by Abby W. Schachter
“You have to remember that I was 20 years old. I don’t know anybody who can look back at who they were at 20 and say, ‘I’m the exact same person,” Nicole Richie told Ocean Drive magazine last year. “I have fond memories of that time. I was doing a show with my best friend and we didn’t really have to do much. We were just being ourselves–and playing it up for the cameras,” Richie explained of her and Paris Hilton’s unbelievable run as do-nothing-celebrities who got to be incredibly well-known for absolutely nothing.
The interesting thing these days is that while Hilton continues to party and not “do much,” Richie has been extremely busy. Richie got married to rock star Joel Madden–with whom she’s had two kids, runs two fashion lines, and is a celebrity judge on a reality competition called Fashion Star where she’s been praised for her level-headed mentoring. “You can’t just be an artist. At a certain point, you have to be a business woman as well,” Richie told a contestant in season one.
“I’ve always loved the possibility of being able to transform yourself through the way of dress,” Richie on why she developed her fashion lines House of Harlow 1969 and Winter Kate. And her personal trainer Tracey Anderson gushes about how she juggles it all: “’She is a mother of two, a wife, runs a fashion empire (that I am obsessed with), but she still finds time to dance!’ the fitness guru writes on her website.
Meanwhile, Hilton has to comment on another set of famous-for-no-reason celebutants in order to make the news, as when she claimed she and the Kardashians are still “friends” even after a funny (if slightly mean) advertisement for a Ford Figo which is only sold in South Asia, depicted Hilton as having bound and gagged three of the Kardashian girls and shoved them in the trunk of her car.
The question to ask is why is Richie still so much in the headlines whereas Hilton, who was the bigger commodity in their reality show days, is now on the D-list? Some have suggested that standards of beauty have changed since the early 2000s so that biracial Richie and the more curvaceous Kardashians can shine now where the bony blonde once ruled. Others argue that Richie, like the Kardashians, learned from Hilton who invented the genre of famous-for-famous-sake and improved on her brand.
For those of us who want celebrities to embrace happy families and better moral choices so that they can serve as good role models, Richie’s fame after choosing marriage and motherhood might seem like a good story. But don’t forget that for every Richie there are half-a-dozen Kardashians, who seem to work hardest at their fame rather than anything in their personal lives.
