If Kim Kardashian has molded the fashion industry in her likeness, @KylieJenner has shaped the way we present ourselves online.

She grew up & evolved in the public eye in a way that had never been possible before. In doing so, she created codes for the life we curate and share.

What is your earliest memory of Kylie?

For many people she entered the collective consciousness on October 14th 2007, the night KUWTK debuted on the E! network.

You may remember her as the wild youngest one who jumped on the stripper pole that Kim bought for Kris as a present.

Kylie, like many of her family members, was born on camera 23 years ago. That's less than a year before The Truman Show debuted in the US, introducing the possibility of a life lived on universal broadcast.

You could say that regardless of what the landscape looked like, fame was always destined to find her: she had Kardashian blood ties on one side & an Olympic gold medalist father on the other.

This is how you land on red carpets as a toddler. From movie premieres to award shows.

Other than these occasional appearances, her early childhood remained largely private and standard for a kid growing up in Los Angeles. Which is an entirely different standard.

"Even before the show, my dad always had an audience, so I was always around that energy." — Kylie

And then came said show. Keeping Up With The Kardashians appeared on our TV screens when Kylie Jenner was just 10 years old. While it would focus on her extended family, it exposed her and Kendall to adjacent fame at a very early age.

Our eyes have never looked away since.

This is how we begin to explore the story of a girl born under public domain, who then took control of the different cameras being pointed at her — changing life as we know it in the process.

CHAPTER #1 — THE KEEPING UP YEARS: YOUNGEST OF THE BUNCH:

As I said before, Kylie was never meant to be a main fixture on the show when it came out. She was too young to be thrust into the spotlight & instead was featured occasionally as we got to know everyday family dynamics.

The first season saw her appear on TV a total of 3 times across eight episodes. She instantly positioned herself as the fun little one who was ready to keep all the family adults busy.
Her scenes involved typical child activities like asking for a puppy and playing with Kendall.

While they were old enough to get a grasp of what was coming together around them, they were still at some of their most formative years.

This is why Kylie told Harper's BAZAAR in February that she does not remember much of her life before the cameras started rolling.

“I don’t know. I think it’s a blessing, the way it happened so early, because I don’t really know what it would be like to not be famous or in the limelight.”

You know when you fantasize about what it would be like to be famous? This is that, only the other way around.

It's interesting because while Kourtney, Kim and Khloé were well into their mid to late 20s when the show started and had experienced teenage & young adulthood away from the spotlight, Kendall and Kylie's lives have never not been subjected to public fascination and speculation.

But that wasn't always so obvious. Keep in mind that during this time television was still pretty much at the top of the entertainment and news chain.

Social media platforms were in their earliest stages, and we didn't have other outlets to channel our ~voyeuristic~ tendencies.

So if it wasn't on TV you weren't following it anywhere else? Exactly. Seems like ages ago but that's what we went through. They were safe.

Having said that, these scenes are all we got from Kylie on the show, from 2007-2011 and seasons 1 to 6:

There was another form of media to keep up with the rich and famous and that was: Magazines! which I love.

You're a real OG if you remember the days when they did every single cover and project together. It took time for each sister to come into their own.

These are from 2011:

The early days of their print takeover saw Kylie as just another sister in the bunch. But generational changes were starting to take place.

Remember social media? Enter Twitter & Instagram, which had been creeping in & Kylie was old enough to join in 2011. Now brace yourselves.

The story of Kylie Jenner is also the story of a major shift in power dynamics between celebrities, mere mortals, traditional & modern media.

All of it was facilitated by one single invention, possibly the most influential of our lifetime and beyond: the iPhone.

To understand what's about to happen it is necessary to get a sense of the context around this time

•Magazines were the only platform celebrities had to control their narratives. They were also too slow for online rumors & involved too many people / getting their words twisted.

•MTV Cribs, the show responsible for letting us peak into extravagant homes for over 10 years, was soon to go off the air... Leaving us with no place to get our daily fix of excess and lavish lifestyles.

All while giving the newly launched Instagram room to breathe.

But Instagram, a photo sharing app that has pivoted to flea market in recent years and was once exclusive to iPhones before extending its charity work to Androids and them, was not created to fill in that gap left by MTV Cribs.

So where did things take the turn that they did?

