IN SEARCH OF PERFECTION: CELEBRITY CULTURE, WHAT WE EAT AND THE WAY WE LIVE

Illustration: Gemma Wilson

In the last two decades or so the concept of celebrity has been undergoing some radical changes. As the cliché goes, in today’s world one no longer needs talent in order to become famous — just look at the Kardashians! — as the internet has finally brought along Andy Warhol’s prophecy: In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes. Leaving behind these stale and cynical remarks in regard to the state of our culture, certain things have undeniably changed. Where celebrity status used to, mostly, be based on one clear trait or talent, the lines have blurred. The average celebrity today seems to take on a myriad of jobs. Consider, for example, Rihanna, who is, among other things, a singer, an actress and a business woman with perfume, makeup, fashion and marijuana brands. And while fandom has always included the will to know more about the personal life of one’s favourite celebrity — no one just liked Marilyn Monroe for her skillful acting — celebrities now seem more and more willing to give us little peeks into their private worlds, often paired with ‘lifestyle advice’. YouTube is filled with videos of celebrities showing their daily makeup routines. Ricky Martin and his husband show the team of Architectural Digest, and us, their home. And, as of more recently, models and other famous people share in videos what they eat in a day.

Jennifer Garner and Ina Garten out for some burgers. (via Instagram @ina_garten)

While most of these lifestyle segments have merely become a part of the publicity machine surrounding celebrities doing their ‘real job’, some of them take it to a new level, with even fewer raising these enterprises to the main stage of their careers. In the food department of lifestyle advice, Instagram shows that actress Jennifer Garner has become close friends with the Barefoot Contessa’s Ina Garten. Under the hashtag #pretendcookingshow she has started filming cooking videos in her own kitchen in an attempt to share what she and her family eat — under no pretense, as the hashtag suggests, that she is a professional chef. On the Barefoot Contessa’s Thanksgiving episode last year, however, Garner went on to share her favourite Thanksgiving dish, alongside other guests such as acclaimed food writer Nigella Lawson. Martha Stewart then also invited Garner onto her show and this year she released her own line of cold-pressed, organic baby food: Pretending seems to be less and less a part of the plan.

Is Gwyneth Paltrow wrong about everything?

Gwyneth Paltrow on Netflix’s The Goop Lab. (via Netflix)

The most famous of all celebrity gurus, however, still plays a whole different ball game. As early as 2008 actress Gwyneth Paltrow started giving lifestyle advice in a newsletter under the name Goop, which has since blown up to become a huge brand that includes a successful website, an online shop, print magazine, cookbooks, a podcast and a brand new Netflix series. However, Paltrow has not only become tremendously popular throughout the years, but also increasingly hated. In a tone akin to a 1990s Martha Stewart, she seems to hit a nerve in some by setting bars impossible to reach for the most of us. On top of that, she has been criticized for perpetuating pseudoscientific thinking: Giving health advice that is in no way rooted in science and in some cases even considered dangerous. Paltrow has in many ways become the stereotypical example of modern celebrity guruism, leading the way in all things from spiritualism to healthy nutrition. She officially claimed this title when public health professor Timothy Caulfield published his 2015 book Is Gwyneth Paltrow wrong about everything? Even with all this hate coming her way, Goop is flourishing, and apart from some small roles here and there, she seems to have mostly put her acting career on hold.

“Paltrow has in many ways become the stereotypical example of modern celebrity guruism, leading the way in all things from spiritualism to healthy nutrition.”

As with everything, the kind of lifestyle advice given by, in this case, celebrities, says a lot about the times we live in. While Miley Cyrus’ marijuana propagation in the mid-2010s might have had more personal than cultural reasons, her denunciation of gluten would have been unthinkable even ten years earlier. She wasn’t the only celebrity warning about the dangers of a mostly harmless protein that is only proven to be hazardous for the one percent of people suffering from celiac disease, as well as a potential small percentage suffering from gluten sensitive enteropathy. Oprah has spoken about the health benefits of scrapping the protein from your diet, while Gwyneth Paltrow in a 2019 New York Times interview hinted that her 2015 gluten-free cookbook was what started the trend. While she is powerful, this seems to be a slight overestimation: The list of celebrities propagating the diet is long. Among others, Kourtney Kardashian, Jessica Alba, Katy Perry, Victoria Beckham, Lady Gaga, Ryan Phillippe, Zooey Deschanel, Billy Bob Thornton and Rachel Weisz have all spoken publicly about the health benefits of gluten-free diets.

Illustration: Gemma Wilson

Selling dreams

While there is, of course, other sources of information that influence our nutritional choices, such as public health campaigns, doctor’s advice and simply our own tastes, the recent shift of gluten-free diets from the periphery into mainstream food culture seems to largely be due to its popularisation by celebrities and the media. As it turns out, celebrities measurably change the way we live. After Angelina Jolie wrote an article for the New York Times in 2013, declaring that she had undergone a preventive double mastectomy to lower her risks of getting breast cancer, an immediate rise in genetic testing and mastectomies was detected. On a darker note, the so-called Werther Effect describes how highly publicised (celebrity) suicides lead to temporary peaks in suicide numbers: Marilyn Monroe’s death was followed by a 200 percent increase of suicides in Los Angeles the following month. Images of celebrities smoking lead to increases in cigarette sales. All of this makes sense; in fact, there seems to be a kind of inherent logic in the idea that we like to take advice from people we admire. After all, Paltrow is rich, famous, seemingly happy and looks amazing. If following her advice could mean raising our own chances at having a life like hers, or at least outwardly making our life look more like hers, why not give it a try? Despite the widespread idea that this ‘age of celebrity culture’ is something thoroughly modern, with former U.S. president Barack Obama even speaking of “a change in culture” that causes young people to pinpoint the Kardashian-West lifestyle as the ultimate mark of success, this shift might have more to do with the accessibility the internet and other modern media have brought along than with a real change in our search for inspiration and example. Or, to put it differently, for as long as celebrities have existed, there have been people looking at their way of life for inspiration, and there have been celebrities willing to share (glorified) details of their existence with the public. Celebrities have always sold the dream of a life free of our insecurities.

