Us Weekly fed a heretofore misunderstood appetite for boring but ostensibly off-the-cuff photos. Fuller more than doubled newsstand sales. Other outlets copied the strategy. Sites like TMZ and Perez Hilton emerged after 2004, and expanded the appetite. Suddenly we were seeing stars acting quite normal all the time.
Now it’s common knowledge that celebrities of any alphabetical designation, A to Z, would work with these photographers. They or their teams would call paps to “catch” them doing whatever they were doing. This “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality allowed some celebs to shape their images, whether they wanted to be seen as exciting and partying or wholesome and shopping for groceries. They could even do product placement, sometimes literally in Us Weekly’s “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” columns (“They find their shade at Sephora!” et cetera). They could be fully prepared to appear as “normal” as they needed to be.
Stars, then, were just like us, but better. Sure, they did all things prosaic, these types of images seemed to say, but they tended to have prepped for a photo with the new knowledge that their very existence was newsworthy. If they ate fries, they looked hot eating fries. If they took out the garbage, they were, like Channing Tatum this past weekend, in gold lamé Hammer pants. The tacit social contract was that if they were going to be so gorgeous and talented and wealthy, they should try to cut it with a down-home, relatable bit too. “Stars, they’re just like us” had transformed from a winky barb to a mandate.
That bubble popped in the years following 2011, when social media became de rigueur for all. It’s a tale told many times over. Stars were sharing their own photos and those competed with the professional ones. (Plus, California tightened the laws and penalties around paparazzi’s business, making it harder for them to get certain shots.) The peak of paparazzi began its downward slope, but its legacy, the relatability mandate, lived on.
Since the world went on lockdown, the paparazzi, like so many others, are in a bind. At one time in the not-too-distant past, they covered the celebrities preening on red carpets or on set, or they fought hard to get glamour shots of their subjects on yachts and at restaurants—that is, acting not at all like us. Now, there are no red carpets or galas to photograph, nor film sets, nor airport arrivals. There are probably celebrities on yachts somewhere, but getting to and from those areas is tricky. And so all we have now is the celebrity mundane.
Some celebrities—your Madonna or Ellen DeGeneres—are spending their time at home showing off their homes, and reaping the whirlwind for it. Many more are being revealed to us via the paparazzi, walking through neighborhoods. Sometimes they are going to the grocery store or leaving it with greens in hand. Sometimes they are biking. Sometimes, though not often, the celebrities are on those craven electric scooters. Sometimes they are Shia LaBeouf, and he is running. Seeing celebrities in their homes is a little unbearable, but following them on their walks in suburbia is almost nostalgic, like a copy of Us Weekly from 2002, only the subject is Kylie Jenner instead of Tom Cruise.
The illusion is still harder to buy into almost two decades later, though. Take the Kylie Jenner photo series from a little more than a week ago: These photos tell the story that even as stars are backed into a corner like you, they are absolutely not. The youngest Jenner-Kardashian daughter is famously always done, but in these photos, a few weeks into Los Angeles’s shelter-in-place orders, nature has tried to reclaim her. Her eyebrows are not expertly filled in and she isn’t wearing lash extensions. Her hair, unusually natural, is pulled back. A bag of Lays potato chips is tucked under her arm. The hoi polloi probably can’t afford her sweatsuit (it costs more than $1,500), but it’s one of those pieces that’s meant to look inexpensive. Without any of the other trappings that say “I’m rich,” they do. She looks like a normal 20-something. But that’s just it. Jenner almost never looks like that in public. On Instagram and at events, she usually resembles an cartoon character come to life. Looking at her smiling next to a large SUV, one can really see the things money and time can buy, and deduce that no, the stars are not like us at all.