The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Even Meghan can’t convince me we need ‘lifestyle’ gurus
Those anxiously awaiting the reappearance of Meghan and Harry will be reassured by the news from Netflix. Two years on from its disappointing documentaries about the couple, the streaming service is squeezing a bit more juice from its $100million Montecito lemons before the contract runs out. The Duke of Sussex will be presenting a programme about polo. After his immersion in Californian woo-woo, he must be grateful to be returning to the familiar world of hooves and mallets. The Duchess, meanwhile, will launch a new series celebrating “the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining, and friendship”.
Lifestyle, in other words. What else could it be? The announcement comes not long after Markle launched “American Riviera Orchard”, her absurdly named new brand. If its trademark applications are an indication, ARO – presumably to be pronounced like “arrow” – will soon be flogging us cookbooks, linens, jams, stationery, yoga mats and nut butters. Traditionally, a famous person would endorse something. Now, things are harnessed together to endorse the celebrity. Why buy boring old normal bird seed when you can have seed with Markle’s gleaming imprimatur?
If you are beautiful and famous, lifestyle is an alluring prospect. You get to run a shop where your aura, rather than any qualities in what you’re selling, lets you put the prices up. Markle is following a trail blazed by Martha Stewart and tarmacked by Gwyneth Paltrow. Before she redeemed herself by going to prison, Stewart was a kind of proto-tradwife, a blonde vision of wallpaper and muffins. Paltrow added some nonsense about vagina steaming, but it was fundamentally the same idea. Lifestyle is underpinned by the notion that these fragrant gurus do not just have something they want to sell you, but they are better than you in every way.
Lifestyle is uniquely suited to the Instagram age. As the writer Daisy Alioto said, it is “propped up by the unprecedented visibility of things on social media, making individual consumption more public than ever before”. You can only buy into
Meghan’s life if you can see her living it, which is made much easier by Insta posts and a Netflix series. Its genius is that it is unending: no matter how many yoga mats you buy, you will never look like Meghan, have her friends or her big house in California. What enriches her will make her customers poor and miserable, which isn’t much of a lifestyle.
The irony in Markle’s case is that she is, in a roundabout way, following in an old tradition. Royals have always led tastes in clothes, gardening, architecture and entertaining, even before “tablescaping” was a word. The original British lifestyle brand is the Royal Warrant, a way of knowing – and signalling – that you are drinking the same tea, eating the same shortbread or using the same trowel as the monarch. A coat of arms sufficed before TikTok. Launching herself as a lifestyle icon may be naff and commercial, but it might also be the most regal thing the Duchess of Sussex has done.
There is nothing like a good literary ding-dong. The American critic and novelist Lauren Oyler made her name with spiky criticism of other writers, including the bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney. In the past fortnight Oyler has found the shoe on the other foot. There have been scalding reviews for her new essay collection, in the
and The latter in particular was so harsh that it was passed around, samizdat-style, in WhatsApp groups.
I expect Oyler won’t mind. She says she is a “snob” and complains about the timidity of modern criticism. But it is a pleasure to be taken seriously, even by people who disagree with you. Both reviews were sharp but well reasoned and elegantly written. Besides, the relish with which readers have taken to them proves Oyler’s point: we need more literary beef, not less.