I have a theory that puts Kylie at the root and center of it. Based on my recollection of events, my experiences on social media and a few conversations I had with people from different cities, I will show you why I believe that KJ laid the blueprint for how we present ourselves.

Kylie Jenner joined Instagram on November 4th 2011 when she was 14 years old. It was short before she started showing up on magazine covers, and she soon put the app to good use.

This was her very first post and between the filter and how random, it is peak OG IG:

Too much has happened too fast in the last decade so it would be good to remember what some things looked like. There were no influencers shoving products down our throats, no #ads, no stories, reels... It was just you and your mustache-printed cup of coffee against the world.

Better yet, there was NOBODY policing what people should and should not be posting or saying, how they looked and why they weren't being "cancelled."

I am here to show you what carefree looked like through some of Kylie's earliest posts. This reality no longer exists:

It's crazy to think of it now, but there were no rules to instagram at the beginning. Nobody cared about the algorythm or any stats.

Kylie would post almost daily, sometimes even several times a day. She was showing us life in Calabasas through her eyes:

I'm not sure what other teen stars, or soon to be stars, were embracing instagram this early. What I know is that being an open book was an uncommon standard for the industry, and yet that's the life Kylie knew.

So being an open book was the approach she took to Instagram.

As did virtually everybody else with an iPhone at the time. We were left to turn into wannabe photographers sharing every sunset, pet pic and grainy selfies.

The same pics proliferated all over & still do because we replicate what performs best. "Monkey see, monkey do" I guess

But Kylie was no average girl and the pics she was sharing were innocently offering us another window into the expanding family empire AND, for the very first time ever, her own personal life.

This is where our MTV Cribs culture meets one of the first celeb teens to go digital.

I don't think she realized it at that point, though. She was simply showing us what made her happy. This includes
•Her highschool days
•Closest friends (Hi Stas!)
•Her family (One thing about them is they love each other)
•Outdoorsy stuff. (Did you know she was a horse girl?)

There's a photoshoot and some candids that she shared in late November 2011 that encapsulate those days' aesthetic and overall feeling better than I could ever put them into words.

For some reason they look like random stock photos lol

It was during this time that she started to show up at red carpets more regularly but again, just not on her own. They were a pack everywhere they went and this time it was the Kardashian Khaos store opening in Las Vegas, where they sold merch and their OPI nail polish collab.

Enter: Kylie-Kode #1: the nail selfie.

I am not saying that Kylie invented taking a picture of your nails. But for a teen who grew up beauty conscious and around glam squads, she sure gave it new popularity by sharing her different styles, starting with some #sponcon in Dec 2011

In true Kardashian-Jenner fashion, here she was telling her thousands of followers about her new nail polish (Rainbow in the S-kylie).

Was it just a proud moment? Did she actually invent sponsored content at 14? She just loved switching up her nails and letting us know about it

She soon got the hang of it and started sharing her different promotional adventures. Something about these pictures give me a "Look what I'm up to and I'm proud of it" vibe more than a desire to push anything. It was just a different time.

Another thing she started to figure out early? The beauty selfie and golden hour. Again, not saying she invented/discovered it.

She was showing everybody the Kylie way to do it. Which would soon become the cool way to do it.

Side note: Kylie REALLY loves her eyes.

Remember our obsession with luxury and excess? Little Kylie knew she lived a good life and she was ready to let us know just that. She started sharing a vision of life that was shaped by all the shiny objects around her.

This was gold for our escapism-starved eyes. This was IT!

Now, there is one VERY specific shiny object that would go on to become the ultimate Kylie Jenner trademark. It was endlessly parodied by the first wave of IG boutiques and crystalized our obsession with her.

The EYECONIC Cartier love bracelet entered the chat on January 26 2012

I'm sorry but if you say you didn't want 1 or five at one point or another I smell BIG cap.
I remember thinking maybe I can save some money & when I saw the price I nearly passed tf out! I was so fixated on having ONE that I almost gave in to buy some fakes. Thank god I didn't.

But enough of the Cartier bracelets for now! We'll get back to that later.

Let's take a look at what was going down outside of Instagram in 2012. Kylie and Kendall branched out and debuted on their first magazine cover together: Teen VOGUE's march issue! There were two packs now

It was still One Big Happy Fame-ily, they were just ready to take over every demographic under the sun. World domination was incoming! 2012 was their moment.

