She's With the Brand
Ever since she started crashing red carpets, Paris Hilton has been mocked for exploiting her family's name to gain fame. But this celebutante, who has been "famous for being famous" for years, is starting to get famous for making her own money.
Ms. Hilton stands to inherit $30 million of her family fortune, but in 2005 she made a reported $7 million on her own. The hotel heiress's name is emblazoned on everything from perfume to lip enhancement serum. She has appeared in movies, commercials, and fashion shows. For a measly $1 million fee, she will appear at a party near you.
It can be difficult to pin down exactly what Ms. Hilton does to earn her money, but she repeatedly refers to herself as a brand in interviews and seems to be capitalizing on her name more than any product that the name promotes. Like Starbucks putting its moniker on the recent film "Akeelah and the Bee," she branches out into products that seem incongruous with her reputation, but inexplicably sell.
Her current product, a self-titled pop album, debuts tomorrow. The previously released single, "Stars Are Blind," is a catchy summer tune, but much of the album is over-produced. Which makes some sense: She can afford to hire people to make her sound good, not just look good.
Ms. Hilton proves more than any other celebrity how thoroughly fame — or infamy — translates into marketability today. The mention of Ms. Hilton's name may provoke a strong negative reaction from many people — she was recently voted the most overrated celebrity by the Guinness Book of World Records — but she sells. And with profitability comes legitimacy.
Naomi Wolf has called Ms. Hilton "the perfect Bush-era heroine, because she's all style and no content." Second only to President Bush in Google hits on the Internet, she shares with him the backhanded gift of low expectations. When the public assumes you're a moron, it only takes a few stabs at competence to hurdle past presumption.
Ms. Hilton also shares with President Clinton an uncanny ability to spin bad publicity away from her and onto her detractors. Other celebrities have seen careers ended by leaked sex tapes, but hers was launched by one. She earned some sympathy for the exploitative nature of the video, but the tape earned millions of dollars, and while Ms. Hilton says she never saw a dime of the money, her career is still profiting from it.
It helps that the American public has the memory of an overused etch-a-sketch when it comes to scandal. Eventually, bad recognition transfers into simple name identification.
Now that she's got everyone's attention, Ms. Hilton is doing her best to distance herself from her sexual past. Her clothes more often cover certain body parts. She recently stated that she will abstain from sex for the next year, and now claims to have a sexual history of only two men.
In her 2005 book "Female Chauvinist Pigs," author Ariel Levy posited that Paris "is the perfect sexual celebrity for this moment, because our interest is in the appearance of sexiness, not the existence of sexual pleasure." And that is exactly the game Ms. Hilton plays. The heiress has borrowed the tanned, taut body and blond mane from the vocabulary of porn, but plays the sexual innocent at any opportunity. And despite her many rumored paramours, it seems clear that Ms. Hilton's only true love is the camera.
Says Camille Paglia: "She feels the Zeitgeist. She has that dancer's feel for the camera, for the observing eye, and she produces fantastic still pictures." Ashley Barrett, global PR director for Coty Prestige, has added, "She is very clever about giving the press what they want — provocative fashion, an ever-increasing list of projects, scandal. She gives great paparazzi."
At a time when many young artists have little or nothing to do with their career choices or artistic output, Ms. Hilton is the ideal conduit to the public. Her vacuity is what bothers people most about her, but it is also what makes her so marketable in today's world. Ms. Wolf has called her "an empty signifier … you can project absolutely anything on to her, which is the perfect situation for branding."
That's probably why Ms. Hilton increasingly goes out of her way to be as inoffensive as possible. Today taking a public stand on any issue ensures losing the affection of some group, but Ms. Hilton steers clear of having any major opinion. She rarely says anything negative, and somewhere she learned that most any situation can be deflected with the phrases like "that's hot," "you're gorgeous," or "sexy."
And she learned early that if she acts like what she wants to be, one day other people will believe her. As an adolescent, acting like a celebrity made her a commodity in tabloids.
"I think every decade has an iconic blonde — like Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana — and right now, I'm that icon," she recently told the Times of London.
Whereas other stars and celebrities may shy away from cameras and paparazzi, Ms. Hilton has always sought out photographers, made friends with them, and been ready to provide photos they can sell.
A former confidante, the actress Tara Reid, doesn't seem to grasp this principle. The party girl is filmed in various states of disarray all over the world. She often bemoans her fate, but the reason for her decline is simple: She hasn't made a strong argument for her presence on film, and she just doesn't look as good as she used to. But Paris always looks her best, because the camera is always watching. "The Simple Life" co-star Nicole Richie learned this lesson. Unfortunately, she had to sacrifice her friendship with Paris and most of her body fat to get it.
Other celebrities shy away from cameras, bemoan their craft, and mouth off on politics. But Paris is always ready with a wave and a smile. She provides the accessibility into her life that the public has begun to expect.
Ms. Hilton lives something that resembles her life on film everyday. She represents the domination of style over content and as long as the cameras keep focusing on her, it will increasingly become Paris Hilton's world that the rest of us live in.
