Salient

Cory Kennedy: The teenage internet celebrity

By Hannah Cooke and Lisa Lawton | 8 Oct, 2007

When flicking through an Australian fashion magazine recently, we noticed a whole mess of snapshots of a young-ish looking girl dominating the “what to wear” sections. In all the photos, she wore pretty awesome outfits, had great ‘it took me two hours to look like I just got out of bed’ hair, a cheeky grin, and basically looked like she was having all kinds of fun. The pictures weren’t paparazzi style; they were more like the kind of photos you take when you are going out with your friends – grinning at the camera and making stupid hand gestures. This intrigued us. Who was this girl with the fabulous-looking life?

It turns out that this girl is Cory Kennedy. And she got famous when, at just 15 years old, she got photographed by the then 20-year-old thecobrasnake.com dude, Mark Hunter, who she ended up ‘interning’ for. This involved, like, attending hot parties and going to bars and whatever (thecobrasnake.com is like a US scenester party photo website – see our first Online Weekly of the year). She then of course started going out with him and, not long after, became some kind of internet celebrity. All without her parents knowing.

How? Well, the cobrasnake photos of Kennedy got her a lot of attention; the ratings of the website went up whenever she featured. So she decided to capitalise on it, and started a blog (at corykennedy.blogspot.com), where she posts pictures of her fabulous life and writes the kind of inane, misspelled posts that you would expect of a 17-year-old.

What’s quite awesome about this is that her parents just didn’t get it at first. When strangers would call out to her daughter in the street, Cory’s mum recalled thinking “Gee, Cory knows people all over. How nice!” But soon after, when Cory started staying out until 2am on a school night and posting blogs about Vincent Gallo trying to pash her, her parents figured it all out and sent her off to a boarding school.

Talk about a pretty archaic solution to a totally internet-age problem: what the fuck do you do when your child becomes some kind of sceney-celebrity on the internet? Kudos to Cory for keeping them in the dark for so long. But anyway, she finished school and is now continuing to live a shallow, fabulous life - hanging out with Sean Lennon, going to fashion shows and hooking up with Kings of Leon. The usual seventh former stuff.

This is all so depressing. It’s like those times when you find out that you’re the same age as Scarlett Johansson, and all of a sudden you realise that you have done crap all with your life, and how come you aren’t in lots of good movies? Why aren’t you a freaking U.N goodwill ambassador? Cory freaking Kennedy is 17-years old now. Like a seventh former. Like Hannah’s little sister. Like Lisa’s little brother.

And yet she is so much cooler than us.

She gets paid to show up at all the hip scene bars, is on the cover of/doing work for friggin’ Nylon magazine, being some kind of celebrity model, and respectable magazines refer to her as a style-icon. Oh, and she has like thousands upon thousands of MySpace friends.

(If you want to be friends with her, she’s at www.myspace.com/cklckl).

Gutted bro, if only we were 15 now. Cory Kennedy, you are the online queen.