Joan Crawford, hostess with the mostest

A bottle of Pepsi was never far out of reach in Joan’s later years.

Case in hand here is a book titled My Way of Life, published in 1971 and written by then 67-year-old actress Joan Crawford. The book is in equal parts memoir and self-help book, filled to the brim with mind-dazzling advice on how to live that is equally out of touch as the Kardashians’, as it is a sign of its time. Advising on all aspects of a woman’s life, from balancing a successful career with her actual job — keeping her husband happy —, to tips for packing suitcases and home decoration, the chapter on entertaining is perhaps most interesting. In the social media age the questionable term ‘food fascism’ is thrown around by those opposed to the propagation of dogmatic modern dietary hypes, ranging from paleo diets to juice cleanses and raw eating. However, Joan Crawford is here to prove that long before any of these ideas rolled around, another kind of food dogmatism was very much present. While there is some small references to dieting in the book, the point here is much less about healthy living than it is about keeping up appearances — although one could very well argue that in many cases, today’s restrictive diet trends have more to do with outward appearance than inner health, too. Still, Joan takes a different approach. Throwing dinner parties is an important part of Joan’s strategy for women to find something to take pride in and to make a name for themselves. In order to gain or keep a reputation, the hostess can benefit from rehearsing, and by that Joan means “rehearsing herself”: knowing what to say to each single guest, how to introduce them to each other, and so on. She compares this practice to comedian Red Skelton rehearsing his routines, which makes sense considering the fact that in Joan’s book, being a good hostess is every woman’s role of her life. As the star of the show, she has earned some special privileges: “When all the other ladies wear short skirts, she can look smashing in a long one, or in hostess pajamas.”

““Joan not only gives a party, she goes to it!””

Of course, Joan herself has mastered the art of entertaining so miraculously, that when her friend is in town she will, without shedding so much as a drop of sweat, host dinner parties for eighteen in her name, for ten nights in a row. Immediately following this brag she has to admit that, apart from the cook, there were two butlers and four maids actually running this operation. This might explain why “Noel Coward once said: ‘Joan not only gives a party, she goes to it!’” And this is important, because Joan is always acutely uncomfortable when she sees her “hostess running off to the kitchen or fretting so about her arrangements that she hasn’t time to chat with her guests.” Exactly how this translates to workable advice for those who are not a part of the rich and famous remains unquestioned. A brief return to earth — “it doesn’t necessarily take money (though that helps) to have successful parties” — is immediately followed by the imperative that “there should be a bartender for the first part of your party.” It’s obvious that Joan’s advice is rooted in a time in which women were not supposed to be a whole lot more than a pretty thing on a man’s side that couldn’t possibly be seen sweating and stressing over a roast in the oven. This becomes even more apparent in her advice for young brides inviting their husbands’ bosses over: “Don’t talk too much, and above all, don’t drink too much. That’s the evening to sip a little vermouth or white wine before dinner, even if the boss and his wife have three martinis.” (For more of Joan’s advice click here.)

The glamour of good health

Joan Crawford making sure the table setting is spick and span.

Ridiculous as this advice might sound today, one could argue that it isn’t all that different from the role Gwyneth Paltrow is trying to play in the twenty-tens. We live in a world obsessed with health and the idea that it is always a product of your own doing. Most of our lives center around the idea of self-fulfillment and investment in our mental and physical well-being. In this bubble Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop can exist and flourish. She gives hands-on advice that makes us feel reassured in navigating this world, in which not only the pride of good health and looks, but also the shame of sickness lands on our very shoulders. God knows Joan Crawford’s concern was not health: As the wife of Pepsi-Cola’s CEO Alfred Steele, there is very few pictures of Crawford in later life in which she is not sipping from a bottle of Pepsi. Nevertheless, her ideas of a woman’s role are to an equal extent exaggerations of ideas circulating in society at the time. Crawford’s book must be understood in light of the idea of a kind of domestic divinity as the ultimate form of self-realisation for women. Paltrow’s work can only be interpreted as part of a bigger discourse of mental and physical health as capital that needs to be invested in. Both women understand the great extent to which the food we eat and serve, in all its cultural and economic aspects, helps us forge identity. And both women strive for an outward image of perfection, and give advice to their fans on how to achieve that for themselves. Crawford famously said: “I never leave the house unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.” To some extent her ideals of glamour and artifice have made place for dreams of spiritualism and health consciousness — or at least an outward image of it.

Text: Yannic Moeken
Illustrations: Gemma Wilson

Sources:

Michele R. Berman: Can a gluten-free diet make you thinner? Miley Cyrus thinks so
Timothy Caulfield: Is Gwyneth Paltrow wrong about everything? When celebrity culture and science clash. Published by Penguin Random House, 2015
David Gelles: Gwyneth Paltrow is all business
Unknown: President Obama: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s wealth isn’t a realistic mark of success