0
View
comments
It isn't just jobs that have suffered in this recession: certain high-profile partnerships suddenly seem out of step with the new era of austerity. No wonder they've gone into liquidation...
Something strange is happening on Planet Celebrity. Despite their seemingly charmed existence, the rich and famous have to live with the global financial crisis just like the rest of us. All of a sudden the recession is hitting them – hard. And guess what? We're looking at the first round of redundancies.
It's a bit like banking. The first to go are the ones who didn't keep their heads beneath the parapet, who trumpeted their fabulous successes without shoring up their defences. So in celeb-land the first casualties are those couples who built their brands around their relationship during the boom times.
Three high-profile pairs have recently announced that they're splitting: Katie Price and Peter Andre, footballer Frank Lampard and his girlfriend Elen Rives, and interiors guru Kelly Hoppen and celebrity hairdresser Nicky Clarke. These were all relationships forged during the glory days of champagne-swilling, pre-recessional excess. Come the crunch, their stock has gone bust.
Frank Lampard and Elen Rives have called time on each other
Frank Lampard and his partner of seven years Elen Rives have said that their relationship came under pressure after his mother died suddenly from pneumonia last year.
They have agreed to an amicable split and will live close to each other so that he can see their two children.
Although they never married, Elen has been told she can expect about £10million of his £25million fortune – provided she signs a confidentiality agreement.
Even more ridiculous sums of money are likely to be involved in Katie and Peter's split, the reasons for which are still hazy.
She claims he is the love of her life (although she also says it is important to 'move on', as she made clear by immediately le aving for the Maldives after the announcement of the break-up).
He claims that he can no longer cope with her binge-drinking and partying – and accused her of cheating on him.
Kelly and Nicky announced they were parting in April after a relationship of two years.
With their lookalike afghan tresses, and commensurate fortunes, they were dubbed one of the most stellar matches of the London social scene when they first got together. Their his-and-hers combo of big smiles and bigger hair was a celebration of glamour and glitz, and fêted on the pages of Hello!. While the Moët was still flowing, it worked. Now those days are gone.
Is it a coincidence that these three couples should split up around the same time? Almost certainly. But it's still a rather interesting one.
At a time when people are starting to lose their patience with celebrities and are devoting their time to worrying about rather more important things, it seems tell ing that these three splits represent the demise of three types of modern celebrity that suddenly look outdated and, frankly, rather odd.
Katie and Peter, for example, represent the ultimate triumph of the 'famous for being famous' phenomenon.
Perhaps no celebrity couple will ever achieve this again on the level that they have enjoyed. (Indeed, in years to come, surely we will look back on their wedding pictures and ask ourselves, 'What was all that about?') Their relationship has been captured on camera since the moment they met – when both their careers were on the wane – deep in the celebrity jungle in 2004.
Both have since reinvented themselves and have built their new brand – and their relationship – around the idea of being brash, loud and completely open about every aspect of their lives. This was totally in tune with the good times. But in a downturn? You suddenly see the tasteless exhibitionism for exactly what i t is.
Kelly Hoppen and Nicky Clarke are busy untangling their relationship
Meanwhile Kelly and Nicky's brand as a couple also thrived during the party era. Both represented conspicuous consumption. He was the king of the £450 A-list haircut, she was the queen of the £300,000 home makeover.
And as for Elen and Frank, they were key figures during the Wag era, which was all about being seen to be more glamorous, wealthy and glossy than the next person. Not a good look for 2009.
So not only have these celebrities' relationships literally become redundant for them, but our interest in them is also plummeting. Their currency has nose-dived.
After the Katie-and-Peter saga and the hundreds of hours of airtime devoted to the highs and lows of a relationship that constantly seemed to totter on the verge of collapse anyway, it's hard to believe in any self-publicising celebrity partnership any more.
There's also a sense of fatigue and a creeping realisation that maybe there is something just a tiny bit crass in wallowing in all this excess.
Isn't there a danger that everyone is getting bored with this glitzy silliness now that it feels so out of step with the times? As Marina Hyde writes in her book Celebrity: 'The celebrity situation is out of control and we need to start looking for an exit strategy. Entertainers have vastly exceeded their mandate.'
Our disenchantment with celebrity couples – along with bankers and estate agents who are having such a torrid time in this recession – has been brewing for a while. For most of the mid-noughties, we were obsessed with the glitz and gloss of all these nonsensical D-listers' lives.
U.S. gossip watcher Rebecca Traister described the dri p-drip of celebrity witterings as an international 'soap operatic narrative' with plot twists, cliffhangers and a constant loop of pointless but, crucially, 'new' information: 'They're adding an extra room to the house! She wasn't drinking on a recent vacation! He didn't thank her in his acceptance speech!
'But,' she adds, 'at some point, the fizziness of the whole experience began to go a little flat.' U.S. gossip queen Liz Smith last year proclaimed that 'we are being dished up loads of stuff about people we have never heard of and don't care about'.
About a year ago, Liz says, the mood started changing, once a more interesting soap opera started to air – the Obama Story. This was a
real-life story with meaning, not just glitz: 'People are only interested in politics,' she concludes. Too right. And this was even before the global financial crisis really took hold.
Katie and Peter's passion ran out and now they're lining up the lawyers
Now the couples who have only their image to sell are struggling to hold people's attention. Anyone who has been canny enough to develop their brand into something with a little more depth and meaning is protected: think of Wayne and Coleen, Victoria and David.
Their relationships are recession-proof: in both cases both partners have an identity outside the couple (the women have been especially careful to maintain this), they cultivate interests outside the marriage and outside what they're best known for professionally.
This is the sort of advice any careers coach would give to an executive in a recession: focus on your strengths but also diversify and be versatile.
Elen Rives is alr eady aware of this – and of the fact that it's perhaps too late for her. Telling one newspaper that she was not 29 as reported – she was 34 – she added: 'I'm not like Coleen, who is 23 with a great career, so I don't know how I can move on. It's so hard.'
But when redundancy threatens, you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and look to the future. Richard and Judy, whose daytime TV show was recently axed, are already following this advice: they're working on separate projects for the first time in their careers (and have just signed up for Strictly Come Dancing).
And as the Brangelina brand struggles for survival and is rocked by break-up rumours every week, we can expect more adoptions, more hippie pronouncements (in step with the new era of austerity) and/or an announcement of a new career direction
for one of them at least.
In the meantime perhaps don't write off Katie and Peter yet. If anyone is likely to bou nce back from redundancy, it's them – as long as they keep it recessionally correct. I wonder what an austerity version of that particular brand might look like?
0 comments:
Post a Comment