password years ago, is a window into the mind of a child with ADHD who has access to rudimentary editing software and a lot of free time. In one video, she and a friend perform a beauty-pageant skit. Mostly they just pull funny faces for the camera and speak in chipmunk voices. For those first few years of posting, she felt like she was talking to herself. “My parents didn’t know what was going on with YouTube,” she says.
She had two ambitions at the time: to be a model and to get invited on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “There are so many videos of me putting brooms on my back and walking down my parents’ hallway like, ‘I’ll be in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show one day,’” she says. “By the time I got lit, Ellen had fallen off.”
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The six-second video platform Vine, which launched in 2013, was tailor-made for charismatic teenagers with a sense of humor, and Blackwell was prolific. The skits she was filming, mostly physical-comedy bits in her bedroom, weren’t materially different from before, but they were finding larger and larger audiences. A post in which she’s writhing on the floor and slapping a guitar with her long braids got millions of views. The exposure gave her a taste of internet fame, even if, for the most part, it didn’t have a tangible impact on her daily life. “I would just go back to school,” she says. There, at Allen High School, Blackwell was a cheerleader with a tight-knit group of friends. On Vine, she was “Quensadilla,” and she eventually reached close to 1 million followers and more than 750 million “loops.”
“If I do become somebody bigger than I am right now, I either want to be an actress, a model, or something where my brand ‘Quensadilla’ is not really attached to it but has the same following,” she told her high-school newspaper.
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After Vine shut down in 2017, Blackwell switched to Twitter. If Vine was an earnest comedy camp where she was mostly performing for young fans, some of whom had been watching her since they were children, Twitter was a cesspool of mean-spirited grown-ups who were quick to dish out criticism. At one point in her late teens, she tweeted out a nonsensical beauty-product endorsement while under the influence with her friends — “the ingredients from around the world the product matches to your raw un-blemished/marked skin and begins to change the imperfections” — and immediately became a meme, and not in a good way. Chaos was becoming her signature.
“I swear to God, they were waiting for me to fail, like Twitter bitches do. Twitter is a place where you cheer for someone’s pain,” Blackwell told her followers later in a video. “I regret not just going to YouTube.” She skipped the SATs and, after graduating from high school, moved to Los Angeles. She didn’t exactly have a fully hatched plan, but it seemed more viable to make it in social media there than in suburban Dallas. She was 17.
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Two weeks before Corsica, I meet Blackwell one morning at the Valley office park where she’s about to film an episode of Feeding Starving Celebrities with Jake Shane, the podcaster and TikTok star. Inside, 16 staffers are putting the finishing touches on the set, which is just for show. Most of the cooking will actually be handled by two professional chefs, who are prepping fried rice, miso cod, and a cocktail that involves Diet Coke, Champagne, and sour octopus gummies. The production values have come a long way since the pandemic, when Blackwell pivoted away from Twitter for TikTok and YouTube and called a friend for advice.
“She was struggling financially, trying to figure it out, and I was at the same place in my life, and she texted me like, ‘Hey, I want to film a YouTube video,’” says Larray. The two of them had met through Vine and were making a go of it as full-time content creators in L.A. He had spent some time at the Hype House, the TikTok collective, and Blackwell was slowly cultivating her profile much like she had in high school, except she wasn’t getting as much notice as she had as a precocious tween. New to Hollywood, she felt insecure about her looks.
“When I first came to L.A., I got Botox. I got filler in my nose because I wanted my bridge to look different. I looked like a cyborg the whole time,” she says. Eventually, she got the fillers dissolved. “The look that I want is to look like me. That was the face I was trying to get.”
Not unlike the character she played on Sennott’s show, Blackwell tried growing her fan base any way she could, filming TikTok dances or her reactions to Instagram Reels. Sometimes the gimmicks didn’t play well. When she was 21, posts about buying a $100,000 couch by mistake and her ensuing meltdown were roasted online after she seemed to confess it was a prank. Meanwhile, she had fallen in with Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, starlets who were also blowing up on social media and getting signed to lucrative endorsement deals with mainstream brands. Blackwell had millions of followers, too, and she was represented by United Talent Agency, but she wasn’t getting calls from American Eagle or Hollister (or Sabra hummus or Dunkin’, for that matter) like Rae and D’Amelio were. The snappy, ping-pong energy that endeared her to fans made her a risky bet for commercial ambassadorships.
