How Linda Schulz Accidentally Became the It-Girl

She didn’t set out to become the internet’s next fashion fixation. She just had two free months, a good eye for outfits, and the nerve to begin. There’s something almost ironic about calling Linda Schulz an “It-Girl.” Not because she isn’t one. She is - entirely. The outfits, the ease, the visual consistency, the million following, the polished coolness that makes fashion audiences stop scrolling. But unlike the archetype the internet has spent years romanticising, Linda did not arrive on social media with a master plan to build a personal brand, engineer desirability, or perform a hyper-curated version of herself online. She became Linda Schulz almost by accident. Or at least, that’s how it started.

Before the campaigns, the partnerships, the agency representation and the loyal audience that now looks to her for fashion inspiration, Linda was on a far more conventional path. She studied industrial management, completed a master’s in economics in Barcelona, and had already signed a contract for her first post-university job before her student life had even properly ended. Efficient to the end, she finished her thesis earlier than expected and found herself with something many ambitious people rarely know what to do with:

Time. Two months of it. 

No deadlines. No immediate pressure. No backup stress, either - the job was already secured. And in the stillness of that strange in-between chapter, something shifted. She realised she needed something to fill the gap, some outlet for the creative interest she had always quietly carried with her. Fashion had long been part of her world, even if only as a personal fascination. So she asked her boyfriend to take outfit pictures of her. Not with a business strategy in mind, but simply because it sounded fun.

That hobby would change everything.

Within those first months, Linda’s content began gaining traction. A few thousand followers came quickly. Brands started reaching out. The momentum was real, but so was the chaos. Her original account was banned by Instagram after just a week of posting fashion content, forcing her to begin again from zero.

For many people, that would have been the end of the experiment. For Linda, it became an unexpected gift.

Starting over meant freedom. No friends from school watching. No family members quietly judging. No audience carrying assumptions about who she had been before. Just a blank page and the chance to post without self-consciousness. In a strange way, zero followers made her bolder. There was nobody to impress, and therefore nothing to lose. 

That clean slate became the foundation of everything that followed.

When her corporate job began in October 2021, Linda was already balancing two identities: the consultant she had worked hard to become, and the content creator she never saw coming. For a year and a half, she lived in both worlds at once. By day, she worked in consultancy, a field that fit the logic of her education and the expectations attached to it. On the side, she kept building her platform, uploading fashion content, growing her audience, learning the rhythms of brand partnerships, and discovering the invisible labour that comes with building a digital career.

And then came the crossroads.

Leaving a stable, respected corporate job to become an influencer is the kind of decision people often reduce to aesthetics - as though it’s simply a glamorous pivot toward easier work and free products. Linda speaks about it very differently. There was pressure, fear, and the very real weight of disappointing the people who had believed in the more traditional version of her future. Her father, especially, came from a mindset where career progression, structure and professional prestige mattered deeply. Telling her parents she had quit to become a full-time fashion influencer felt almost impossible. 

So she waited until it was already done.

On her final day at the company, she drove to her parents’ house for dinner and told them the truth: she had quit, and the next day she would begin her new life as a full-time influencer. It is easy to admire that moment for its boldness, but what makes it more interesting is what sat beneath it. Linda did not leap recklessly. She had intentionally stayed in the corporate role long enough to build real work experience into her CV. She wanted a foundation. She wanted proof, for herself as much as for anyone else, that she could return to that world if she ever chose to. 

It’s a detail that says a lot about how she thinks: even in the middle of a life-changing pivot, she was building with long-term logic. That duality is part of what makes her story so compelling. Linda represents a newer kind of fashion influencer, one who understands aspiration, but also structure. One who can appreciate the dream while still speaking the language of strategy, sustainability and risk. 

Today, she says she has no regrets. 

Every day, she wakes up grateful for the life she now has: working with dream brands, travelling, creating, and even working side by side with her boyfriend, who has become an integral part of the engine behind her content. Their relationship is one of the quieter pillars of her success story. Long before the audience growth and brand deals, he was the person encouraging her to take the whole thing seriously. When she had zero followers on a brand-new account, he was the one telling her to imagine that this might be the account that changes her life.

Now, years later, they work together full-time. 

In an industry that often focuses on the face in front of the camera, Linda offers a reminder that success is often built in partnership. She is clear that her boyfriend’s support made a significant difference, not only emotionally but operationally. Content creation, especially at her scale, is not just about posing for photos. It is logistics, styling, planning, travel, steaming clothes, changing outfits, monitoring deliverables, handling timelines, tracking performance, and constantly thinking ahead. It is intimate work, repetitive work, invisible work. And for Linda, trust matters too much to hand that over lightly. 

