Kendall Tries to Outdo Kim by Straddling Cara Delevingne in Love Magazine

It was only a matter of time before a fashion glossy featured British uber-model Cara Delevingne and her emerging American counterpart, Kendall Jenner, wrapped (and rapt) in a playful, passionate embrace.

So it was with detached amusement that I studied a teaser image from LOVE magazine’s February issue, which shows Jenner, 19, and 22-year-old Delevingne straddling one another with the kind of boundless affection typically reserved for mawkish romantic dramas (see Rachel McAdams attempting a similar move in The Notebook.) While Jenner’s face is buried in Delevingne’s neck, the photo shows the British model’s profile: head dipped back in apparent ecstasy; snub nose pointing skyward; lips brushing Jenner’s bare shoulder; distinguishing eyebrows photoshopped to look cartoonishly dark and thick.

Jenner, who recently landed an Estée Lauder campaign, Instagrammed the image on Tuesday afternoon to her 16 million followers (“All you need is LOVE #BestThingEver,” she wrote for the caption), several hours after LOVE magazine posted the photo on its account.

Delevingne regrammed the photo a few hours after Jenner, writing, “LOVE at first sight.” While Delevingne has been on the modeling scene for longer than Jenner and has a louder personality—impish, charismatic, and frequently irreverent—Jenner, who was described as “charming but terse, with a daffy sweetness if not necessarily the gift of gab” in a recent New York Times profile, has a substantially larger social media following. But together they are quite the pair, amassing nearly 25 million followers on Instagram alone.

Indeed, Jenner and Delevingne seem to be rather enamored of each other lately (in a platonic but all-consuming, post-adolescent way), posting pictures of themselves dressed as Super Mario brothers for Halloween, mugging in Minnie Mouse ears at Disney World, and “living on the edge” in Austria (they both walked the runway for Chanel’s Métiers D’Art show in Salzburg on Tuesday).

Jenner has since deleted the LOVE magazine photo from her account, perhaps because of the media’s fevered rush to declare it the magazine’s cover image, when it may in fact be nothing more than an outtake from the shoot.

If it is just an outtake, we can only hope the cover will be sufficiently sensational to compete with Kim Kardashian’s “internet-breaking” derriere.