Let's go back to instagram to take a look at what Kylie's style was like in that year:

According to that Teen Vogue profile, this is what she was wearing in terms of brands: superskinny 7 For All Mankind jeans, a cutout gray Helmut Lang T-shirt, and her favorite black Steve Madden combat boots.

She also had gotten her first Louboutins:

Which were another of her insta obsessions! Judgind from these posts you can tell she had been very vocal about wanting her first red soles.

Who remembers Kim's old Louboutin closet full of shiny, spiky pairs? Kylie was DROOLING over it.

Speaking of Kim, it's worth noting that Kylie has always respected and followed her big sis' fashion choices, from the peak Kim K years to now. I think it's become more obvious recently, but it's always been there.

These are all from the first half of 2012:

And here are more classic Kylie luxury shots for us to drool over. The kind of pics that leave you coming back for more and more and more and more and more:

Also, is that pool shot not the opening scene of The Sopranos?? Convince me otherwise.

Now let's fast-forward to June 15th 2012, where Kylie made a really important and relevant announcement with her #picoftheday: She LOVED Lana Del Rey.

So much that she recreated a shot from her Blue Jeans video. More on why this stands out later.

If you know anything about Kylie, you KNOW she has had her fair share of influence on the music industry. Growing up around so much and so many, she had big time access to her favorite artists and absorbed a lot from them.

But how? We'll get to that later too.

I would say it was around August 2012 that things began to accelerate in a way they haven't stopped since. There was change in the air. Want to know why? Grab a tissue.

It's the 22nd and the E! News headline of the day went something like this: Kylie Jenner has joined TUMBLR.

At this point you KNOWWW there is no going back. The world would never be the same after Kylie Kristen Jenner unleashed http://kalifornia-klasss.tumblr.com  on us. But why?

Analisa from California put it best: "I think it was the fact that everyone who had a Tumblr, it felt secret. So finding hers, I felt like I had a personal connection to her for the first time than just following her on IG and Twitter."

Tumblr had a certain intimacy to it.

To me, Tumblr symbolized the end of the classic teenage bedroom full of wall posters of your idols, celeb crushes, and magazine pages teared apart for inspiration. The images we love used to be visibly everywhere in our lives and Tumblr was making it all go digital.

You know how Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod as "1,000 songs in your pocket."?

Tumblr was XYZ amount of images in the iPhone that you kept in that pocket. All of them shielded from the criticism of annoying family members and shared with the people who just got it.

Kylie said she used to have a private Tumblr but decided to start over public to share more of her inspirations & what she liked. It's like she was taking us on a journey inside her mind, as opposed to sharing on IG what was around her.

But let's log off from both for a second.

Back in the real world, September 2012 was awaiting and it was full of surprises. Y'all know it's fashion month and the whole family has always been about it.

Kylie and Kendall would land on the cover of Seventeen Magazine. They also made their NYFW runway debut for Sherri Hill

PAUSE. Who could have imagined that years before Kendall became the it girl, Kylie would be the one to make waves at fashion week? She also hit the runway for Avril Lavigne's Abbey Dawn show.

Now that was something. But moving on...

Then came October, and she showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, as if there weren't enough signs that she was out to take over, Kylie did another thing.

Keek, the OG TikTok, has entered this chat. And on the 23rd Kylie used Instagram to tell the world that she was on it:

Keek was a whole era. I remember the family eventually jumped on it and shared behind the scenes while they filmed in Miami. Scott’s Keeks were the funniest!

These were the days before IG Live and anything similar. Watching these videos was new and made you feel like an insider.

Kylie was never much of a Twitter girl, but now we were talking Instagram, Tumblr, Keek and a blooming career in real life. If you cared for magazines, she was getting covers and if you were into digital, she was on every hip platform.

This is how you become inescapable.

Things got even better in November when she started hinting at an aesthetic shake up. I think on Tumblr Kylie was exposed to lots of great worlwide imagery that she would later expose US to. This was a stark contrast to the still grainy and basic Instagram quality and filters.

And what I mean by shake up is: her rocker/skater/edgier side started pushing through. She was now part of the infamous MSFTS and flaunting it proudly.

I'm talking about Jaden Smith, Mateo & Moises Arias + others and that clothing line with the lll symbol that they always did.

