“Do you want a blanket, Paris?” I ask from the side of the camera. She animatedly nods her head, a desperate “Please” escaping from her lips. Grabbing the only warm material I can find, I wrap Hilton’s shoulders in wool, and she holds on to me for body heat. As we cozy up to each other in a hug that feels way more comfortable than it should be (we’ve only just met), I tell her I hope she has a nice bath waiting for her at home. Does she ever! “Every night, my husband [Carter Reum] and I take a bubble bath together — it’s our ritual,” she shares, blushing. “We talk about our day and what’s going on with our businesses; it’s sweet and fun. These past couple of years with him have been the best of my life.”
You see, Hilton has just come out on the other side of an identity crisis of sorts. Ten (maybe even just five) years ago, it would have been easy, nay expected, to write her off as a spoiled heiress, the teenage star of a sex tape, the dumb blond from The Simple Life and a party girl who said things like “That’s hot.” But thanks to the 2020 documentary This Is Paris and bestselling book Paris: The Memoir, the world has learned just how colossally we have underestimated her.
Hilton is a performance artist (more on that later), a businesswoman who sits atop an empire of 19 different product lines, a survivor of the abusive “reform” boarding-school system, a fierce children’s-rights advocate who is fighting to pass the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act in the U.S. Congress, a wife and mom of two kids under two and a DJ and singer coming out of an early retirement.
“I’m here to save pop music,” she tells me playfully over the phone the day after the shoot. Her second album is coming out this fall, 18 years after her first and hot on the heels of her collaboration with Sia on the song, “Fame Won’t Love You.” And with the singer as the executive producer, Hilton’s new slate of songs promises to be the perfect cocktail of catchy and contemplative, especially as the first single makes its debut this summer, around Pride. (For reference, her 2023 Pride concert sold out in just three minutes!) “It has everything,” she teases about the album. “It’s very popcentric, obviously, but it also has love songs, dance music and a few ballads.”
Fittingly, the playlist Hilton has chosen for the photo shoot is called “Y2K party,” and, yes, her 2006 bop “Stars Are Blind” does come on, which prompts a few giggles. But nothing can distract her from her mission: to serve looks. Hilton knows how to pose, where to look, what angles to cheat and how to make her body look its best. (To be fair, though, it would be hard to make her look bad.)
What I was not expecting, however, was the shyness that took over once the cameras turned off. She’s quiet, gentle and incredibly kind to everyone on-set, and I get the sense that she’s a natural introvert thrust into extrovert territory for her job. Nevertheless, she’s glowing — more than any fake tan. I don’t doubt that she’s been recently touched by a tanning machine, but, forgive the sentimentality, it really feels like it’s coming from within — from a woman who is finally, to her core, happy. And she is happy; it just took a while for her to get there.
Paris: The Memoir paints the portrait of a young woman who is drowning in trauma, desperately grasping onto any available life raft she can find. Her rebellious childhood started in New York City in the early 1980s but reached a tipping point in the ’90s. Suffocated by her strict parents and private schools that couldn’t accommodate her challenges (she was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult), Hilton was desperate for an escape and found refuge on dance floors across the city. Afraid for her safety, the Hiltons decided to send their 16-year-old to a boarding school for “troubled teens.” And this is where things got dark. Like, really dark.
It started with two men kidnapping Hilton in the middle of the night, literally dragging her out of her bedroom by her ankles as her parents watched. For the next year and a half, a teenage Hilton was beaten, degraded and starved at multiple U.S. institutions, the worst of which was Provo Canyon School in Utah. Despite numerous attempts to run away, Hilton was regularly drugged and sedated against her will, subjected to invasive “cervical exams” by male and female “teachers” and eventually stripped and put into solitary confinement for days on end. (It has since come out that her parents were unaware of the mistreatment happening at these facilities.)
It was in those cells where the “Paris Persona” was first born. “The darkness was so all-consuming, the only way I could stay alive was to find a source of light inside myself,” she writes in her memoir. “This wasn’t a nebulous daydream; it was a mechanically specific vision. I plotted logistics…. I focused on my inner empire. I would make so much money and be so successful, no one could ever have control over me again.”
When Hilton finally got out, she wasted no time in putting her plan into action. After months of not even being allowed to look in a mirror, she was determined to make up for lost time, lost shopping, lost partying, lost love and lost attention. (For many years, Hilton equated love and paparazzi attention as one and the same.)
She quickly became an L.A. socialite, and so did her friends — like longtime BFF Nicole Richie, whom she met when she was a child. Enter the producers of The Simple Life, who were looking to revamp reality TV and knew just the two young women to do it. “They basically told us, ‘Nicole, you’re the troublemaker, and Paris, you’re the dumb blond,’ and I went full force with that narrative,” Hilton explains. “When the show became such a huge phenomenon, people thought that was who I actually was, so I played into it.”
Full interview: fashionmagazine.com
