CULTURE

Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson, Frances Bean Cobain, and More Share Vintage Photos for Old Head Shot Day

This is definitely a real holiday and not at all made up.


On Friday, to celebrate Old Head Shot Day—a holiday that is definitely real and certainly not made up (like, it didn’t even seem to exist this time last year)—celebrities flocked to Twitter and Instagram to share the images that used to accompany their modeling and acting books. (It’s a real holiday now purely in terms of how much it has gifted us, the casual observer, on this spring weekend.) The likes of Jennifer Garner, Emma Watson, Karlie Kloss, Evan Rachel Wood, Joe Manganiello, and many others filled their followers’ feeds with extreme throwbacks unearthed from their professional archives. Many of them in black and white, the images were, for the most part, also accompanied by sarcastic, self-deprecating captions—for there’s really no other way to broadcast your ill-advised childhood hairstyles and contrived portraits to an audience of thousands of followers.

For starters, Reese Witherspoon posted her child modeling profile, listing her, age 12, at a petite four feet eleven inches—though, as she pointed out, she’s now a “much more impressive 5’2″.” Busy Phillips also posted her own cover sheet from her child modeling days, noting, “I booked not one job as a child model. Maybe it was the crazy clown lipstick or my terrible haircut?”

Phillips was not the only one rocking a bowl cut back in the day: She was joined in that particular endeavor by Shailene Woodley (caption: “well….”), whose look was capped off with blunt-cut bangs. Nina Dobrev, meanwhile, opted for some very 2000s curls in a series of not one but five head shots, captioned, “Brood. Smile. Bad girl. Girl next door. And apparently …. Jane from the jungle???” And Frances Bean Cobain even opted into Old Head Shot Day, albeit with a bit of a troll move: She posted an image of herself, wailing, in the arms of RuPaul (pre–Drag Race, of course), her dad, the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and the Nirvana drummer (and later Foo Fighters frontman) Dave Grohl by her side. “Throw back to my first headshot #werk,” Cobain wrote.

See more of the best of Old Head Shot Day, below.