'You Wanna Be On Top?' America's Next Top Model, Cultural Chaos, and the Accidental Invention of Influencer Culture

Premiering in 2003 and concluding in 2018, America’s Next Top Model became one of the most globally syndicated reality franchises of the early twenty-first century. Created and hosted by Tyra Banks, the series promised to discover a supermodel but delivered something far more culturally consequential: a proto-influencer incubator that rehearsed platform logics before platforms consolidated their power. In this article I argue that ANTM trained contestants in persona construction, narrative vulnerability, and self-branding, operationalizing visibility as currency and authenticity as performance long before social media quantified engagement (Banet-Weiser 2012; Marwick 2015). In doing so, it marked a transition from gatekept fashion mystique to a participatory fame economy structured by circulation and relatability. Yet this shift was fraught, as the show oscillated between democratization and exploitation, expanding representation while commodifying difference. Drawing on cultural studies, star studies, Queer theory, and race scholarship (Hall 1997; Dyer 1998), this article contends that ANTM did not reliably produce supermodels but narrativized personalities: self-branded subjects who anticipated the influencer before the term solidified.