The Sunday Times Magazine • 35M
olly-Mae Hague is a very
modern celebrity, which means
she’s both extremely famous
and someone you may well
never have heard of. But if you
are one of the more than six
million people who follow her
on Instagram, you probably
know about her life in
extraordinary detail.
You might have watched her
get together with her boyfriend, the boxer
Tommy Fury (younger half-brother of
Tyson), in the 2019 series of the ITV2 reality
dating show Love Island. You might have
heard her talk about her endometriosis,
or about being burgled last year, or about
her decision to get fillers — and her decision
to get them dissolved. You might have
watched the couple moving into their first
home together (a £4 million house in
Cheshire). Whatever she does, she
documents on YouTube and the ’gram.
That’s because Hague is an influencer,
an occupation that didn’t even exist when
she was born in 1999. Her job is to show
you how she lives in the hope that you’ll be
inspired to buy the products she uses. You
can dress like her (she’s creative director
of the fast-fashion label PrettyLittleThing),
tan like her (she’s CEO of her own tanning
line) and do your hair like her (an extension
company offers a “bespoke colour” that
matches her own bleached tone).
And millions of her fans, mostly young
girls, do exactly that. Now they can buy the
book as well. Becoming Molly-Mae is part
autobiography, part playbook for turning
yourself into a brand. Because whatever
Hague is endorsing, what she’s really
selling is herself. She’s the blonde, bronzed,
perfectly proportioned ideal, getting paid
— and paid very well — to live her dream.
Aged just 23, she’s a millionaire.
Ask her about her life and she keeps
coming back to one word: blessed. Her
relationship? “So blessed.” Her experience
on Love Island? “Very blessed.” Her social
media following? “Blessed.” It’s a word
that comes straight from the humblebrag
vocabulary of Instagram captions: a way
to stress you really appreciate your good
fortune while pointing out how much
good fortune you have.
To me this voluntary state of permanent
surveillance looks less like a blessing, more
a very specific curse, but according to
polling of teenagers, “influencer” and
“vlogger” are high on the list of dream jobs.
It’s definitely a generational thing, Hague
says. “My nana struggles to understand my
job because it’s something she’d never in
her lifetime experienced.”
We’re speaking over Zoom because she’s
currently in Los Angeles with Fury. Is this
a work trip or leisure? “It’s recreation,” she
says. “We took a trip out here as a holiday.
Just to totally have a week to switch off.”
Although — as evidenced by the fact shegot up to talk to me at 9am — Hague is
never fully off duty. Over the days before
our interview she has put up a post from
Universal Studios, one of her and Fury in
front of the Hollywood sign and pictures of
herself wearing various outfits around LA.
She will typically update her Instagram
feed a few times a week. Photos are taken
either by Fury or one of her management
team’s assistants, and she’ll reject hundreds
to find the perfect image of herself posing
in the street, often holding a Starbucks
(another brand partner). YouTube videos,
which she edits herself, go up once a week.
She reckons she spends about 20 per centof her time “creating content”, and the
rest strategising and running her business
ventures. “I enjoy it so much that even
when I’m off work I’ll still be posting bits
and bobs. I love keeping people in the loop.”
She has been keeping people in the loop
about her life since she was 15, when she
started her Instagram account. Through a
mixture of experimentation and instinct she
figured out which kinds of content worked:
outfits of the day were popular and so were
“hauls”, in which she’d show off the contents
of an online shopping order (Hague paid for
these with her mum’s debit card and only
sometimes forgot to return the items).From top: Hague hit it off with the boxer Tommy Fury on the reality
dating show Love Island in 2019; she has showed influencer nous
by becoming creative director at the fashion label PrettyLittleThing“EVEN BEFORE I WENT FOR THE LOVE
ISLAND AUDITION I KNEW I WAS GOING
TO BE ON THE SHOW ... I MANIFESTED IT”
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PREVIOUS PAGES: JAY BROOKS FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. HAIR: JACK LUCKHURST. MAKE-UP: HOLLIE FLYNN. STYLING: GEORGIE GREY. BLAZER BY BURBERRY VINTAGE, SHIRT BY SERENA BUTE, CARGO TROUSERS BY PRETTYLITTLETHING, EARRINGS BY MISSOMA. THIS PAGE: ITV