Every year, Google’s crack team of scientists crunches trillions of our search engine requests and assembles the Year In Search. Consider it a Who’s Who of the biggest names, trends and events of 2014. While some of the biggest stories are no-brainers (Robin Williams, the World Cup, the missing Malaysian Airlines plane MH370), a couple of the top-ranked names are likely to draw a total blank. For example, the most Googled fashion designer is a Disney-cute 19-year-old teenager from California called Bethany Mota.
I know: who? According to Google data, Bethany beat more established hitters like Valentino and Kate Spade. She outranked Oscar de la Renta and L’Wren Scott, whose deaths this year led to a huge online uptick of interest in their work. Alexander Wang, who dominated the fashion headlines with his much-hyped H&M collab, only made it to number 7.
Bethany even eclipsed Tina Knowles – that’s right, House of Deréon designer and Beyoncé’s mum. You know you’ve got staying power when you emerge victorious over the woman who convinced Destiny’s Child that coordinating orange suede outfits was a good idea.
So who exactly is Bethany Mota? The top trending designer got her start as a vlogger and has parlayed her YouTube fame (7.8 million subscribers and counting!) into a burgeoning design career. She’s partnered with Forever 21 and JCPenney and launched her own clothing, accessories and home line with Aéropostale last year. She’s made cameos on Project Runway as a judge, doling out fashion critique alongside Heidi Klum, and there’s even been speculative fanfiction pairing her with Niall from One Direction (that’s when you know you’re big).
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But unless you’re a YouTuber-loving American tween, you’re unlikely to have heard of her. Established fashion magazines, such as Harper’s Bazaar, profiled her Google triumph with the kind of ‘er, what?’ shrug your mum probably uses when you talk about selfie sticks or some other similarly incomprehensible millenial-speak.
Meanwhile, Bethany’s Mota-vators (as her friends are called) are freaking out online. One fan wrote: ‘DO YOU REALISE HOW FAMOUS YOU ARE YOURE THERE ON THE DESCRIPTION FOR YOUTUBE ON GOOGLE PLAY’.
This is how we measure fame now, my friends: by cross-platform appearances on multiple media sites. According to Bethany, she started uploading haul videos to YouTube out of boredom. ‘I was also being bullied at the time,’ she explained, ‘so I didn’t really want to do anything. I just wanted to stay inside.’
Five years on, she makes an estimated $500,000 to $750,000 from ads on her videos – and she’s undoubtedly netted herself even more cash through her high street collaborations.
Does this all make you want to die a little inside and cling on to your copy of Vogue a little tighter? Bethany is kind of the anti-Karl Lagerfeld. She’s accessible and intimate in a way that fashion absolutely despises – even the product descriptions for her Aéropostale line channel her chatty persona (‘You guys know me, so I’m sure you already know I’m freaking out about my solid velvet dress! I’m so pumped about its shimmery fabric and sassy scoop back’).
But Bethany’s success shouldn’t be sneered at. Sure, she doesn’t exactly fit the standard mould of a fashion designer – she’s more of a celeb designer, albeit one who achieved that status through YouTube’s tween incubator. Like Zoella, she threatens more traditional forms of celebrity and achievement – Bethany hasn’t landed a retail line because she came up through a reality TV show (sorry, Kim) or a big-name pop band (sorry, Victoria Beckham).
And despite having zero Fashion Week access or high-profile runway shows, this teen has still managed to thwart an army of fashion PRs to out-Google every other international designer going. I think that’s admirable – and if nothing else, her Google #1 means that even more people will be Googling her name. Now that’s what you call a double win.
**Watch Bethany In Action Here: **
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.