baby talk

Hello, all! I hope you had good weekends and your Monday hasn’t been too Mondayish. It’s been over a week since my last email, not for lack of gossip - the opposite, in fact: the lives of the rich and famous have been so full this past week that I barely had a moment to collect my thoughts and type them out before the next piece of news broke. It’s brutal out here! Spare a thought for deuxmoi and dietprada who don’t have the luxury of digesting their celebrity gossip via an occasional, hobbyist newsletter and are actually on the front line delivering it to us in real time. I thank them for their service and hope their RSI isn’t too bad.

Anyway I’ve dilly-dallied over this instalment for too long already so I’m just going to dive in, starting with the best news of the past week: Rihanna! Pregnant! In vintage Chanel! Before I get going though I’d like to address some rumours that are swirling around about Rihanna’s clothing choice in these images. Various corners of the internet have been wondering outloud if Riri’s decision to pair a pink coat with a pink mani is a “subtle hint” that she’s having a girl. Frankly I find this an appalling misjudgement of character and think it’s borderline offensive to think that Rihanna - RIHANNA (!!)- would do anything so base as a gender reveal, subtle or not. Let’s consider this case closed.

simply a very chic - if impractical - outfit! don’t be weird about it!

A couple of things have struck me about this pregnancy announcement that I’d like to give some airtime to, the first being the choice of photographer. The images were taken by Diggzy, who, for the uninitiated, is essentially the only celebrity-sanctioned paparazzi. Diggzy is who the celebs’ agents call when their clients are wearing a really good outfit and they want a good “candid” shot of it. He’s probably the only paparazzi to have been profiled in Vogue, and he’s definitely the only one to have any form of currency with his subjects: although celebrities famously loathe being papped, posting an instagram pic with the DIGGZY watermark splashed all over it is like a badge of honour. Somehow, this 26 year old with an “entrepreneurial spirit” has become the 2022, non-predatory version of whatever Terry Richardson was in 2011.

Anyway: in recent years, celebrity pregnancy announcements have been high-end, big-budget, hyper-controlled and super-stylised (see: Beyoncé). But Rihanna opted for a pap shot, the most quotidian of all the celebrity images. She didn’t go for a magazine exclusive, didn’t even bother sharing the images on her own instagram until days later. She just let the paparazzi post the pictures himself and watched the chaos unfold from afar. Truly a thrilling indication of where The Culture - and our relationship to it - is at: the paparazzi lost their hold over famous people with the ubiquity of camera phones; normies with camera phones in turn lost their hold over them when Instagram gave them the opportunity to “control their own narrative”. And now, as celebrities feel the drawbacks of sharing every minute aspect of their lives themselves, the humble paparazzi rises to the top once more, cutting out the middle man (the tabloids) and bringing the goss direct-to-consumer. What a ride, eh! My brain hurts just thinking about it.

Now to the image Rihanna did post/take herself, which also warrants discussion but, you’ll be relieved to hear, for more banal reasons. Less noteworthy than her pregnancy in this picture is the room she is in, which can only be described as the bathroom of a Camden rental flat that hasn’t been done since, like, 2005? 2008? I mean, just look at those tiles! Look at the hooks over the door! They definitely came from Argos, right?Basically all of us have lived in that flat, have owned those over-door hooks. We have all stood under the glare of that too-bright bathroom light and stared at ourselves in the mirror and been a bit alarmed at what’s staring back at us at the end of the night. The question is what Rihanna - a billionaire/stylish woman of means - was doing in there. I’ve given it some thought, of course, and here are some possible reasons I can think of:

• her house is being done up to prepare for the baby’s arrival and she’s camping out in an Airbnb whilst the work is underway.

• she has one normal friend and was round theirs and decided to take the pic, on a whim. Maybe her pal took it, possibly whilst peeing?? girls love to go to the bathroom together after all!

• her agent/manager/publicist has a “regular citizen” house on tap that can be hired out to clients when they don’t want to alienate normal people with photographs of their lovely lives - a money-spinning move inspired by the “Imagine” fiasco and how hard the famous people found it to film in a space in their homes that wouldn’t make the rest of us feel jealous.

Would love to know your thoughts!

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Other aspects of note to fill you in on with the Rihanna story: Drake unfollowed both badgalriri and A$AP on Instagram after the news broke, causing basic boys everywhere to get all excited about Drake releasing a sad little song about the whole thing. Unfortunately this is much more likely than Rihanna releasing a follow up to 2016’s ANTI so we might as well start preparing for sad boy summer now and enjoy her pregnancy fits in the meantime.

And from pregnancy to birth: unto the world an Aquarian was born this week, to Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott on 2/2/22. Apparently the baby is a boy, which people have deduced because of some blue hearts posted by Kylie (I’m inclined to believe this as Kylie, unlike Riri, is definitely base enough for “blue is for boys and pink is for girls <3” idealogy) and called Angel, although this is pure conjecture based on piccies from her baby shower. More as I get it on the name front. Impeccable timing as always from the Kardashian-Jenner spin machine, as Kylie announced the baby’s birth right at the pinnacle of a days-long Kanye social media rant which covered: his daughter’s TikTok, Kim, her parenting, her cousins, their divorce, and alleged-attempted-soliciting to murder (OK, House of Gucci!). The posts have since been deleted, and I don’t really want to get into the particulars as the whole thing is pretty messy in the not-so-fun way, but I will say that I enjoyed both his and Kim’s petty little digs at each other. Kim’s “maybe he can respond to his third attorney in a year” is trumped only by Kanye’s “since this is my first divorce…”. This is the kind of light jibing that wouldn’t feel out of place on Celebrity Roast - i.e. basically harmless - and so is perfectly suitable for this newsletter, which only engages in the light-hearted, bar the small foray into parasocial discourse above (sorry about that).

I think that’s quite enough for now, don’t you? Thanks for reading over 1,000 words on Rihanna and Kylie Jenner. Love you all.

Until next time,

xoxo