Following Nobody
I remember scrolling through this Tokyo street-style account and getting caught. The girl had pink hair, Harajuku fashion sense, perfect proportions, shots from all the right places. The kind of Instagram that made you feel behind on your taste level. Then something nagged at me—the skin too smooth, the light always falling the same way, the proportions just slightly too ideal. This wasn’t a very good Photoshopped account. This was CGI.
Her name is Imma. She’s a virtual Instagram model created by a company called Modeling Cafe, and the whole operation feels like the logical next step for an industry that’s been chasing an impossible standard for twenty years. If you can’t find a real person who looks perfect enough, render one. She posts shots of herself in Tokyo’s expensive neighborhoods, wearing clothes that cost real money to design and manufacture. She has followers. She has a story. She doesn’t exist.
What’s interesting is that she’s not trying to hide it. The company doesn’t position her as a secret project or some discovered hoax. She just is what she is—a digital person with an Instagram account. She’s styled like a real person would want to look, designed to be aspirational in the specific Tokyo sense: fashionable, slightly edgy, always somewhere worth being.
There’s something almost honest about it, in a weird way. With a real influencer, you get the pretense of authenticity—the carefully curated chaos, the real me
confessional, the sense that there’s a human being on the other end with actual desires and flaws. Imma dispenses with all that. She’s pure image. She’s what an Instagram model would look like if you removed the human baggage entirely. No scandals, no disappointments, no aging out of relevance. Just the idea of a girl who looks good in Harajuku.
The comparison to Miku Hatsune is obvious. Both are digital, both are Japanese, both have built genuine cultural presence despite the fact that they’re not real. But Miku makes no attempt at photorealism. She’s clearly digital, clearly an artifact, and that transparency is what makes her powerful—you’re not being fooled, you’re choosing to engage with something explicitly artificial. Imma does the opposite. She’s almost convincing enough to forget about.
I think about what Modeling Cafe probably wanted: a virtual person who could wear different brands’ clothes in promotional shoots without the complications of a real person, who would never age or demand more money or have opinions that didn’t align with the corporate partnership. The perfect employee who isn’t a person at all.
Following Imma feels like following nobody. Not in some deep way—I mean literally watching pixels arranged to look like a person you could never actually know. She’s real enough to look at and find beautiful. She’ll never think about you. She’ll never have an off day and post something weird. She’ll never grow in any way that matters. That’s probably exactly the appeal.