Imagine being a celebrity in the twenty-first century. Sure, the fame and fortune sounds nice, but it comes at a price. It’s a lifestyle fraught with difficulties and pressures. Your every move is tracked and documented by a pack of blood-hungry, ever-vigilant paparazzi whose objective is to discover your secrets, expose your frailties, and destroy everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve. You can’t escape it. The despicable tabloid media, with its twenty-four-hour news cycle, is devoured on a minute-by-minute basis by the very same celebrity-obsessed society that put you in this position of recognition and acclaim in the first place. You can’t trust these people. Sure, your fans might be fine for the most part, but there are those twisted few who love you so much that they want to hurt you. So you hire bodyguards; you build a fortress: you use your material wealth to insulate yourself from a cruel and bitter world … only to get lambasted by the press for being paranoid and out of touch. Then there’s the entertainment business itself, with all its pitfalls and the snakes who go after your money, all of them lying to you, inflating your ego, warping your personality. You feel the pressure to stay beautiful, keep skinny, and look young forever.
Just imagine that weight on your shoulders—all the angst and suspicion you would feel. What would you do? Would you go crazy and start dressing up like a complete jackass? Because that’s what these people did. Here’s a list of Hollywood’s biggest hipsters.
