‘Look, I’ve done and said things I’m not proud of. I wore those nasty Von Dutch trucker caps. I once dressed up as sexy Pocahontas at a Halloween party at the Playboy Mansion. At eighteen I got drunk at a party and sang a lewd version of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice – I knew all the lyrics to his songs. Would I make the same decisions again if I knew then all the things I know now? Obviously not! None of this reflects who I am now.
Unfortunately, we’re not in the Jane Austen realm and Paris Hilton is the Lydia Bennett we can afford in this ramshackle 2023, but if the just-released (in the United States) diary confession Paris: The Memoir obviously not. However, “Pride and Prejudice” remains an interesting testimony to understanding how the inventor of the idea of the “influencer,” then turned into gold by entrepreneurs more savvy at social media than she was, has since Invention was sensationally suppressed.
Because before Kim Kardashian and her sisters and all the other young women who were able to broadcast their “ambitious” lives in real-time on social media, there was Paris Hilton. In the early 2000s, the heir to the hotel empire (42 years old today) formulated the influencer’s business model, or at least laid down the premise: to create a “personal brand” based on one’s own beauty, according to the lifestyle billionaire Los Angeles and private planes that Use internet to spread it exponentially around the world. But then there was no Facebook (it was born in 2004 to socialize Harvard students), there was no Twitter (2006), and most importantly, Instagram (2010).
It’s a bit as if Enzo Ferrari invented his racing cars before the invention of the wheel — the Kardashians who came after her did much better than her, using social media as a multiplier of one’s image — their selfies (it’s not a case , when then-director Stefano Tonchi photographed Barbara Kruger on the prophetic cover of American fashion magazine W Kardashian in 2010 with the “stripes” that said “I’m the center of everything/No, it’s you/No, it’s me») .
It’s interesting to read Hilton, 42-year-old mom, retired selfie baby today, because she truly created her brand with an anxious instinct for what works online, but also with an equally terrifying inability to move between trash and everything else to distinguish. Inability that fascinates because the aspiring Kardashians, born to a normally wealthy family in the San Fernando Valley, ie on the wrong side of the Hollywood hills, have harbored all the flaws of Paris Hilton, who was born into the burgeoning world of the Armenian sisters – blond, tall, thin, blue eyes, Beverly Hills, the name is already world famous.
And this is how “trashata” is told in “trashata” Paris. He writes about the bad relationship with Playboy: “I lived with two playmates, I knew Hugh Hefner, he asked me to pose for the magazine: he offered me more and more money, he said I might not be completely naked, only topless, or in lingerie.” Finally, Hefner featured a photo he found in an old test shoot, and the issue sold very well thanks to the Paris name, “because people expected to see me naked in the magazine . Result: My parents angry, I in tears ».
And he troubles us with the story of the relationship with the cute eighth grade teacher: “All the girls in my class were in love with this handsome young teacher who looked like an Abercrombie model: everyone adored him, including the nuns.”.