Just over 20 years ago, the society magazine Tatler put Tara Palmer-Tomkinson on its cover, along with fellow socialite Normandie Keith, and proclaimed them the It girls. “What does it say about us that we care so much about them?” asked the coverline. Their rise, and the rise of Palmer-Tomkinson in particular, always seemed to be about something bigger than the enduring fascination with beautiful young women in paparazzi-friendly dresses. They came at the end of the grunge years, and their privileged lifestyles reflected the start of London’s economic boom, but at the same time their rise seemed to mark the end of the old order.
It was the beginning of the end of the Sloanes, as international bankers and Russian oligarchs started buying up swaths of west London and pricing out the younger generation of English old-money families. It was probably the beginning of the end of going out. Palmer-Tomkinson was famous for her party-going, an idea that seems almost as old-fashioned as if she’d been a 20s flapper; now people stay in with Netflix. More than half the UK’s nightclubs have closed since 2005, and people have swapped alcohol and cigarettes for Fitbits.
And it came at the tail end of deference to the upper classes. Newspapers were impressed by the raft of society girls’ connections to the royals, but nobody I knew was. Palmer-Tomkinson was compelling because she seemed like enormous fun, but if you grew up in the 90s, you never thought she or the others (Tamara Beckwith, Keith and later Lady Victoria Hervey) were cool. Even while they were having their moment, the society It girls already seemed old-fashioned. They were naughtier than many of the debutantes of earlier decades, but definitely of the same type. They went out with ridiculous posh men and rarely seemed to leave west London, unless it was for a skiing holiday or a cruise on someone’s yacht. (Compare that with current aristo It girl Cara Delevingne, whose quirky edge and global Instagram reach means her poshness isn’t quite so defining.)
Babes on babes on babes. @caradelevingne @mileycyrus ๐๐พ๐๐พ๐๐พ
But Palmer-Tomkinson was also the beginning of a huge cultural shift that not many of us could have imagined at the time. She wasn’t the first society It girl – the 30s and 50s especially had witnessed the rise and fall of extravagant, glittering socialites. But she was, says Wendy Holden, the journalist and novelist who ghostwrote her column in the Sunday Times, “famous for being the first person to be famous for being famous”. In the 90s, that was considered an insult.
“Being called talentless, that is the worst,” Palmer-Tomkinson said in a 2012 interview. “I can recite every line of Shakespeare. I’ve got a really good brain. Of course, I haven’t earned [fame] and I didn’t feel I was worth it, and going to all those endless parties, it made me feel worth a pile of shit.” Had Palmer-Tomkinson emerged now, she would never have had to justify herself. Instead, she paved the way for reality TV, Paris Hilton, any number of YouTube and Instagram stars and, of course, the reigning champions of self-promotion, the Kardashians. Criticising them is pointless. These are all cultural fixtures now.
Ellis Cashmore, visiting professor of sociology at Aston University and author of Celebrity Culture, recently discussed Kim Kardashian with a group of sixth-formers. “I said: ‘Is she talented?’ And there was no criticism at all that she was just famous for being famous.” They listed what they believed were her talents, such as what she does to attract publicity and the art of the selfie. “She can’t sing or dance or act, which we, over the 20th century, have decided to call talents,” he says. “But now we are in a transitional phase where people do different things, which are not talents that are immediately recognisable to older generations.”
Palmer-Tomkinson, he says, “prefigured this. The development has been so accelerated over the past 15 years.” Now, he says, “we don’t even query why they’re there in the first place. We don’t even think about the fact they are present on Instagram or Twitter, which makes them occupy space in our lives.” And it has been professionalised – social media accounts are carefully crafted, agents and publicists work to extend the longevity of even the most fleeting reality TV stars. There is a clear end goal: to monetise their fame.
Palmer-Tomkinson, by contrast, never seemed calculating. She seemed big-hearted and genuine, fragile and someone who had stumbled into fame and its trappings because it seemed fun, not because of how much money she could make from it. “She had this amazing life anyway, she had all these friends, she was having lots of fun,” says Holden. “Also the persona we created for her was not entirely serious, otherwise no reader was going to sympathise with her. It had to be funny. We made her almost into a comic figure, but I think she could see the point of that, and had lots of funny things to contribute to it.”
It does feel like a different time now, where to be a celebrity is to be a brand. This also means, especially for young women in the public eye, fame is largely on their terms – with an Instagram account, they don’t, like Palmer-Tomkinson did, have to rely on being interesting to newspaper and gossip magazine editors (and she was never __more interesting to the tabloids than when she was self-destructing). Many of the people who become famous now are those who engineer it, via TV or social media, and carefully craft it. The element of randomness, the sudden elevation of a funny, spirited posh girl who never particularly asked for it, says Cashmore, “has largely disappeared”.
“While there’s no doubt she enjoyed it, Tara definitely took being famous less seriously than people do now,” says Holden. “I can’t imagine her operating 10 social media accounts at once, for instance. I don’t think she could have been bothered, and who could blame her?”