"'Oh Nina, what a lot of parties.' (... masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies...)"
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
Paris Hilton by Sofia Coppola in Elle July 2013
We all seem to be drawn to star quality - the brightness and the ebullience that makes famous people so famous - like moths to a flame. We pore over the pages of gossip magazines and discuss celebrities with our friends with a very real sense of investment into their lives. Some more than others, yes, but it's something we have programmed into our DNA since we first tore out that Leonardo DiCaprio poster from Dolly magazine, or we played our 'mysterious girl' single so many times we wore it out. It's heartening - endearing even - to realise that even the loftiest of lofty idols is capable of being starstruck. Sofia Coppola, the girl crush to end all girl crushes, bought up in the foothills of Hollywood and never short on celebrity acquaintances, is as drawn to star quality as the rest of us. It's pretty clear from this spread on Paris Hilton in the July issue of Elle US. The socialite, dolled up in tasteful makeup, canoodling her dog beneath baroque chandeliers and mirrored bedheads, is a slightly toned-down version of herself, but still radiating that sense of celebrity and persona and money which is really what we talk about when we talk about fame.
Sofia understands - as F.Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh understood before her - that what draws us to stars (talent or no, Paris Hilton is certainly a star) is not actually the looks or the love but the lifestyle. When we see a celebrity we don't ever really see the movies they have been in or the model they're sleeping with but the parties, what a lot of parties, that they call meaningless but to us, mere humans, seem like everything. When people pose the question 'why is Kim Kardashian famous for doing nothing' they are slightly missing the point. What she 'does' is live a moneyed lifestyle that speaks of everything that money can bring. It doesn't have to be Kim K. Pick your poison. But I've seen enough Gossip Girl to know that now, more than ever, we are as closely aligned to the celebrity-obsessed, stargazing society of the 1920s as we ever were. We dream in technicolour, we look in repetition and we long for carelessness. All of Sofia's movies have, in some way or another, dealt with this central conceit of being young and beautiful and so very, very rich. Perhaps because she is part of that world she always treats her characters if not through a rose-coloured lens then at least without judgement. Don't ask me whether that's a good or a bad thing, I love her too much to be able to answer. But I know that I can't wait to see The Bling Ring because I, like every other warm-blooded human being just cannot get enough of that foul dust that floats in the wake of dreams.
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