Influencer
The Atanga Twins Are Betting Luxury Fashion Wants Uniqueness, Not Reach
Curtis and Carlsen Atanga did not choose fashion first. Their mother did, having a driver take them to new locations after school so the twins could change outfits in the back seat and pose for pictures neither of them asked to have taken. Today, Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Christian Louboutin are the ones doing the asking.
Curtis and Carlsen are identical twin fashion creators and models known as the “Atanga Twins,” represented by Ford Models Digital and named among the youngest honorees on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Art & Style Class of 2026. Born in Galveston, Texas, and raised between Cameroon, Paris, Austin, and Dallas, they relocated to New York City five months ago chasing what Curtis calls “the dream.”
Their brand résumé includes work with Jean Paul Gaultier, Dior, Christian Louboutin, Meta, Ray-Ban, Vans, Puma, Starbucks, and Poizon, along with a runway walk for LUAR during New York Fashion Week. Both twins are also college students, on track to finish bachelor’s degrees in cybersecurity on top of an associate’s degree in computer science completed two years earlier. Their signature content series, “Let’s Dance,” has become the format most identified with the brand.
On why houses with unlimited reach at their disposal choose two creators with a comparatively modest following, the answer isn’t about numbers. “I always believe you shouldn’t just wait for things to come to you,” Carlsen says. “You have to go fetch for it.”
Why Being Identical Doesn’t Mean Being Interchangeable
Carlsen has a direct answer for what a brand like Dior or Jean Paul Gaultier is actually buying from two creators without the reach of a typical lifestyle influencer. “We bring something unique,” he says. “Twins.”
Curtis expands on the distinction. “Identical twins that do love to be around each other,” he says, noting that some twin duos keep more distance from one another publicly. “We don’t dress alike, from head to toe. We complement each other. That uniqueness [is] just something you cannot beat.” He adds, “This uniqueness drives sales. That’s why they will keep coming.”
That pitch matters more given the numbers involved. The twins’ following on TikTok and Instagram is modest against typical lifestyle-influencer partners for the same brands.
Forced Into Fashion, Then Choosing It For Themselves
Neither twin came to fashion naturally. “This may come as a shock, because people always think we’re so fashion coded, like we’re born with Louis Vuitton,” Curtis says. “I was not even interested in fashion. Neither [was I interested in] social media, at all.”
The push came from their mother. “She was, like, sit down, smile. She would dress us alike, take the pictures,” Curtis recalls. “Every day after school we’d hop in the car, the driver would take us to different locations, and we’d change in the car and take pictures everywhere.” One photo, he remembers, drew around a hundred likes. “I’m like, oh, my gosh, I’m famous,” he says.
Carlsen ties the early discomfort to environment. “People are very close-minded, not so open-minded,” he says of growing up in Cameroon. “It was a little bit restricted.” The family’s move to France, he says, introduced different styles and approaches to accessorizing that widened his sense of what fashion could be.
What actually converted the habit into a career wasn’t the childhood photoshoots. It was a viral series they built themselves. “For the longest time, it was just posting on social media. It wasn’t anything serious,” Curtis says. “But when we did our viral series, right now it’s called ‘Let’s Dance,’ like ‘Let’s Dance’ with three e’s at the end. It literally took off. It went super viral, 10 million views and everything. I was like, oh my gosh, people do love our style.”
Carlsen calls it “one of the few content formats that were able to truly express our fashion sense,” built on a specific critique of the industry they were entering. “Being in the high fashion industry, we realized everyone is so serious,” Curtis says. “There’s no fun. So we’re like, let’s bring something fun.”
Growing Up In Fast Forward
Fame arrived alongside adulthood, compressed. “Honestly, I don’t care about that. But I wouldn’t lie,” Carlsen says of losing a typical college experience. “The fact is, it’s a reality. We have to grow up a little bit faster because we’re just twenty.”
Curtis points to the pace of exposure rather than the workload as the harder adjustment. At nineteen, he says, they were suddenly in rooms with people like Kim Kardashian, an acceleration that “makes you grow up so fast” while costing them, in his words, “your college life.”
The logistics are unglamorous in a way that undercuts the polish of the finished content. This past summer alone meant five courses layered on top of Milan and Paris fashion weeks. “[We’ll be] in the Uber going to the show with our laptop doing assignments,” Curtis says. “I’m like, ‘oh my gosh, we have 20 more minutes.’ It’s a whole movie, literally.”
The Brand That Posted Without Asking
Creative control is not incidental to how the twins work. Carlsen writes the scripts, Curtis edits, and much of the photography is self-shot. “I’m gonna pull out my tripod and take my content,” Curtis says. “When you know the right angles, it’s easy.”
That instinct carries into negotiations. “If you’re coming to us with a specific idea and I can’t alter it at all… I’d love to have a say. Can we modify this?” Carlsen says. Curtis is blunter about why: “Most of the time the creative [briefs] are so ‘addy.’ It’s not organic. People don’t really connect with that.” The same instinct led them to build an unsolicited campaign concept for Puma with no brief and no budget. The brand reached out afterward. “We work with them,” Carlsen says. “It’s been great,” Curtis adds.
Not every unsolicited attention ends that way. Curtis describes an unnamed brand that was mired in what he calls political and moral controversy when it approached the twins after a photo they made using its product went viral. “They wrote to us: ‘I would love to do something with you guys.’ I didn’t respond. I don’t want something in the past,” he says. The brand later reached their agency instead, and at an event afterward, Curtis learned what happened next from his own friends. “My friends come to us like, ‘You guys see the post?’ This brand, without our permission, took our pictures and posted [them] on the main page.” The twins asked for it to come down immediately. “They didn’t respond to us for like sixteen hours,” he says. “Ever since, I’ve never worked with this brand.”
Two People, Not One Contract
Working as a pair creates a negotiating problem the twins say brands routinely get wrong. “At the end of the day, it’s two individual people, on two different minds, from two different beings,” Curtis says.
He points to another duo, Young Emperors, who ran into the same issue. “They had the same deal,” he says. “If you don’t tell your management, brands may want to pay you as one creator.” His advice: “You always have to make sure you negotiate that. If you’re starting a page and it’s a deal for a trio, when you’re negotiating your deals, make sure you’re negotiating as three different people.”
Carlsen sees a related, deeper misread: brands assuming they understand a creator’s audience better than the creator does. “A lot of whoever is running the campaigns have a very specific idea of how they think they understand the creator’s audience, but it’s impossible, because you are not the creator,” he says. “I know what my audience likes most. I wish these brands trusted the creators coming to them for partnership more.” He argues, in his own words, that creators simply know their own audience far better than a brand does.
Being the Reference Point
The next move is a product of their own. Carlis, an accessories line combining both their names, has been eighteen months in development and is set to launch in two colorways, first across Instagram and TikTok, with YouTube reserved for behind-the-scenes footage of what Curtis calls “being a brand owner.”
It’s an extension of the argument the twins have been making since before they had a product to sell: that reach can be rented, but a distinct point of view has to be built. Curtis measures the ambition against names he considers the current standard.
“The Creator Economy is going to explode even more, because there’s a boom right now with [Substack] and the streamers,” he says. “For the Atanga Twins, I want people to reference us as the fashion identity. When you think about a fashion figure, you think about Wisdom [Kaye], you think about Zendaya. In five years, when you think about the Atanga Twins, you think of fashion icons.”
Photo source: ICON PR
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Check Out Our Podcast
