Of Linda Evangelista, Gwyneth Paltrow and the Neoliberal Age

The story goes that the beginning of the end for the supermodel was Linda Evangelista's much-cited quip about not getting "out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day," and this remark, which could so easily have been taken as a bit of self-mockery (I personally think this was how it was meant), instead drawing forth a backlash against the extremely high public profile of the elite of the modeling world.

I have never found this version of events persuasive, but it may say something that so many people think it is--especially as we hear far, far more snobbish utterances all the time without there being any such consequences, not only when they come from, for instance, unhinged plutocrats, but even from celebrities much more easily comparable with Linda Evangelista, like Gwyneth Paltrow, whose speaking anything not written for her by a screenwriter seems an unceasing stream of far worse snobberies leaving far less room to take them as jest (e.g. "I am who I am. I can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year" variety), as they do far worse than possibly misspeak (as seen in the appalling "Gwyneth Paltrow Accepts Your Apology" cover of the issue Town & Country that hit the magazine racks in May 2020 amid the pandemic's socially fraught early days, which so far as I can tell drew no flak whatsoever even as Gal Gadot and her collaborators suffered years of brutal criticism for their ill-conceived but essentially well-intentioned video rendition of "Imagine" at the same time).

Granted, some will point to a less forgiving attitude on the part of the press toward models than toward Oscar-winning actresses who also become "businesswomen" trafficking not in anything so "frivolous" as beauty but in "wellness"--or perhaps the way an ever more pervasive and aggressive identity politics plays into the media's responses, with such figures' supporters ever ready to react against anyone who criticizes anything a public figure does with a ferocious counterattack charging them with double standards, prejudice, bigotry against whatever demographic categor[ies] they are identified with (at once changing the subject and muddying the issue, usually very sanctimoniously and also usually very effectively). However, the more fundamental thing may be just how much more brazen the ultra-privileged have become about displaying their inegalitarianism in the last quarter of a century, and how very accommodating and defensive of that sentiment the operatives of that media have been, ever ready to not just excuse but exalt elite stupidity, self-satisfaction and disdain for the plebs and their feelings and opinions as they cheer for every punch they throw downward--and in the process unfailingly remind us that if some present the generality of "journalists" as tribunes of the people they are instead courtiers who strive to be more royalist than the king.