Meghan’s too earnest to have a lifestyle brand
The first lifestyle guide I encountered was not a blog but an old-fashioned thing called “a book”; nor did it make any reference to lifestyle. Entertaining, by Martha Stewart, was published in the US in 1982, and it set the template for every influencer ever since, including the Duchess of Sussex, who has just revealed a little more about her soon-to-be-launched lifestyle brand.
Entertaining featured Stewart, the OG influencer, on the cover, perching over a fancy dining table like a shoulder-padded monarch surveying her kingdom, and, my God, I loved to look at that book: the tips on what napkins to use for a sit-down country luncheon for 25; how to pull off a last-minute dinner party for 35. This, I thought, was what adult life was like, even though my parents offered ample evidence to the contrary.
Julia Child taught American women how to cook, but Stewart taught them how to aspire. There have been a few male lifestyle brands, but in the main this has been a career path trodden by women, because men’s life advice tends to come packaged as testosterone-heavy motivational talks (practitioners range from Tony Robbins to Andrew Tate), whereas women are promised salvation via the purchase of a dress/set of napkins/£500 juicer. Enlightenment through capitalism, ladies!
Yet, like Gwyneth Paltrow — the lifestyle queen of the wellness era — Stewart knows the trick to this schtick is to do it with a dash of self-satire. After Stewart finished her five-month prison sentence in 2005 for lying to investigators about insider trading, and was then under house arrest, she posed for glamorous photos in Vanity Fair while wearing her electronic ankle bracelet. Paltrow sells vibrators that cost £12,000. Annoying these women may be, but they’re also pretty funny.
That former quality is in abundance in today’s lifestyle wannabes, the latter less so. Launching a lifestyle brand has become the favourite career option for famous and/or posh women blessed with time on their hands and extremely healthy self-esteem. Once, they would have gone into PR, but launching a lifestyle brand takes PR to its natural conclusion, because the brand you’re PR-ing is yourself. We live in the secular age of identity, in which a person’s selfhood is celebrated in the way more religious eras obsessed over the idea of the soul. So brands that claim to express their maker’s identity while helping consumers realise their own are the new gurus, their websites verging on cultlike.
On the celebrity side, there’s Kourtney Kardashian — famous mainly because someone once leaked a sex tape of her sister Kim — whose lifestyle brand Poosh teaches you how to “live your best life”. On the posh side, there’s Mrs Alice (“Four pink linen flower napkins — £88”), the lifestyle brand of someone called Alice Naylor-Leyland, and just in case anyone is unclear why they should want to live like her, her website features several photos of her at a stately home.
Meghan’s American Riviera Orchard, a name Paris Hilton would have rejected as too ridiculous for one of her chihuahuas, gives nothing away in its name or on its Instagram. Happily for the faithful worshippers at Meghan’s altar, the trademark filings suggest that the royal outpost of Montecito, California, will soon be flogging everything from “vegetable-based spreads” to, of course, “cocktail napkins”.
This is a poor show from Meghan. She doesn’t seem to understand that her role now is to be a royal disruptor, and that means doing the unexpected to cause maximum embarrassment. Think of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson having a meet-and-greet with Adolf Hitler in 1937, or Prince Andrew going on Newsnight and claiming he doesn’t sweat. The only point to the royals now is to provide distraction for the nation and material for future TV dramas based on their lives. This is trebly true for the royal disruptor, the joker in the royal cast. If Meghan were doing her job properly, she’d at least include a couple of sex toys in her brand, ideally some sex tips, with hints about her husband’s preferences. But a website flogging “personal writing journals”? Princess Margaret would have regarded this nonsense with a withering glance and then stubbed out her cigarette on it.
This age of identity has less to do with realising one’s sense of self — whatever that even is — and more with participating in a nonstop popularity contest. How many likes did my tweet get, fortysomethings ask themselves fretfully. (And then we wonder why our children are so anxious and dependent on external validation.) This is especially true of lifestyle brands. The artist once known as Puff Daddy, aka Sean Combs, was one of the few men to launch lifestyle brands, from fashion to alcohol to a cable network, and to do so largely successfully. But now that he is facing what I shall euphemistically call “legal troubles”, all that’s in the pan. Martha Stewart’s business thrived after her incarceration because she painted herself as a woman who had known difficulties and became all the more relatable for it. Combs is unlikely to have that option.
Meghan’s brand has a different problem, in that it’s unclear whether anyone aspires to be like her. Do people really want tablescaping tips, let alone lifestyle guidance, from someone who airs their familial grievances to Oprah Winfrey? In this sense she is the true product of the identity age, someone not very interesting who nonetheless thinks there is none more interesting. A royal, one might even say. Let them eat vegetable-based spreads!