Young Hollywood Rich Bitch
Who gets to be an LA cool girl?
Recently, after I told someone that I grew up beside a farm, he said:
“You don’t give small town,” with a dry lilt, his lips skewed into a stoned smile.
“Thank you so much,” I replied acerbically. “I’ve worked really hard.”
What I meant by this: growing up, I always wanted to be a city girl. I didn’t want to have to wear practical outdoor shoes, I wanted to be Andy in The Devil Wears Prada, hailing a cab on her way to Condé in knee high boots, or Elle Fanning in Somewhere, sunning at the Chateau Marmont with her washed up actor Dad (chic).
I’ve learned to hold this small-town part of myself with grace, while growing and evolving into the woman I’ve long dreamed of being.
My fascination with Addison Rae’s trajectory in this regard has been well documented. In a recent NY Times Popcast interview, Rae described how she started strategically posting on TikTok in her senior year of high school in Louisiana, so she could “make it out.”
Usually, “making it out” means moving to New York or LA.
I want to live a Big Life, I’ve always thought. Meaning: a life where you’re running around New York and then you’re flying to Paris, where work takes you to London on a whim and then you’re sipping a martini at the Sunset Tower in a slip dress and kitten heels. Celebrity sightings and book deals and magazine articles and spending money without thinking about it and meeting more people than you could’ve imagined and fashion shows and flights and cold blue water and string bikinis and cobblestone streets and kissing in cabs. The magic of Making It.
I asked a friend who lives in LA (a trusted source—he loves the Chateau and listens to Lana’s spoken word poetry in the car) about who gets to be an LA cool girl. Which is really a question of who, in a particular sense, gets to make it.
I think it’s super subjective, he texted me back.
cool girls in LA to me have a sense of style that can’t be replicated without being inauthentic - someone who took the time to curate.
An unknown source of income bc it doesn’t matter where it comes from she’s using it to be iconic lol
and usually it’s the girls with RBF, but are actually so nice if you get to know them
I think well connected ppl embody that if the connections are genuine and that’s why they’re “in the club”
they’re well known and ppl want to be them or fk them lol
Whenever I go to LA, I feel slightly out of place in this way. There’s a sense of star sparkling glamour to the girls there, an unknown legend beauty grounded in a 60s, Laurel Canyon dreamworld. I get in my head about not naturally belonging to this world, one that I’ve long romanticized; from watching Sofia Coppola movies and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to reading Joan and Eve with religious devotion. By devouring Hollywood love stories, like Anjelica Huston’s essay about attending a party at Jack Nicholson’s and never leaving, or by consuming Devon Lee Carlson’s sun-drenched, matcha fuelled, leopard print life through my iPhone (in a pop culture canon full circle, Carlson is dating Duke Nicholson, Jack Nicholson’s grandson, who was also pictured on the cover of Lana del Rey’s album Norman Fucking Rockwell).
In her essay on falling in love with Jack Nicholson, Huston writes:
“My old life ended and my new life began as I was standing next to a baggage carousel in the customs hall at LAX in March 1973.”
Sometimes I catch myself waiting for my life to arrive in this way. When’s it gonna be my turn, as Lana sings. I taste it when I land at the airport, watching palm trees pass by out the express bus window with my earbuds in. When I get a large green juice at Whole Foods and walk around West Hollywood, lost in a dream.
When I asked my friend if the coolest LA girls are born or bred, he replied:
the OG girls might have been here longer and made more connects over their life here but coolness comes from anywhere
she was drawn here for a reason
The phrase “Young Hollywood Rich Bitch” comes from a YouTube podcast that I watched stoned in bed. Chronically online internet girls of the 2014 persuasion likely know Kylie Jenner’s LA bestie @stassiebaby, aka Anastasia Karanikolaou, who recently launched a video podcast with her “best friend” and manager.
The phrase came about as a way to describe Karanikolaou’s luxury sense of taste.
“As crazy as I am—princess, bougie, whatever you want to call it,” she began, red wine glass in hand.
“Wait, is this going to sound really bratty?” she laughed. “Whatever, fuck it I don’t care. Maybe I am a brat.”
She describes touring a prospective new home with her manager and her manager’s husband. The husband gave the space a disapproving sniff before turning to Karanikolaou and saying that she needed a “young Hollywood rich bitch house . . . not this stuffy old home.”
“It’s an energy,” she continued. “Once you turn on the YHRB, you can’t get rid of it.”
A Young Hollywood Rich Bitch could be a nepo baby, like Romy Mars (Sofia Coppola’s pop song posting daughter) or one of the many Instagram-adjacent “It Girls” not dissimilar from the type my friend described. Young and hot, operating with mysterious wealth, flitting through a life of Nobu, Erewhon, the pink and green Beverly Hills Hotel print, private planes, black cards, European vacations, Nice Guy nights and back rooms and “shopping addictions” and hot pilates.
While I don’t necessarily want to be a YHRB per se, I do crave the quiet luxury of a rich LA girl life. I want to wash farmer’s market carrots in a bright, yellow kitchen and step out of a steaming hot bath onto black and white checkered tiled flooring, pattering around with wet hair and the windows open, warm night air seeping in. I want to live in a Spanish style, 1920s house where I hang lace curtains and slowly make my coffee in the morning. I want to have a spare bedroom that’s also a walk in closet, overflowing with vintage clothes. I want to drive along Sunset on the way to dinner listening to Julie London. I want to be perpetually tanned and feel that, yes, life should be like this.
Over martinis at a popular French bistro in Toronto, my friend Rhea charted the difference between It girls, Party girls and Scene Queens.
“A party girl does exactly that,” she said, drawing a diagram on a napkin. “An it girl has something else going for her, something else that she’s known for or does. A scene queen brings people to the party . . .”
She paused and drew a box separate from the rest of the categories.
“And then there are the girls who don’t give a fuck about being seen or known,” she added, tapping the box with the tip of the pen.“They’re the coolest.”
Context is key here. Who gets to be cool in LA is defined by the city’s dreamlike nature (“There’s no community, but there’s sun,” an influencer who I follow on TikTok said).
On a recent visit to New York, as we were walking around Chinatown, a friend of mine who’s lived in Manhattan for years said that running into “like, seven people” she knows a day is crucial for her mental health.
The coolest people I know in Toronto have a strong sense of community, creative interests that they pursue passionately and a dream that they can taste on the tip of their tongue. Coolness comes from anywhere. When I close my eyes and visualize living a Big Life, fragments from the present pierce through. I picture New York and LA and my friend’s faces, laughing around the table at the little French bistro. Where this Big Life takes place changes depending on the day. She was drawn there for a reason.
A dream on the tip of a tongue. Magic ⋆.˚⭑𓂃
Coolness comes from anywhere 💧I love your brain