She had considered hiring outside help, but the nature of the job, and the level of closeness it requires, made that feel difficult. Working with someone who knows her fully, wants the best for her, and has grown alongside the brand feels not just practical, but essential. 

Still, Linda is refreshingly honest about the psychological cost of building a career online. 

For all the glamour projected onto influencer life, she rejects the fantasy that a successful digital career equals a perfect existence. She speaks candidly about pressure, comparison, fluctuating engagement, and the mental toll of constantly being aware of numbers. Reach becomes addictive. Growth becomes measurable in ways that can distort reality. A post that takes hours can flop. Something thrown together in seconds can go viral. And when your work lives inside platforms that reward visibility while remaining impossible to fully predict, stability becomes emotional discipline.

What Linda has learned over time is that low engagement is not the same thing as failure. It does not mean irrelevance. It does not mean the work has lost value. It means the rhythm has changed, and that too is part of the cycle. That perspective feels particularly important in an industry where so many people quietly confuse performance metrics with self-worth. 

Start, she says. Just start. 

Her advice to aspiring creators reflects that same groundedness. Start, she says. Just start. Not once everything is perfect. Not once the content is polished. Not once the fear disappears. Improvement comes from publishing, from observing, from learning what resonates and what doesn’t. She speaks openly about how different her early content looks compared to what she produces now, but without shame. That evolution is the point. And while she encourages emerging creators to study what works, to gather inspiration, analyse what successful influencers are doing, and understand why certain content connects, she draws a sharp line at imitation. 

Originality is what lasts.

In Linda’s view, authenticity is not some soft, overused industry buzzword. It is the only thing that sustains relevance over time. Copying may help someone gain momentum in the beginning, but eventually audiences notice. The illusion breaks. Originality is what lasts.

That insistence on authenticity may be part of why Linda’s audience feels so connected to her. Her content may be fashion-first rather than diary-like, but there is still a strong sense of self running through it. She does not overshare. She is intentional about what remains private. She has built a career around style without turning her personal life into public property. 

That boundary becomes even more pronounced when she talks about the future. 

Linda can imagine motherhood one day, but not as content. She is unequivocal about not wanting to show her child online. In an era where family content is not only normalised but highly monetisable, her stance feels both protective and quietly radical. She speaks about creepy messages, the inability to control how images circulate, and the frightening implications of AI. One recent example made the issue painfully clear: a follower alerted her that one of her outfit photos had been used on a retailer’s site, altered with AI so that her body remained but her face had been changed entirely. It was, somehow, both her and not her. Disturbing, absurd, and a glimpse into the growing instability of image ownership in the creator economy. 

For Linda, that only reinforces the need for limits. 

She may one day share the experience of pregnancy, motherhood, or evolving priorities through fashion and personal perspective, but never at the expense of a child’s privacy. It’s a distinction that says a lot about the kind of creator she wants to be: present, but not consumable; visible, but not fully available.

That same long-term thinking extends into her ambitions beyond Instagram. While she fully intends to continue creating, she is already thinking about what comes next. Not because she is done with influencing, but because she understands the risk of building everything on a single platform - or worse, on the permanence of personal relevance. She talks about wanting to find something of her own eventually, something sustainable, something good enough to last, and importantly, something not overly dependent on her face.

It’s a striking perspective in a creator landscape increasingly built on personality-led brands. Linda is wary of launching something simply because influencer-to-founder has become the expected next move. If she builds, she wants it to be with rigour. With quality. With a sense of permanence. Not a vanity project, not a fast monetisation play, not just another brand entering an already crowded space because the timing seems commercially convenient.

That mindset, ambitious, but restrained; aspirational, but thoughtful; is what makes her feel especially relevant right now. 

Because Linda Schulz is not simply another beautiful woman with a polished wardrobe and an enviable life online. She is emblematic of something bigger: a generation of women building careers that don’t fit neatly into old definitions of legitimacy, but are no less real, strategic, or demanding because of it. She is proof that reinvention doesn’t always arrive as a dramatic plan. Sometimes it appears in the quiet after a thesis deadline, in the boredom of a gap between chapters, in the impulse to take a photo just because you have nothing else to do that day. 

And sometimes, that impulse becomes a career. A business. A new identity. 

An It-Girl, accidentally. 

But perhaps that is exactly why it works. 

Because Linda never chased the title. She built something more convincing instead: a life and career that feel genuinely her own. 

For our March issue, The Accidental It-Girl, there could be no more fitting cover star.

Written by: @itscamilleroe

Conversation with: @sophlleon & @itscamilleroe

Cover Star: @linda.sza

Published by @roemagazine