POWER PACKS
Why celebrities are ganging up
HOW DOES a celebrity know they have made it? When they get their first sixfigure salary? When their rabbit has its own fan club? When Karl Lagerfeld calls them fat, or boring, or plain?
No, the ultimate sign of success in modern Hollywood is when another celebrity wants to join you on holiday and post pictures on Twitter.
Last week Jennifer Lawrence, the Oscar-winning star of Silver Linings Playbook and The Hunger Games series, joined the American stand-up comedian Amy Schumer and a group of her schoolfriends on holiday.
Like normal people, they took photographs. Unlike normal people, they experienced no rain and no boredom, and nobody looked as if they really wanted to be somewhere (anywhere) else.
In one picture, Lawrence is driving a jet ski while Schumer clings on to her, open-mouthed, as dazzled as anyone that this is actually happening. In another, the lithe actress is perched on top of a heap of normal-sized women.
Twitter buzzed and celebrity magazines slathered. In the words of the entertainment website E! ‘‘millions of years ago, prophets foretold of a day when two queens would join together and create a friendship so powerful, it would end all the suffering in the world. That day is today’’.
Whether you agree probably depends on how much time you spend reading E! entertainment stories.
Certainly Lawrence, 24, is Hollywood’s sweetheart for the millennial generation – goofy, talented and big box office – while the 34-year-old Schumer, who is less well known, is a star ascending.
Schumer combines the comic charm of Lucille Ball with a filthiness that would make a trucker blush. Her YouTube clips have millions of views, she made Time magazine’s list of the most influential people in Hollywood and she has written and starred in Trainwreck, a new film directed by the king of goofball comedy, Judd Apatow, who co-produced Bridesmaids.
Alone each of these women is big, but together they are a totemic force of funny, feminist cool.
Celebrities behave differently: they start nonsensical lifestyle blogs and wear tight leather trousers without any pants (three cheers for Lenny Kravitz). But it is only recently that they have started to move in herds, like extremely glossy cows with perfect teeth.
Social media have given rise to the celebrity power pack: groups of friends who are carefully selected across industries, age groups and countries. Usually female, these gangs go on holidays and share clothes, jokes and, apparently, men. Then they post the pictures on Instagram.
In one photograph we see Taylor Swift, the 25-year-old singersongwriter who has sold 40 million albums, and model Karlie Kloss, 23, on a road trip to Big Sur, California. It is Thelma and Louise without frowning or death. In another, we see Cara Delevingne with her fellow model and television personality Kendall Jenner.
The benefit of this behaviour is obvious: celebrities – like zoo animals – are more interesting to watch when there is more than one of them. This is well understood by Kris Jenner, the mother of Kim Kardashian and Kendall and the patron saint of ‘‘Why am I watching this?’’ TV.
She realised long ago that while one Kardashian might lurk at the bottom of a celebrity news site, seven Kardashians – each with their own social media profile – are an entertainment goldmine. Kim pouting at her iPhone is not fun, but her sister Khloe hitting her over the head with a handbag is.
If you do not have a pack of actual sisters, or they are not interesting, thin or glossy enough, the next best thing is to create a pack that is – which is exactly what is happening.
To men, Taylor Swift is a lyrical praying mantis – waiting to date and destroy you. If you are a twentysomething woman with talent and a media profile, she wants you in her ‘‘Swift squad’’. The minute you land your first Vogue cover, Swift will find you, colour co-ordinate you and make you leap around as though you are modelling for the Boden catalogue. Taylor’s squad, her celebrity posse, is impressive. It includes Lena Dunham, the creator of Girls, New Zealand singer Lorde and the model Gigi Hadid.
They have been seen holidaying on the Californian island of Catalina and hosting dinner parties that are just like yours or mine, except no one eats too much pork crackling and has to lie down.
Their mascots are Swift’s cats Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey. Initiation rituals are unclear but I like to imagine they involve a blindfold, a guitar and Ed Sheeran covered in honey.
In an interview with Vanity Fair last week, Swift referred to her clique as ‘‘the Sisterhood’’ and admitted that they would not think twice about sharing men. And why should they when operating as a ‘‘sisterhood’’ allows their fan bases to cross-pollinate and grow.
Taylor Swift fans – she has 41.1 million followers on Instagram alone – are more likely to listen to Lorde once they have seen the two sharing a smoothie in LA. It is direct marketing, Hollywood style.
These packs have become ubiquitous. There is a model crew: Delevingne, Jenner, Suki Waterhouse and Georgia May Jagger. There is a British crew: television presenter Alexa Chung, model Pixie Geldof, DJ Nick Grimshaw and designer Henry Holland.
There are also the grand dames, the ones who were not in nappies in the Nineties: the actresses Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore, smiling coyly over a mountain of quinoa.
One assumes they know some normal people too, but somehow these always seem to be just out of shot. In the whirlwind of social media, your online tribe can be as significant as the performance of your latest film or album, a sign of your desirability and star ranking.
Even more crucially they are a form of support, an AA meeting and lobby group rolled into one. They are, if you like, a virtual brassiere. Because what these women share – other than fans – is that their industries remain dominated by men.
Music industry bosses still push the wearying notion that for young female artists to sell records they need to take off their clothes and grind the nearest lamppost.
In Hollywood, top-earning actresses take home about 40 per cent of the salaries of their male co-stars. Jennifer Lawrence was paid less than the men in American Hustle despite having won an Oscar the previous year.
This is exactly the sort of gender disparity that drives the comedy of women such as Dunham and Schumer.
Fierce, funny and ready to talk about sexism, they provoke a remarkable response. A good social media pack can help to make that happen.
Earlier this year Witherspoon started the hashtag #AskHerMore to encourage entertainment journalists to ask women about something other than their dresses. This drew support from Dunham and a host of others.
The tactic has its roots in movements such as the Everyday Sexism Project, a website founded in Britain that documents examples of sexist behaviour and is used by women in other industries as well.
When the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt resigned from University College London earlier this year after making remarks at a conference about ‘‘my trouble with girls’’, female scientists responded with the hashtag #distractinglysexy – posting photos of themselves in goggles and lab coats.
If a good power pack can boost business, bring commercial success and promote equality, what does it matter if you have slept with the same boy?
As Swift put it: ‘‘We even have girls in our group who have dated the same people. It’s almost like the sisterhood has such a higher place on the list of priorities for us.
‘‘It’s so much more important than some guy that it didn’t work out with.
‘‘When you’ve got this group of girls who need each other as much as we need each other, in this climate, when it’s so hard for women to be understood and portrayed the right way in the media . . . now more than ever we need to be good and kind to each other and not judge each other.’’
So put on that polka-dot bikini and say cheese.
‘Millions of years ago, prophets foretold of a day when two queens would join together and create a friendship so powerful, it would end all the suffering in the world. That day is today.’
E! entertainment website