Dennis Kane, way too hot right now.
#KANEDENNIS #kanEdenniS #KaNeDeNnIs (via Twitter)
When Zoolander and Hansel appeared at Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday, they were just telling us what we already knew: they belong to the old world of fashion. The future belongs, apparently, to child models with obsessive Internet followings. Meet Dennis Kane, the Korean-Australian 8-year-old model who has thousands of fans on China's Weibo social network, a Facebook fan club in the Philippines, a Twitter fan club, and an official fan club website (official as in "his mom said OK") that strongly implies Dennis has the Shining:
All work and no play make Dennis a questionable Internet icon. (via ShineKane)
Now, sometimes the story of Dennis' newfound fame is awesome, like how his mixed-heritage parents and background make him relatable to a new generation of Asians. And let's be honest, the kid has style and panache.
As a purely visual Internet device, the kid wipes the floor with any emoji when it comes to conveying cool confidence. I mean, the kid can eat jellied toast while wearing a fishing hat and somehow still exude swag:
If he was more famous, he might easily replace Beyonce on Tumblr for gifs and images communicating one's fierceness. And as far as I know, he's never released unflattering photographs that he then tried to get pulled from the Internet, resulting in a hilarious Photoshop war. Unlike Beyonce.
On the other hand, I was blown away by the depth and rabidity of the fandom I found online for this kid.
Dennis' (I guess officially endorsed) Filipino fan page.(via Facebook)
Frankly, a lot of the Asian sites really seem to treat him as if he's already grown up—apparently, the Internet first noticed Dennis when he was around 4, and although he was too young for fan clubs then, he wasn't too young to call a mulatto bastard:
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, TAIWAN? (via news.gamme.com.tw)
Now that he's 8, however, blogs are complementing him on his new, more adult face.
That's right, ladies, he can open his own M&M bags now. (via news.gamme.com.tw)
The distinctly not-politically-correct discussion of his race continues across the Pacific Internet, with his Weibo fan page describing him as a "mestizo" - a term associated historically with mixed-race people in former Spanish colonies (which makes sense since the page might have been set up by Filipino fans). That's not even the most off-putting word on the page, though. That would be "tender":
Um, either Google Translate is way too creepy or I do not understand Weibo at all.
(via Weibo)
I also discovered that he has a rival in the Internet child modeling world—a 9-year-old Russian girl named Kristina Pimenova. For commenters who are concerned about Dennis' fans' creepiness, they all agree that at least he's not as bad off as Kristina is.
As Rocket24 (which also reported on Dennis Kane) writes, while well-behaved online commenters gush "about little Pimenova's exceptional good looks as far as they meet the Japanese concept of the western ideal of beauty." Meanwhile,
the rest of the Internet, as well as Pimenova's agent (which may or may not be her parents), seem to have more complicated, Lolita-esque feelings about the little girl – as evidenced by her millions of Facebook followers, the creepy comments therein, and the feverish, out-of-left-field debates about whether or not she's Polish.
Well, at least Dennis Kane isn't unintentionally fanning flames of racial hatred (I take that back, this is the Internet, there's no way he isn't doing that).
Just another reminder that it's a big Internet out there, and the Asian Internet is even bigger than the American one, and you should make sure to parse the bad translations to see what exactly you're liking. I set out to write about a cool kid doing cool things and ended up writing about how weird this all is. That said, I wish Dennis the best (I think he'll be fine unless the world suddenly runs out of cool) and I hope his fans keep supporting him appropriately.