If, as my co-workers fear, low-rise jeans are coming back to haunt us, then it is only fair that we must contend with other trends from the early aughts. Before we launch into the world of chunky highlights and RAZR phones, however, Paris Hilton is here to demystify a photograph that honestly deserves prominence in the Smithsonian (one writer’s opinion).
Picture it: 2006. Two years before Obama was elected president. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was the biggest film of the year. (Wikipedia tells me this is the second in the series.) And Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan were spotted hanging out at the Beverly Hills Hotel together. The holy trinity, Paris called it in 2017.
As it turns out, however, this divine grouping was truly an act of happenstance. In a new Sirius XM interview with Andy Cohen, Hilton explained that “Britney and I went out for the night” and Lohan apparently “party-crashed” Paris’s Mercedes SLR.
“We were all at the Beverly Hills Hotel at the bungalows during an after-party and then Britney and I wanted to leave to go home. Then [Lindsay] started, like, chasing us and then squeezed in the car. And it was literally a two-seater SLR — you know, the sports car. She just, like, squeezed in and I didn’t want to humiliate her in front of all the paparazzi and be like ‘Get out of my car,’ so I was like, ‘Whatever.’”
To 17-year-old me, however, this photo was an affirmation, and everything in pop culture that I held dear. To 29-year-old me, it is a piece of pop-culture iconography, and also some deeply #relatable #content. Some days you’re “tag yourself, I’m Britney;” some days you’re “tag yourself, I’m Paris.” Both 17-year-old and 29-year-old me would also, it should be noted, still wear all three of their outfits. Everything old is new.