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Candids > 2024 > July 29 – on yacht in Saint Tropez
Paris Hilton and Meghan Trainor announce “truly iconic” collab ‘Chasin”
[ Written on July 12 2024 by karina ]
Paris Hilton and Meghan Trainor are teaming up for a “truly iconic” collaboration titled ‘Chasin”.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Hilton and Trainor announced the new single, which will feature on Hilton’s upcoming sophomore album ‘Infinite Icon’. The song is due for release on July 26, and is being co-produced by Sia.
Trainor revealed that she began writing the track “years ago and knew I had to save it for someone very special. Paris brought it to a whole new level. I can’t believe I get to be friends with her.”
Paris added: “[Meghan] put into words an experience that was so true for me; that time in your life when you find the confidence, power, and self-love, to walk away from toxic relationships and move forward with your life.”
Trainor also said of her relationship with Hilton: “She is the sister I always needed and when she calls me sis, I die of happiness inside. We made something truly iconic together and it was a bucket list dream come true for me.”
‘Infinite Icon’ will be released on September 6 via Hilton’s own production company, 11:11 Media, and is being executive produced by Sia.
The album has already been previewed by one single, ‘I’m Free’, with Rina Sawayama. ‘Infinite Icon’ comes 18 years after the release of Hilton’s 2006 debut album ‘Paris’, hosting her biggest song to date, ‘Stars Are Blind’. She first mentioned working on her second album in 2017, telling Time Magazine that it was inspired by the sounds of “deep house, techno-pop and electro-pop”.
The pop culture icon and socialite hinted at her musical comeback in December 2022 when she re-released her debut single, now titled ‘Stars Are Blind (Paris’ Version)’ in December 2022. She further teased her return by singing the upbeat pop song with Miley Cyrus and pop hitmaker Sia at Cyrus’ New Year’s Eve concert in Times Square.
Other recent singles from Hilton include the Kim Petras-featuring remix of ‘Stars Are Blind (Paris’ Version)’ and EDM-driven ‘Hot One’.
In October 2023, Hilton spoke to NME about her creative process behind the album. “Music has always been such a huge part of my life,” she began. “I love DJing all around the world and at the biggest music festivals and having my concerts, but singing is something that I just love to do and I’m so proud to be in the studio.”
Source: nme.com
From fighting for children’s rights to collaborating with Sia on new music
[ Written on June 30 2024 by karina ]
“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
Paris Hilton says Gen Z loves flip phones ‘because they love things that are iconic’
[ Written on June 26 2024 by karina ]
Taking an extra eight minutes to draft out a text … that’s hot. At least if you ask Paris Hilton.
The socialite who reigned over the 2000s with an iron fist, or rather, a small chihuahua, welcomes back the Y2K resurgence with seemingly open arms. Jeans are low-rise and phones are low-tech, and Hilton thinks it’s a fad that is born out of trying to break out of the mold.
“Flip phones are making a comeback right now because people wanna flip the script, do something different,’ the famous former carrier of an iconic pink Razr told Fortune at an event hosted by Motorola. Of course, Hilton’s sign off happened at Motorola’s event as the phone company unveiled a new model of flip phone.
Trend cycles come in the blink of an eye these days, as fueled by fast-fashion and an extremely online era. But the year 2000 has been a point of fascination for a couple years now (which feels equal to a decade these days), finding a captive audience with Gen Zers in particular. Both our low and high points have come back to bite, including leg warmers, trucker hats, and even dresses over pants. And now phones have caught the new millennium bug.
Over the past couple of years, a cohort of young adults appear to have increasingly turned to flip phones as a result of a feeling of longing for the past and a need to make a digital detox— notes Lecturer Omah H. Fares for The Conversation. Unplugging can perhaps cause some ease, as early studies show internet addiction has been linked to feelings of depression and anxiety.
