Paris Hilton was born into wealth, at the entryway to celebrity. The heiress’ father, Richard, was himself an heir (of yet another heir) of his grandfather’s global hotel brand, Hilton Hotels & Resorts— large enough at one point to warrant its own iteration of the Monopoly board game, Hilton-OPOLY. As she was a firstborn and demanded the spotlight, the family photo albums and home videos disproportionately feature Paris over her younger siblings. In her documentary, This Is Paris, we glean how frequently her father filmed his little “Star,” as he nicknamed her, how early in life she learned to perform to the camera, and how different family members expected her to use her captivating presence: her grandmother wonders if she’ll be the next Grace Kelly or Lana Turner, before concluding, “Or is that Paris Hilton? Could be better than any of them”; while her mother, Kathy, a model and actor since her youth, shoos her away from a path in the public eye.

Though birthright provided her a lifeline to luxury in one form or another, her rise to a de facto pop culture icon—the ways she wielded and navigated her visibility as someone already “famous for being famous”—was anything but predetermined. Her eccentric intuitions and improvisations along her windy road to superstardom signaled the way for those with plenty of money but less inherent celebrity. “They’re little stars,” said Jason Binn, publisher of Hamptons Magazine, of the Hilton sisters in the September 2000 issue of Vanity Fair. “They’ve become names. To them it’s like a job. I believe they wake up every morning and say, ‘OK, where am I supposed to be tonight?’” In the same article, a friend of Hilton’s says, “It’s like battle of the society sisters: ‘Oh, we both had our pictures in the Post by the time we were 14!’” referring to a rivalry between them and the Schnabel sisters— Julian Schnabel’s daughters Stella and Lola.

To say Hilton acquired outsized influence would be an understatement. Modeling and acting despite her mother’s protestations, in shows like The Simple Life—where she and Nicole Richie tried on a working-class life in Arkansas (at least while the cameras rolled)—Hilton modeled a care-free, careless attitude and a performative obliviousness that came to be popularly associated with blondes. She also pushed the benchmark for Eurocentric beauty standards even further beyond possibility. Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, without a clear understanding of who Paris Hilton was—or why I was so exposed to her image without seeking it—I saw young girls emulate her and young boys look for her in them. She was a strong dye permeating the otherwise clear pool of available media that influenced our still-forming systems of desire.

“Fuck!” Hilton groans, registering the extent of her impact after I tell her she influenced my grade school peers in the Midwest. “When I moved to New York, I didn’t have a stylist. I was just very original and ahead of my time with fashion and the way I thought. I’ve always been a risk taker and went by what I felt. Now people come up to me and say, ‘You invented Y2K fashion, you are the blueprint, you are mother!’” Two decades after her meteoric rise, she feels validated for choices she felt misunderstood for at the time. “‘Look at the way Paris, socialite, is dressing, this is so out there!’” she says, imitating an early aughts tabloid. “Now I see all the things I’d get in trouble for wearing then as huge pieces on runways by the biggest designers. Now everyone’s rocking it. I love that people are finally giving me the credit that I deserve.”

Back in that 2000 Vanity Fair article, titled “Hip-Hop Debs,” another unnamed friend of Hilton’s tells the writer, “It’s like all she wants to do is become famous, to wipe out the past, to become somebody else.” With Paris: The Memoir, her documentary, and reality series Paris in Love, she is now reckoning with her early public image and unearthing darker chapters from her past, chiefly the abuses she endured (forced drug use, solitary confinement, strip searches, physical and verbal attacks) in her time at various “troubled teen” programs—three of which she managed to escape. Now she is using her platform to expose the for-profit industry. In October 2020, Hilton and hundreds of fellow past students protested Provo Canyon School in Utah, the last of such programs she attended. They demanded it be shut down.

When we speak, Hilton has just gotten back from an Easter trip to St. Barts with her husband, Carter Reum, a venture capitalist and son of an ex-Amsted Industries CEO, along with her two babies, Phoenix and London, both delivered via surrogate last year. During that stay, she flew to Jamaica for a day to help boys who revealed they were being abused at Atlantis Leadership Academy, a wilderness camp owned and run by Randall Cook, a former staffer of WWASP (an umbrella corporation of “associated teen behavior modification programs” that folded following investigations into child abuse).

“I wanted to go there because they had their court case and they weren’t being taken seriously,” Hilton said, “So I knew I needed to go there and shine a big spotlight on that and really put the pressure on these people. The five employees who were abusing the kids just got arrested yesterday, and people are being held accountable, finally. So that makes me really proud to be the hero that I needed when I was a teenager, and be able to do that for these boys and other children in these types of places—these hell holes. I feel this is my real purpose in life and something very dear to my heart. I won’t stop fighting until change is made.”

Paris sees her recent forays into activism and personal memoir (soon to be adapted into a series by A24 and the Fanning sisters), documentary, and reality TV as attempts to take more control over her public image, which various parties (publicists, sponsors, press, paparazzi, producers, directors, editors, etc.) have had a hand in since her youth. But selfies, which she claimed on X in 2017 to have invented with Britney Spears in 2006, were always a glamorous record she could control. “We were in Las Vegas, at the Palms Hotel,” she explained of the selfie with Spears, in which they both wore black bunny ears. “We were just having a girl’s night—it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is this thing called a selfie’— it was just this thing that we always did. It was never uploaded anywhere, because it was on a disposable camera.”

