let katie kitamura have her $24 lip gloss, damn!
they want writers to be out here looking like raggedy ann, but why?
I often think that if I ever become a Big Writer, I will almost certainly exploit this opportunity to make sure everyone understands how hot I am. I’d be lying if I said I don’t often long for an era when writers were seen as hot, sexy. This is not about conventional beauty, this is about mythology, shaped by things like personal style, taste. But enough dicking around. Let’s talk about Katie Kitamura’s $24 lip gloss.1
Who cares!!! That’s my thesis, raw. But some context for you: there’s an essay out there criticizing Kitamura for doing a New York Magazine interview during which she’s asked about 15 items she can’t live without. Two of the items she supplies are $54 hair clips and a $24 lip gloss from Clinique.
Let’s do some quick math even though I don’t feel like it: The lip gloss is $24. You might wear it four days out of the week. This might last you like a month or two. That’s like 80 cents a day.2 The hair clips, $54, I don’t know how many are in a pack, but assuming you don’t lose them, could last for years.
Yes, I’m outraged whenever I watch celebrities in Vogue flippantly talking about a $60,000 scarf in their twelve bedroom estate amid a worsening housing crisis. This is not the level of wealth we’re discussing. Kitamura is still a literary writer and professor in America.
As other people in the essay’s comments pointed out, Kitamura also mentions tea, tape, and a charger in the interview. One perceptive commenter asked, why only focus on the traditionally feminine items on her list?
Well, because feminine things are unserious, duh.
I get what the essay is trying to say—that in the face of extreme economic uncertainty and inequality this article is tone deaf. That asking writers about their cosmetic purchases is a distraction from their work. That for writers to be asked to even turn up for these kinds of interviews is degrading to people who, at the end of the day, are just trying to be artists.
But it’s also an interview in a style magazine.
We romanticize cheap shit at the same time we lament its true costs.3 Had Kitamura said she’d paid $24 for, like, a microwave, this detail would be cast as quirky and charming. She would suddenly become a beautiful low-maintenance woman. Had she listed “hope” as a thing she couldn’t live without, as one commenter suggested which, to be clear, would have been cringe, I think many of us are living without hope right now, then she’d be a morally aspirational woman.
Instead, she’s a hot one. Boo hiss, or as one random guy in the comment section put it: “She just came waaay down in my esteem scale.” That’s so cool, Thom, you just lost your 1 aura point.
Another commenter suggests a $6 alternative gloss which the post’s author cosigns. Listen, I am the Queen of Cheap Shit, but who and what allow this product to be $6? Let’s not climb too quickly on that high horse.
The post’s writer argues that it was okay for Joan Didion to model for Celine because Didion was 80 and therefore challenging ageist stereotypes. As if Katie Kitamura is a white, blonde, rich-coded woman—or even young. She’s a 46 year old Asian American woman.
But back to Didion. One of the most mythologized writers in America for her taste and style. I hear this complaint a lot, why are people asking writers questions that have nothing to do with their writing. Well:
Wtf does Joan Didion’s packing list and her leaning against a corvette have to do with anything?
Wtf does James Baldwin casually chain smoking in interviews, pretentious leg cross and all, calling the interviewer, ‘baby’ have to with anything?
Wtf does Jack Kerouac being fine as fuck have to do with anything?
It has to do with EVERYTHING!! Because when we talk about these writers, we also talk about these iconic qualities. Their style. We care, we’ve always cared, about the person behind the craft. Not every writer has to feed this curiosity. But some are born to be in the spotlight. Cunt is their calling.
No one would be talking about this if Kitamura had bought a $24 hardback book because we expect hardbacks to cost that much, if not more, and also, we think books are important. They are a moral purchase that reveal something about ourselves that we want revealed: intelligence, depth. We understand books as being particularly relevant to the writer’s life, as if all writers do is read and write.
We don’t think makeup is important. Or fashion. Those things are vapid, empty, consumerist, wasteful. They’re beneath the serious writer.
Though even books aren’t entirely spared in this essay:
Kitamura’s choices serve no such higher purpose, unless you count that she recommends a few books. Two of the books are “about the size of a deck of cards,” too small for most libraries to carry, and—you might argue—at $16–$18 are as “obscenely priced” as her hair clips.
UM, the higher purpose is now her lips are poppin. But also, we put writers in this weird position where most of them don’t make any fucking money for years and it’s like, we should pay artists a fair wage, but when they make a fair wage it’s like, you out of touch asshole.
Who decides what a serious writer does or doesn’t look like? What should she have put on that list? A fax machine, graph paper? I actually don’t know.
A few years ago, I spoke to an incredible fashion historian for a show I was producing. One of the things she talked about is how no one really questions paying millions for a Picasso, but we question paying large sums for fashion. One is art, the other is a hobby. She told me this is because the making of clothes—sewing, knitting, weaving—has traditionally been women’s work, often poor women’s work, and so we don’t value it. We don’t think we should have to pay that much for it. She also explained there are so few fashion history programs in the country for the same reason—fashion isn’t taken seriously as an academic discipline. Fashion and makeup are the domains of women and queer men.
There are plenty of subcultures, demographics for whom investing in your appearance is part of a tradition, a point of pride and dignity. The gays and the gworls are not turning up to the function looking the fuck terrible. Black women are not attending the soiree with their hair in shambles—and hair can cost hundreds—braids, weaves, relaxers. There’s a kind of white middle-class person who likes to pretend to be broke to show symbolic solidarity with people in actual poverty (weird), then shame other people for not also doing this. Folks, I don’t know any Black people who do this. We’re still over here trying to get back pay for slavery.
They want us out here giving nothing. But who does it serve not to serve?
Katie Kitamura happens to eat in all her author photos. She’s also an excellent writer. Let her be hot. Let her have her lip gloss.
The question of whether interviews like the one in New York Magazine actually sell books came up again and again. As a steward of pomp and circumstance, that thinking is myopic to me. Few interviews neatly translate into x number of sales. It’s all a bit mushier than that. And are we simply looking to sell a couple copies, or are we trying to carve out a space in the shared cultural imagination, far beyond a book’s pub date?
I’ll leave you with the question the author of that essay leaves her own readers:
What would you have done in Kitamura’s situation? Declined the interview? Listed only books among the things “you can’t live without”?4 Recommended your mascara and eyeliner in addition to your lip gloss?
One person commented that they would have declined to do the interview, even if they were an artist starving for sales.
Another said they would’ve disintegrated in embarrassment if they’d done what Kitamura had done.
I would’ve turned up to that Zoom interview in giant Gucci Hexagon glasses, full blow out, a beat face and, let’s be honest, probably jacked up nails.
Good thing none of us are or will ever be the fabulous Katie Kitamura.
I’m actually seeing that the lip gloss is $25 on Clinique’s website (though on sale for $18.75 right now). The essay in question says $24 so I use it throughout, we’ll just be wrong together
I LITERALLY pulled out my calculator for this and now someone needs to give me $24
child/slave labor and environmental tomfuckery
So basically a reading list which LitHub and literally everywhere else has covered
as an asian author, her being asian absolutely has to do with her being targeted for this shit lmao
I read that other essay and was like am I supposed to feel bad that I 100% would jump at the chance to tell someone about my lipgloss if they thought enough people liked my writing to care to read that article…