“Her type of content is not what many people would have considered brand-safe a decade ago,” says the writer and editor Derek Blasberg, the former head of YouTube’s fashion division. “Pop culture has either caught up with her or finally gets her, because I don’t think she has changed.”
Blackwell laughs it off now, but couch-gate was followed by a shift. Soon after, she modeled for Savage X Fenty, Rihanna’s lingerie line, and dialed back the stunt-posting to focus on making longer, more obviously jokey videos with the help of friends. (Later, she jumped from UTA to the powerhouse agency CAA.) “I taught her the ropes of YouTube,” Larray says. “And when you give her the sauce, she knows how to make a full-course meal.”
Feeding Starving Celebrities arose from a dinner at home with Lil Nas X and the musician Destin Conrad. “They were like, ‘Let’s go hang out, let’s go party,’” Blackwell says. “And I’m like, ‘Y’all have music careers. I need to make a video. And so I’m going to stay here and make a video because it’s my job, but if y’all want to hang out, we can make a video together.’ And then it turned into, ‘Okay, let me have another friend come on. And then let me have another friend come on.’ And then bam, I have a show. And it’s a cooking show. I thought, Maybe I need to go to culinary school?” Instead, she leaned into what she didn’t know. The pretense became part of the gag.
Now, the episodes run about an hour and cost up to tens of thousands of dollars to produce. Each is bankrolled by advertising as well as other platforms, such as Patreon, where her followers can pay $5 a month to find “unseen episodes & BTS chaos.” She cites Oprah Winfrey as a role model, except Oprah never talked to pop stars about anal bleaching or fell from a treadmill wearing a cat costume (that we know of). On Blackwell’s show, other young celebrities, many of whom came up at the same time she did, are comfortable getting loose — Rae gossiped over po’boys, and Sombr flirted over steaks — while plugging a new project without any of the awkward questions they might face from a journalist. That closeness is why she and Shane were tasked with interviewing actors for Vanity Fair at its Oscars party in March. The livestream was widely ridiculed as chaotic and disorganized, but the two of them are still dining out on it months later — the TikTok promo for their Feeding episode sees them locking arms on a faux red carpet.
As she and Shane giggle their way through the first course, Blackwell does something I’ve noticed in her other cooking episodes. Every so often, she hits the camera with a conspiratorial side-eye or strikes a beauty pose. It took me a while to realize what she was doing: chumming the waters for her fans (or “clip farming,” as it’s known), giving her loyal followers frames of her looking hot that they can rip and turn into their own viral edits. In I Love LA, Blackwell’s character is scarily calculating about going viral — the secret to her operation is a shady click farm powered by dozens of old phones. In real life, Blackwell describes her average clipper as “a 16-year-old with access to CapCut,” the free video-editing app. They have handles like “Quen’s Wife” and “The Quenaissance” and seem to spread her material for free.
“Editors make the world go round,” she says. “Editors are the reason why any movie right now is breaking the box office. Editors right now are the reason why any of these pop girls have, like, hard-core fans. They create the world that we exist in; they really do. They are the kingmakers. There are no more gatekeepers, except for the fan accounts.” Blackwell is a student of celebrity culture, and she explains that her dynamic with clippers is an evolution of the old Hollywood tactic of dealing with paparazzi. “You see those videos of Kylie Jenner walking outside with her bob?” she says. “She gives the camera a shake because that’s a good photo. You want to give them something.”
