Kylie Jenner materialises as if from the ether. It’s impressive. One moment you’re staring out the window, many floors up in a Manhattan skyscraper, your head running with questions – Will she say anything? What will she look like up close? Are people going to be cranky she’s on the cover of Vogue ? Is Timothée Chalamet kicking around here somewhere? – the next she is standing right behind me, her bodyguard José hovering a few feet away, the pair having stealthily arrived as smoothly and silently as a pair of Teslas.
“ Hey ,” she says, upbeat but trepidatious. It is immediately clear she is shy in a way perhaps only the chronically observed might understand. Then, in what transpires as a moment of self-willed bravery for the reality star/beauty mogul/mother/fashion week bombshell/auspice of society’s downfall (pick your poison), she adds: “Can I get a hug?” So we hug, the effect of which is kind of reality-warping, if I’m honest.
The matrix unplugged. Pixels made flesh. We are talking about so many pixels here.
Using Instagram followings as biography has been problematic, to say nothing of a little naff, since the end of the last decade, but sometimes you can’t fight the numbers: Kylie’s following on the pink app alone is a couple of ticks shy of 400 million. Four hundred million people! Even if a chunk of them are nonhuman, a notable percentage of the world’s population is infatuated (some infuriated, granted) by the daily shenanigans, o.