You know what else she was hinting at? Longer nails. Bigger lips. Music. And Lana Del Rey. Again. This was both on Instagram & Tumblr.

Kylie was obsessed with everything LDR. After posting this classic shot of her in November, she got longer, pointy nails like hers a day after.

Lana Del Rey proved to be one of Kylie's biggest visual influences in this early period where she was coming into her own. One thing we all know to be true is that Lana reigned SUPREME on Tumblr back in that day. Her vintage, sad-glam girl aesthetic was the move. A fact is a fact

But getting into the details of how Lana changed the game is another thread of its own and one I am not planning lol.
I will say, though, that Kylie Jenner put me on to Lana Del Rey. And Frank Ocean. I love both of them to this day so shoutout to the soon to be Kylizzle for that

I imagine if that's how it happened for me, it may have happened the same way for more people. She just exposed us all to a lot of things we weren't familiar with, especially if you lived outside the US.

That's my first memory of thinking of Kylie as influential. What's yours?

Okay it's time to wrap up 2012. Kylie ended the year by introducing us to two of her classic essentials. Make some noise if you remember her love of Céline Phantom bags and Urth Caffé!

She was super obsessed with that bag in the way people obsess over Birkins.

Want to know another way she ended the year to prepare us for her next era? By giving herself a brand new name... on instagram. She was now IPUTTHEDISTRICTONMYBACK.

MSFTS tingz! Let's see what it all means. Things start to get real good around this time.

2013 came and she had been working on her selfie game. She had also started to wear beanies and kept doing that III sign because MSFTS.

Another brand she gave new popularity to? Brian Lichtenberg, who did streetwear parodies of houses like Hermes and the like.

CHAPTER 2 — AN ALTERNATIVE KYLIE

The Kylie we all came to be obsessed with is around the corner. It took her literally less than a month to figure out her new aesthetic on Instagram.

By February she was posting high contrast photos in black & white with her group of friends

Looking back it makes sense that a lot of her photos turned out super cool and she learned about light and how to take her own pics. Her friends were super into photography and maybe it rubbed off on her in different ways.

Back then I was like how??? Every time she posted

By March another Kylie trend would reveal itself. She started playing with the way she framed her pics in white backgrounds, adding hazy/faded filters and those little vintage lights and beams. Maybe this was getting common on Tumblr but she was the one who took that to IG.

Soon after it was EVERYWHERE. I think we all tried to replicate her feed at one point or another. She positioned herself as the epitome of cool in a time where there were basically no cool teens on instagram. They were all doing the same corny stuff

But Kylie separated herself.

Finding the apps that she used became an actual goal and hunt. She wasn't vocal about it so everybody was desperate to find out. I remember people asked on the comments and it was a constant search on Twitter.

Until someone said it was Afterlight and it spread like wildfire.

Personally I downloaded it IN A SECOND. It looked exactly like it and had all the features. Charlie wishes he could have been half as happy as me with this little golden ticket. EYE had found the real gold.

For the backgrounds I never knew the exact app so I used Squaready lol

People said she used VSCO too which was a big possibility so I got that as well. When I tell you my feed started to emulate hers!!! I felt like I, too, was a MSFT. Maybe I had just become iputeverythingandeveryoneonmyback. The apps came with the cool points.

I was IN!!!

I still got all my pics from that time and stand by all of them. I would like to hear from people who tried it all and still have them too so come forward with the evidence.

That feed and aesthetic stand the test of time if you ask me. Kylie has a good eye.

There's something she started to take to the next level with her new iPhone, editing apps and tastes: her nail selfies. The Cartier love bracelets were still there and STACKED on top of each other.

Her hands looked like a supporting character in a Lana Del Rey video.

Her love of G Wagons became more and more obvious. She perfected the handbag /accesories pic and became the ultimate California Girl.

The modern day poster girl that everybody needed and could keep in their pockets. She knew how to pose. She could just stand there and look cool.

As Darsey told me from California: "Seeing her in really dope outfits, driving and living life as a teenager was everything. She seemed so independent and carefree, things every normal teenager dreams of and Kylie is doing all of that while dressing so authentic & very distinct"

It doesn't hurt that she was always hanging around the coolest people in the industry.

Kylie went from offering us a vision of luxury to embodying it fully and having all around access to the best of everything at that time. How could we look away from her feed?