Cory Kennedy
The internet made her and unmade her.
By Brock Colyar
CORY KENNEDY has a hard time looking at the photos that made her famous—the shots in which she’s a tipsy teenager at parties with the Olsens and Lindsay Lohan and Steve Aoki. There’s one that is particularly well known among those who remember who she is in which she’s squatting on the sidewalk, looking elfin and disheveled, smoking a cigarette. When I bring it up recently, she declares, “That’s not the person I am today,” balling one of her hands up in a fist and struggling through a sudden-onset stutter. “It’s me screaming out for safety. It’s not just an image of me partying. It’s me looking for the ground. A pose I became famous for, ironically.”
Kennedy might have been the internet’s first “It” girl. She rocketed from teenage anonymity to virality after becoming a muse of sorts to the party photographer Mark Hunter, a.k.a. the Cobrasnake, at the time only her second serious boyfriend. But unlike the influencers who followed in her wake, she never really felt she was in charge of her own image and never really cashed in on it either.
This story is from the April 24 - May 07, 2023 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the April 24 - May 07, 2023 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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