In 2017 a mother in Orange County started an Instagram account for her seven-year-old identical twins. Within months the internet had handed Ava Marie and Leah Rose Clements a title nobody asked for — “the most beautiful twins in the world” — and a level of attention that most adults never experience.
They turned sixteen this July. Here’s where the story actually went.
How it started
[IMAGE 1 — phone screen showing a social media profile]
Ava and Leah were born on 7 July 2010 to Kevin Clements, a high school swim coach, and Jaqi Clements. They have an older brother, Chase, born two years earlier.
By Jaqi’s account, modeling wasn’t her idea — the girls asked to try it. They signed with agencies on their seventh birthday, and Jaqi opened an Instagram account the same day to share a handful of photos. The account did not stay small. Within a few years it had passed two million followers, and by January 2025 it sat above 2.1 million.
The work
[IMAGE 2 — children’s clothing brand campaign setup]
The campaigns arrived quickly and from serious names: American Girl, Janie and Jack, Claire’s, Skechers, Old Navy, Lands’ End, Nike, Disney, Mattel, Target. They appeared in magazine editorials and signed with agencies in Los Angeles. For a family with no industry background, it was an unusually fast ascent.
The part that changed everything
[IMAGE 3 — hospital corridor, quiet and out of focus]
In October 2019, Kevin — then 39, a working swim coach and by all accounts extremely fit — was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He needed a bone marrow transplant, which meant finding a match.
The family turned the Instagram account, built entirely on modeling photos, into a donor registration drive aimed at millions of followers. It’s the detail that reframes the whole story: the thing people criticized the family for building became the thing they used when it mattered most.
The criticism, and the answer to it
[IMAGE 4 — comment section on a phone screen]
Running a large public account for young children attracts a specific kind of criticism, and the Clements family has absorbed plenty of it — that the girls are too young to consent to this, that a parent-run account monetizing a child is a business with the child as the product.
Jaqi’s answer has been consistent: she says the girls chose modeling rather than having it chosen for them, and that if they ever want to stop, she’ll back that completely. It’s worth noting she had already pulled them out of an agency once, very early on, after deciding they weren’t ready.
Whether that settles the question is genuinely debatable — and it’s a debate that now covers a whole industry of family accounts, not one household in California.
Where they are now
[IMAGE 5 — clothing rack in a small business setting]
At sixteen, Ava and Leah are in high school and still working, but the interesting development is that they’ve moved from being hired to building something: a clothing brand of their own, Kaveah. That’s a meaningful shift — from being the product to running the business.
The title the internet gave them at seven was always a strange thing to hang on a child, and it says considerably more about the people handing it out than about the two kids who received it. Nine years on, the more interesting question isn’t how they look. It’s what they do with a platform they didn’t choose — and, in a couple of years, whether they keep it at all.
