From APHA reserve championships to an Antarctica shoot that cost her hearing and eyesight, the record behind one of the first models made famous by a phone video.
Kate Upton's career runs against the usual route to modelling fame. For decades, a model became widely known by walking for top designers at runway shows. Upton had been signed for about three years when a phone video of her doing the dougie in the stands at a Los Angeles Clippers game went viral in April 2011, and that clip did more for her public profile than any catwalk.
Guy Trebay of The New York Times used the moment to make a broader point: social media could now give a model stardom, a power that had previously belonged to the big designer shows. Within two years of that video, Upton had covered the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue twice, shot the 100th-anniversary cover of Vanity Fair with Annie Leibovitz, and landed an American Vogue cover by Mario Testino.
What follows traces that sequence as recorded on Kate Upton's Wikipedia entry: the background, the early bookings, the viral clips, the film work, the covers, and the costs she has described along the way.
Background: Michigan, Whirlpool and Florida
Katherine Elizabeth Upton was born on June 10, 1992, in St. Joseph, Michigan. Her mother, Shelley (née Davis), is a former Texas state tennis champion; her father, Jeff Upton, was a high school athletic director. The family name carries weight in Michigan business and politics. Her great-grandfather, Frederick Upton, co-founded the appliance manufacturer and marketer Whirlpool Corporation, and her uncle is former U.S. Representative Fred Upton.
In 1999 the family moved to Melbourne, Florida. Upton attended Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy, a private Christian school, but did not graduate. That detail matters to the timeline: by the time she would have been finishing school, she was already being signed by a major agency.
A national-level equestrian before modelling
Before any of the modelling work, Upton was a serious competitive rider. She showed at the American Paint Horse Association (APHA) and competed nationally. Riding a horse named Roanie, she won three APHA Reserve World Championships, which are second-place finishes:
- 13 and Under Western Riding
- 13 and Under Horsemanship
- 14–18 Western Riding
She was also named 13 and Under Reserve All-Around Champion, taking her total to four reserve championships, and finished third overall on the APHA youth Top 20. With a second horse, Colby, she won 14–18 Western Riding in 2009 and placed in the top five in both 14–18 Horsemanship and 14–18 Western Pleasure. This is a sporting record in its own right, and it overlaps almost exactly with the year before her modelling career began.
Signed in a day: Elite, IMG and the first clients
In 2008 Upton went to a casting call in Miami for Elite Model Management and was signed the same day. She later moved to New York City and signed with IMG Models. Her first clothing work was for Garage and Dooney & Bourke, and she became the face of Guess for 2010–11.
The 2011 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue was the first big step up. She appeared in the body paint section and was named Rookie of the Year for that issue. Further bookings followed: Beach Bunny Swimwear, features in Complex, and Esquire, which named her 'The Woman of the Summer'. One of the Beach Bunny suits later turned up on her in the 2014 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, a small example of how swimwear labels and the magazine fed each other.
The dougie, the Cat Daddy and attention by video
The April 2011 Clippers clip is the hinge of the story. A short internet video of Upton doing the dougie, a hip-hop dance, spread widely and raised her profile well beyond the audience of a swimsuit issue. Trebay's reading in The New York Times was that the clip showed how social media could now hand a model the kind of stardom that had previously come from top designer runway shows.
It was not a one-off. In April 2012 a second video, of Upton performing the Cat Daddy dance to the song of the same name by The Rej3ctz, also went viral. Two hits a year apart suggest the format suited her, and they arrived around the same time as her first Sports Illustrated cover, so print and online attention were reinforcing each other.
Other appearances in 2011 point the same way: an episode of Tosh.0 in June, and a place in the Taco Bell All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, in July. These are publicity bookings rather than modelling jobs, and they show how quickly her name had become marketable outside fashion.
Film work and the Three Stooges controversy
Upton's acting debut came in Tower Heist, released in November 2011, in which she played Mr. Hightower's mistress. She went on to appear in The Other Woman (2014) and The Layover (2017). In between, she played Sister Bernice, one of the sisters at the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage, in The Three Stooges.
That role brought trouble in April 2012. Vanity Fair described a scene near the end of the film in which she emerges from a pool 'in a nun habit, a rosary, and little else'. The Catholic League called the performance 'crudity' and claimed it was symptomatic of a willingness to trash Christianity, especially Catholicism.
The detail that tends to get lost: the shot of Upton coming out of the pool in a revealing bikini appears only in the trailer. In the finished film her swimsuit is seen briefly in a couple of scenes. Much of the criticism was, in effect, aimed at the marketing rather than the movie.
Four Sports Illustrated covers, one in zero gravity
Upton was the cover model for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 2012, released in February that year, and again in 2013, making it two consecutive years. Parts of the 2013 pictorial were shot in Antarctica, and the extreme cold caused her hearing and eyesight to fail during the shoot.
In 2014 she appeared on the flip-side cover of the 50th-anniversary Swimsuit Issue, the first time the magazine had used that type of cover. Part of that shoot took place at Cape Canaveral and captured her in zero gravity. She returned as cover model for the 2017 issue, bringing her total to three standard covers plus the anniversary flip-side.
For a single model, that run across 2011 to 2017, from body-paint rookie to repeat cover, is the core of her public career. It is also where some of its sharpest downsides sit, covered in the final section below.
Winning over the fashion establishment
Swimsuit fame does not automatically translate into high-fashion credibility, and Upton's next covers are the evidence that hers did. She shot the November 2012 Vogue Italia cover with Steven Meisel and the January 2013 Vogue UK cover, then landed the June 2013 American Vogue cover by Mario Testino. In October 2013 Annie Leibovitz photographed her for the 100th-anniversary cover of Vanity Fair.
Her editorial list spans American, Italian, British, Spanish, German and Brazilian Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, V, Mademoiselle, LOVE, three editions of GQ, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and Esquire. Covers include Italian, American and British Vogue, French and American Elle, American, Italian and German GQ, Esquire and Vanity Fair. Advertising clients include David Yurman, Sam Edelman, Betsey Johnson, Guess, Victoria's Secret, Express and Bare Necessities, and Bobbi Brown named her its 'new face' in 2014.
Industry recognition followed. In September 2013 she was named Model of the Year at the 10th annual Style Awards during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City. Popularity lists also ranked her: fifth-sexiest model by Models.com in 2012, Maxim's Hot 100 in 2012 (citing her Sports Illustrated shoots), and number three on AskMen's Top 99 Women for 2013.
What to watch for when reading the story
The tidy version, viral video to Vogue, skips the costs. Upton has spoken about the negative aftereffects of the 2012 Sports Illustrated cover, saying she was subjected to criticism and felt she had been objectified. The 2013 Antarctica shoot left her with failing hearing and eyesight from the cold. Both sit inside the same run that made her famous.
The viral-fame narrative has limits too. She had already been signed by Elite and IMG, had fronted Guess and had been Sports Illustrated's Rookie of the Year before the Clippers clip spread. The video amplified an established career; it did not create one from nothing. Anyone using her as a template for online-first fame should weigh that.
Finally, treat the popularity rankings with care. Lists from Models.com, Maxim and AskMen measure attention at a moment, not working credentials. The covers, the photographers who shot them and the Model of the Year award are the firmer markers of where Kate Upton stood in the industry.
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