Kylie Jenner’s Next Top Best Friend
I’m There is, somehow, a new season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Has time collapsed entirely? It feels like only a couple weeks ago I was awaiting the show’s narrative on the Jordyn Magdalene drama. It was all pretty anticlimactic. KUWTK always is, but sometimes Kourtney requests a matcha latte station for a an infant’s birthday party so it’s worth it for me. Last season, they were able to edit in plenty of foreshadowing and gave Jordyn more screen time than usual, making sure to include footage of the family complimenting and doting on her to neatly set up the twist of the knife at the end of the season.
In the meantime, an entire season of Revenge Body With Khloe Kardashian, a show that still exists, aired. On Instagram, recasting Kylie’s BFF has been in full swing.
Like many things that do not make sense to me, Paris Hilton did it first. I’m sure I’ve talked about Paris Hilton’s My New BFF because it’s all I ever talk about besides like clothing filling landfills and Sky Ferreira, but it’s Paris Hilton’s MTV show post Kim K and Nicole Richie were girls competed to be her best friend. Paris’ then-boyfriend, Benji Madden (who is now married to Cameron Diaz, occasionally guest judged. There were two seasons, neither of which resulted in a BFF.
Kylie’s doing it differently, but I still don’t get why she’s doing it so publicly at all. I guess that’s why I’m not a billionaire?
At first Stassie Baby, who you might remember from the Handmaid’s Tale birthday party, seemed to fill the role. Blessed be. They Instagrammed themselves in lots of matching outfits all of a sudden even though they had already been friends for years without seeming to feel the need to do so.
Stassie got a Missguided collection to go with the boost in her profile, but soon, headlines fixated on another potential BFF who also has a new Missguided collection!!!
Source: People
Source: Mirror
Yes, Sofia Richie, who is STILL dating Kourtney’s ex and the father of her children, Scott Disick.
Sofia (daughter of Lionel, sister of Nicole) was not embraced by the family at first. Probably in part because it didn’t seem like, despite her pedigree, she was any different from Scott’s barely legal string of paramours. I think of his trip to Cannes with Bella Thorne constantly. Sofia is freshly 21 and Scott is 36. She was 18 when they started dating. Kendall, who is not funny, even managed to crack a decent joke about Scott and his kids (including Sofia.)
There were other potential sources of conflict. Kourtney has long been rumored to have hooked up with Justin Bieber, who dated Sofia for a few months. When Scott and Sofia started dating, Kourt was with Younes Bendjima, a longtime pal of Richie’s, but that friendship seemed to frost over in the wake of their new romances. It seems like it might be healthy to look beyond inherited wealth and Hollywood mega churches for love, but what do I know.
But Sofia stuck around. She’s an age-appropriate friend for Kylie and it makes sense for Kris Jenner to fold her deeper into the empire to keep her eyes on Scott.
Of all the unruly Kardashian men, Scott is the favorite, perhaps in part because he’s never had much going on outside the family. He alternates between fucking up and feeling a desperate desire to prove his worth. It seems to me that Scott’s relationship to Kris Jenner is similar to that of Roman and Gerri on Sucession; he’s her slime puppy.
The Kardashians and the E! Network are currently keeping Scott busy with Flip It Like Disick, a home renovation show that he is qualified for in the sense that he is a person who has enough money to buy houses. Sofia makes appearances. Willa Ford, the singer of “I Wanna Be Bad” from the early aughts, is on the show as an interior designer who also provides some narrative tension as idk a shrill lady who doesn’t always let boys be boys. She blames 9/11 on her pop career’s failure to fully take off, but says it helped her find herself, and yeah, same.
Stassie and Sofia were both included in Kylie’s Kylie Skin promotional trip, which involved wearing lots of matching outfits to celebrate a product that’s probably just vanilla scented Cetaphil that they certainly aren’t using because they all go to cosmetic dermatologists. Sometimes they even dressed like the bottles!
You may note that these Kylie Skin dresses are made by Talentless, which is Scott Disick’s fashion line. SYNERGY!
I don’t know. The performance of it all just makes sad. Take some time to be emo! Losing friend might not fit into the Revenge Body Industrial Complex, but it’s important to mourn nonetheless. I certainly don’t think any good can come from a social circle comprised of good looking people whose agents are getting 10% whenever they promote your makeup line.
It’s too bad Kylie can’t call up Taylor Swift, who knows all too well how dicey extremely public friendships can be. Taylor discussed the fallout of the Welcome to the Stage era in a recent Guardian profile.
She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”
And now Karlie Kloss will never escape Swifties in her Instagram comments. I might feel bad for her but she hangs out with Jeff Bezos so nah!
This week, the big pseudo-celebrity BFF friend news is about Caroline Calloway and the previously unknown Natalie Beach. Basically, CC got super Instagram famous while she was studying abroad and wrote super long Insta captions (excuse me, #Adventuregrams) about being whimsical in Cambridge and whatever. But this essay from her former friend says she didn’t really write all the captions herself, or relied heavily on edits and guidance to help create a character, and bought tons of her followers and inflated her follower count with ads before the FTC was punishing that sort of thing.
She became a controversial figure when she got a huge book advance then just didn’t fucking write the book and said she decided to not write her book as a STAND against PATRIARCHY bc she didn’t want to be defined by her relationships with men even though that’s what her book proposal was about? Which actually, sure, why not. And then she sold tickets to workshops about “creativity” but didn’t actually plan out the logistics. She sold tix to events in Philly etc and then was like “oh nvm I’m not traveling I’m gonna do an event in NYC and you can take a train to a different state.” Natalie paints an unflattering but not unfamiliar portrait, casting herself as the best March to Caroline’s Jo. (Claire_Danes_Wig_On_Fire_I_Never_Saw_Myself_As_Much_Of_Anything.gif) It’s equal parts vicious and loving.
A lot of people didn’t even know who Caroline Calloway was before this and of the people who did and the people who didn’t, the reaction is mixed between people licking their chops and people tweeting and writing about how they cannot believe people are even BOTHERING to tweet and write about such nonsense which, k?
There are ways to be friends besides dressing up as a Summer Body Bundle and what I would call mutually assured destruction if it didn’t do wonders for follower counts. We’ve read Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney and sent our friends drafts of texts and Instagram captions and cried and paid too much to eat at diners late at night and thought it was special. This summary is adapted from a Caroline Calloway explainer I wrote in a group chat pls don’t share screenshots!!!
Public friendship can be cool! Charli XCX’s new album, Charli , out today is a gold star example of music and collaborative and Us vs. the World energy catapulting is to the stars!!!! As kissing people and ESPECIALLY famous people (if you’re not Kristen Stewart) becomes increasingly gross, I’m sure celebs will rely more and more on it as a branding strategy. I wonder how publicly falling out will evolve with it in new embarrassing ways.
-Trasha