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10 Awkward Phase Pictures Of Famous People

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Before the microphones and the magazine covers, these icons looked like everybody else’s awkward cousin.

TheThings Celebrity built an entire countdown around a simple premise: dig up the school photos nobody was supposed to see. “10 School Pictures Of Famous People” pulls yearbook shots, class portraits and pre-fame snapshots of some of music, film and fashion’s biggest names, catching them mid-braces, mid-bowl-cut, or mid-whatever-that-haircut-was before stylists and glam teams entered the picture. The gap between then and now is the entire punchline.

• Eminem and Kanye West both appear in youth photos that read as nerdy and mousy — a far cry from the hardened, trendsetting images they’d later build careers around.
• Kate Moss is shown during her elementary school years, well before she became the defining face of 1990s high fashion.
• Kristen Stewart’s pre-teen photo captures an awkward phase nowhere close to her current movie-star polish.

The Rappers Nobody Would Have Bet On

Eminem’s public persona was built on grit — the bleached hair, the sneer, the Detroit chip on his shoulder that fueled albums like The Marshall Mathers LP. The school photo featured in the countdown shows none of that. It’s a younger, mousier kid who looks more like he’d get picked last in gym class than headline arenas. For readers who want the fuller arc of how that kid became one of hip-hop’s most scrutinized figures, the tragic details of Eminem’s life fill in a lot of the hard years between the yearbook and the Grammy stage.

Kanye West gets the same treatment. Long before he was reshaping pop production and dominating red carpets in tailored everything, the photo pulled for this countdown shows a nerdy-looking kid with nothing about him screaming future tastemaker. That contrast is exactly what makes these countdowns work — the persona we know is manufactured over years, not born fully formed.

Same bone structure, same eyes — but nothing else about that school photo says “future icon.”

Kate Moss Before The Runway

Kate Moss didn’t arrive on Earth in a Calvin Klein campaign. The elementary school photo in this countdown shows her years before she became the face that defined waif-era ’90s fashion and shared campaigns with names like Johnny Depp’s era of tabloid fame. It’s the same unremarkable look most kids had at that age — nothing about it hints at a modeling career that would reshape an entire decade’s beauty standard.

Kristen Stewart’s Pre-Fame Phase

Kristen Stewart’s entry lands the same punch. The pre-teen photo included in the countdown is awkward in the most ordinary way — nothing close to the composed, effortlessly cool image she’s cultivated on red carpets since Twilight turned her into one of the most photographed young actresses in the business. It’s the kind of photo most people would delete if it were their own.

The Enduring Appeal of Countdowns

Vintage yearbook and school-photo countdowns are a genre unto themselves online precisely because they flatten the gap between celebrity and everyone else. Outdated haircuts, awkward smiles, questionable fashion — every one of these figures had a version of it before publicists, stylists and glam teams got involved. It’s the same appeal that makes before-and-after transformation pieces like the transformation of Jason Momoa from childhood to 42 so watchable — the further the distance between the awkward photo and the finished product, the better the story.

Nobody’s tracking exact placements or view counts on this one, but the format doesn’t need a chart position to land — a bowl cut on a future Grammy winner does the work on its own.