Even Gen Z pop-star Dove Cameron announced last year that she was switching to a flip phone for a bit, after saying being online “was joyless for me at this point.” Of course, it’s still a niche group and the pervasiveness of logging off might be overblown, but interest is not waning yet. Growing up on the internet, Gen Zers have started to look for guardrails as anecdotes of many young adults using the Do Not Disturb function as a way of detaching from their phone.
“It’s not a small trend,” Lars Silberbauer, chief marketing officer Nokia Mobile & HMD Global told the Wall Street Journal in 2023. In November of said year, Arite Beaty wrote for ZDNet that internet searches for flip phones increased by “15,369% over the past year among Gen Z and younger Millennials.” And adults of all ages are using flip phones when they feel like they’re too online, citing feelings of boredom or fatigue. Perhaps people are reacting to the ubiquitousness of the tech world as the new wave of AI is hurried in, creating their own back-to-the-future phenomenon as they search for something familiar.
“It’s nostalgic,” Hilton says of the phone, bringing up an emotion that is especially prevalent during times of socio-economic turmoil as people long for something comfortable and familiar. Especially vulnerable to the current turndown and especially online, younger generations are therefore prone to experience nostalgia—Stephanie Harlow writes in a blog post for consumer insights company GWI. Companies have taken note, as customers are more likely to pay more when nostalgia is triggered —per a 2014 study published by the Journal of Consumer Research.
Some of these young adults are finding comfort in a time before they were born—a time before the world wide web. And Harlow adds that even people born after the 1990s long for the era, 37% are nostalgic for said time. The allure is simple in Hilton’s eyes. “Gen Z loves flip phones because they love things that are iconic,” she quips.
Source: fortune.com
Paris Hilton testifies before Congress on Capitol Hill about childhood sexual abuse
[ Written on June 26 2024 by karina ]
Paris Hilton testified before Congress while advocating to modernize child welfare programs Wednesday.
The “Paris in Love” star and hotel heiress returned to Washington, D.C. to speak before the House Ways and Means committee about the modernization of the country’s foster care system.
“When I was 16 years old, I was ripped from my bed in the middle of night and transported across state lines to the first of four residential facilities,” Hilton told the congressional committee.
“For two years, I was force-fed medications and sexually abused by the staff. I was violently restrained … stripped naked, thrown in solitary confinement,” she told lawmakers.
Hilton said her parents, Hilton & Hyland co-founder Rick Hilton and “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Kathy Hilton, were “completely deceived, lied to and manipulated by this for-profit industry about the inhumane treatment I was experiencing.”
“So, can you only imagine the experience for youth who were placed by the state and don’t have people regularly checking in on them?” she said to lawmakers.
“This $23 billion-a-year industry sees this population as dollar signs and operates without meaningful oversight,” Hilton added.
She continued: “What is more important? Protecting business profits or protecting foster youth lives?”
Hilton, who welcomed her son Phoenix with husband Carter Reum last January, said she is “here to be a voice for the children whose voices can’t be heard.”
“As a mom, these stories break my heart” she told congressional committee members.
In the piece, she opened up for the first time about recollections of being physically forced into complying with “sham” gynecological exams in the middle of the night.
“If we tried to protest or question anything, they said it was a bad dream,” Hilton wrote in the column. “They told us to stop making things up. But looking back on these experiences as an adult woman, I can recognize these exams for what they were: the sexual assault of children.”
Since first opening up about her own abuse, she has met with lawmakers in Utah and D.C., including senators and White House staff.
In her September 2020 documentary This Is Paris,” Hilton leveled disturbing accusations toward a Colorado boarding school she attended as a teenager, claiming she was verbally, emotionally and physically abused and left with insomnia, anxiety and trust issues.
In the YouTube Originals documentary, Hilton alleges her tumultuous young adult years were the result of experiencing verbal, emotional and physical abuse during the 11 months she attended Provo Canyon School, a Utah boarding school for troubled teens. The trauma, she said, left her with anxiety, trust issues and insomnia.
Source: usatoday.com