I asked her about her relationship to selfies in general, and over the years. “Being called the inventor and queen of selfies, I love them. I love that I’ve been doing it my whole life, before social media and all that started. I think it’s an intimate look into someone’s life—just taking a selfie with my friends, my pets, or just me. Now it’s turned into something fun you can do with your fans, or people showing their real lives. It’s also something you control yourself. It’s not paparazzi or someone sneaking a photo of you. For so much of my life, my career was told by other people, who wanted to portray me in the way that they wanted—and no one knew who I truly was or what I’d been through, or that I had this armor that I built around myself, which is this character of myself.”

But she even lost control over images that she took herself. “Someone broke into my house and stole so many of my things,” she said, referring to a 2008 robbery, in which a group of teen friends known as “The Bling Ring” let themselves into Hilton’s house with a key they found under the doormat. “So many pictures I see online now—all these iconic photos that are now turned into memes and are all over—none of those were supposed to be out. This was before social media. This was just me getting my privacy invaded once again, people breaking into my house, stealing my things, and selling my photos all over online. When I look back at all these photos everywhere, I’m like, ‘At least I get to see them!’ Because they were all on disposable cameras that weren’t even developed.”

Although Hilton may not, in fact, have invented the selfie (which predates the 2006 disposable flash photo by at least two centuries, with Robert Cornelius’ 1839 self-portrait), she did career-ize a lifestyle of constant self-portraiture to historic effect on future debutantes and their posers. Who of us today could say who Cornelius is, let alone what he looked like? Hilton’s blonde hair and pool-blue eyes (the result of colored contacts; her actual eyes are hazel) are burned into my generation’s retinas. And Hilton’s iconic appearance reached beyond just the US and Europe.

“It’s just really amazing to me that no matter what country I go to, everyone knows [who I am]. That always makes me feel really good. [laughs]” Hilton says. She remembers, for instance, landing in Tokyo for the first time with her sister. “We had been doing this campaign for a handbag line, so we had hundreds of billboards and magazine covers of our brand The Hilton Sisters. When we landed at the [Haneda] airport from LA, there were hundreds of girls all dressed up, who had either dyed their hair blonde or were wearing blonde wigs and blue contacts—literally looking like clones of Nicky and I—all holding chihuahuas, wearing pink, wearing our handbags.”

In addition to creating handbag and fragrance lines, a pop album, acting, and DJing, in her early career, she first forayed into the family business by licensing her name and sensibilities (credited with interior design) to the Azure Beach Club Paris Hilton, in Parañaque, Manila. One of the Philippines’ major real estate developers, Century Properties, partnered with Hilton, as well as other American celebrities in an effort to brand Manila as an “international city” and attract foreign investment.

When I told her I’m Filipino, she interjected, “Love it! I love the Philippines! The people are the kindest, sweetest, most lovable people ever. I have been there many times for my purse launches, fragrance launches, and DJing, and I had real estate properties out there so I would go to openings and film commercials. The fans out there are so amazing. I always feel at home when I go there, so it’s lovely, and I’m friends with Manny Pacquiao and his wife.”

In 2022, she re-recorded her 2006 hit “Stars Are Blind,” which broke the top 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Flying back together after a New Year’s Eve performance of the new iteration of the song in Miami with Miley Cyrus last year, industry stalwart Sia asked Hilton, “Why are you not a popstar? What if I was the executive producer of your album?”

Hilton’s resulting second studio album is set to release this Fall. “The album has it all,” she said. “I love pop music so much and it feels like someone needs to save it so I’m here to do it. [laughs]” The album has “pop bops,” songs inspired by her memoir, and emotional ballads “because Sia is the queen of that.” It seems to reflect both the new and past phases of her career, the latter perhaps now more on her own terms than before. The updated “Stars Are Blind” is called “Paris’ version,” suggesting she desired to reclaim it.

A song on the new album is called “Fame Won’t Love You.” “It’s a really important message,” she says, “because I feel like I don’t want anyone, especially my kids, to put so much of their self-worth on things like fame or beauty.”

As the lyrics to “Stars Are Blind” attempt to define true love, I ask Paris if she defines it differently now. “I look at love in a completely different way than I did before. Before I had been through so much trauma and pain and had built such a big wall around my heart that I wouldn’t let anyone in. It wasn’t until being with my husband that I felt so safe that he made those walls crash down. Now with my baby boy and my baby girl, I’m just feeling this love that I’ve never felt before. I’m so grateful I found him at this perfect time in my life. Because I wouldn’t have been ready for this type of love had I not done my documentary.”And with that she concludes, “Now to have a real life—everything feels amazing!” 

Photographed by The Morelli Brothers

Styled by Luca Falcioni at Opus Beauty

Written by A.E. Hunt

Hair: Eduardo Ponce

Makeup: Melissa Hurkman using Anastasia Beverly Hills

Nails: Zagasaa Nansal

Lighting Designer: Max Wilbur

Flaunt Film: Isaac Dektor

Digi Tech: Michael Seeley

DP: Jonathan Ho

Retouching: Kushtrim Kunushevci

Video Assistant: Duy Nguyen

Production: Creative P Studio, Rafa Farias, Matteo Morelli, Pedro Paradis 

Production Assistants: Jabari and Mariam Bagdady

Location: Issue Studio

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