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“Baby, that’s a Windows wallpaper,” Blackwell says into a tiny microphone. With a backdrop straight out of a European-holiday Instagram photo dump, she is dishing out sound bites to indie-magazine social-media editors and posing for every photographer who’ll have her. The influencers Alexandra Leclerc and Léna Mahfouf are taking selfies elsewhere on the Corsican cliffside. Isabelle Huppert is here too, fanning herself under an umbrella next to the underground English rapper Fakemink and probably wondering who all these teenyboppers around her are. Elias Medini, better known on Instagram as Lyas, hikes down to the beach to take a picture. Blackwell almost follows, then reconsiders. No. 1 rule of influencing: Never ruin the dress.
Blackwell’s flirtation with high fashion began a couple of years ago when she modeled for the label Off-White, and she’s taken to it like a natural, turning up most recently in the front rows of Valentino and Balenciaga, where she was joined by Sennott. Medini, who is based in Paris, tells me that he was struck by Blackwell’s appearance at a Chanel couture show. The label, it seems to him, is savvy for getting into business with her. “Some people, particularly the millennials, have this idea that they need to be performative versions of themselves on social media,” he says. “The new generation understands that they have to be themselves at any cost. And the brands love that. The luxury industry is having a hard time talking to young customers, but they can reach them through people like Quen.”
After the Jacquemus runway show is over, Blackwell is the first guest to arrive at a celebratory lunch at a nearby beach club. “I don’t mind being punctual,” she says. “I don’t think it’s boring. I went to a Coachella after-party, and there was this A-list actor who was like, ‘How lame are we for being here first?’ I’m like, Bitch, I don’t think that’s lame. Like, I’m happy to be here. I’m not gonna be late to look cool.” She is done with her professional obligations for now and plops down on a sofa in the center of the room next to her boyfriend, whom she describes as “not a public figure.” They’ve been thinking of moving to Paris, at least part time. That’s where she would consider raising children. Just not quite yet. “I want to get popping popping, just a little bit more popping, until I can take a break. I don’t want my kids calling my nanny, like, ‘Mom,’” she says.
Filming for the next season of her series is well underway, and Blackwell wants to keep acting. She hasn’t landed other roles yet, though that’s not for lack of trying. “It’s just been me sending as many auditions as I can to get in front of the right casting directors and choosing the right roles, instead of just being like, ‘I’ll be this smudge in the corner,’” she says. Like every social-media star who has broken through, she’s been asked before if she’ll give up TikTok when she really makes it. Blackwell knows better. “I ran the numbers a couple of times on whether I should get more silent and just let the work speak,” she says, looking out at the beach. “But the work is me. The work is me remaining authentic to myself. There have been socialites in the past, and I’m something else. I shouldn’t try to be like, Well, I’m an actor now, so there’s no more TikToks. Like, whatever, shut up.”
Still, Blackwell admits it’s exhausting to be so chronically online. Back in L.A., she had shown me the app-blocker requiring her to do a ten-second meditation before opening her screen. “I’m an addict to this shit,” she said. When Blackwell recently went on her first real vacation in a while, she had a hard time letting go of work. She wants to follow her boyfriend’s lead and figure out how to pull back from the grid. The last thing she wants is to become a social-media cautionary tale. “There’s this cute girl that I follow, a Parisian influencer, and her baby has been on Instagram since birth,” she says. “Like, Damn, can you just turn off the camera and give him your attention?”
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Photo: MAR+VIN
Production Credits
Photography by
MAR+VIN
Styling by
Jessica Willis
Photo Assistants:
Diego Garcia and Chad Hilliard
Digitech:
Yoshi Park
Hair:
Nikki Nelms
Makeup:
Michaela Bosch
Manicure:
Nori Yamanaka
Hair Assistant:
Tiffanie Garrett
Styling Assistants:
Cole Norton, Jack Novotny, Lili Marner, and Liv Vitale
Set Design:
Henrique Cirilo
Set Design Assistants:
Nicholas Kozmin and Sterling Juan Diaz
Tailor:
Lindsay Wright
Production:
Kindly Productions
The Cut, Editor-in-Chief
Lindsay Peoples
The Cut, Photo Director
Noelle Lacombe
The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor
Brooke Marine
The Cut, Photo Editor
Sofía Mareque
The Cut, Fashion Market Editor
Emma Oleck
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