Stealing fame: lifestyle celebrity and the dubious cultural politics of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring Joshua N. Morrison Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA ABSTRACT In this essay, I theorize the lifestyle celebrity as a figure whose fame is premised on their aspirational status. I offer lifestyle celebrity as a complementary analytic to ordinary celebrity that allows for more precise distinction between celebrity figures. I engage Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring as a film that positions the desire for lifestyle celebrity as dangerous and irresponsible. I argue that the film places the burden of maintaining a “healthy” relationship with celebrity culture entirely on consumer-participants and affirms the class and gender performance hierarchies that structure the valuation and distribution of lifestyle celebrity. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 25 December 2018 Accepted 1 October 2019 KEYWORDS celebrity; self-branding; lifestyle media; fame; postfeminism In the months spanning October of 2008 and August of 2009, a group of California teen- agers managed to steal more than $3 million in luxury goods from the homes of celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. The culprits were dubbed “the bling ring” in the popular press, and as their story unfolded, it became clear that their motive was neither need nor malice. These teenagers wanted to emulate the celebrities from whom they stole. They wanted fame. Nancy Jo Sales of Vanity Fair helped establish this narrative. She quotes Nick Prugo, the member of the bling ring who was most cooperative with law enforcement, as saying that the alleged mastermind, Rachel Lee, was motivated to rob Hollywood starlets because she wanted to emulate their fashion. Police officer Brett Goodkin, who headed the case, also spoke with Sales. He claimed the crimes had a “stalkerish” feel and compared them to those in The Silence of the Lambs. Even the Los Angeles Police Department’s report stated that the crimes were “fueled by celebrity worship.” 1 In 2013, Sofia Coppola adapted Sales’s article into The Bling Ring,a film which tells the story as a tale of celebrity-obsessed teenagers turned fame-seeking criminals. Coppola is an important contemporary auteur and member of the Coppola filmmaking dynasty. Given her cultural cachet, it is unsurprising that the film has been engaged by scholars as an object of interest in explicating the contours of contemporary celebrity culture. Sara Pesce, for instance, approaches the film as a meditation on the tension between the partial dismantling of the classed celebrity ecosystem and the nonetheless persistent “indi- vidualized mode of power and vertical concentration of wealth” which defines celebrity. 2 Delphine Letort approaches the film as a facile critique of contemporary celebrity culture © 2020 National Communication Association CONTACT Joshua N. Morrison morr1512@umn.edu, joshua.en.morrison@gmail.com COMMUNICATION AND CRITICAL/CULTURAL STUDIES 2020, VOL. 17, NO. 2, 149–165 https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1746370