Love her or fear her, there’s no question that Kelly Cutrone gets the job done. In moments of chaos, hers is the voice that cuts through the noise—and shakes you up along the way.
Kelly Cutrone answers her phone from Mexico with a slightly peppy, even happy tone. (“I’ve already said anything that could be incriminating more than once,” she jokes after I say I need to record the conversation, “so don’t worry about it.”) The P.R. maven who heads up the firm People’s Revolution, which she founded in the mid-’90s, is there on a speaking engagement. Am I surprised by the friendliness? A bit. Then again, recently, I’ve been watching sweet moments of Cutrone with convicted hot-girl felon Anna Delvey on Instagram. After masterminding a fashion show on the ankle bracelet-sporting girl-about-town’s roof, the two now cook and kibitz. The low-fi production, filmed at Cutrone’s upstate home, emanates a loveliness that says, Hey, maybe we could be friends.
Still, this is all a far cry from who I thought she’d be. Up until now, Cutrone has scared me. If you were a teenager in the 2000s and caught flickers of her no-nonsense attitude while watching The Hills (2006–2010) from your small-town television screen, you’d feel the same fright. Fast-forward 15 years, and I can’t escape those cutthroat Cutroneisms. She circulates on my TikTok, where those soul-engulfing, cringe-embalming moments live on, spliced from clips from America’s Next Top Model (2003–2018), Cutrone’s own reality television show, Kell on Earth (2010), and the aforementioned The Hills. Here’s a scene that will send a shiver up your spine: Lauren “LC” Conrad, a then- Teen Vogue intern, approaches Cutrone at a fashion show and says she needs a ticket for Lisa Love and two other Vogue editors. The Orange County teen dream pronounces Hamish Bowles’ name not only like the stomach’s food processor but also as if referring to a pair. “Hamish Bowles is one person,” Cutrone flatly tells Conrad with her signature matter-of-fact bite. LC is flabbergasted, too stunned to speak coherently! Death by a thousand Cutrone cuts. Ouch.
Yes, that’s gotta hurt, but Cutrone’s no-bullshit attitude is tough love. She explains to me how we, women, have lost the plot because we are too nice—we aren’t even eating anymore. While on the road for hours en route to Mexico City, she sat down with her driver at a restaurant and asked if she was hungry. The driver, a woman in her early 30s, insisted she wasn’t. “I was like, ‘I’m seriously going to ask you one more time: Are you hungry, and would you like to eat?’” says Cutrone. She finally agreed to have a bite. “I was just like, Women are designed to do this shit. It’s crazy.”
Cutrone believes our power is connected to true femininity. Not that polite femininity, that refuse-to-eat femininity. Cutrone’s definition is more of a guttural fuck-off femininity, our ancient-core femininity. “Who’s the most feared animal in the forest? A mother. Why isn’t that translated throughout nature? Why is it when it gets to human beings, it’s like, ‘quiet, skinny, pretty, and agreeable?’” asks Cutrone, a mother of a daughter in her early 20s. She notes that when women act “masculine,” they’re perceived as gay, adding, “It’s crazy because they assume that when a woman is acting like that, she’s acting masculine. When, in fact, she’s acting feminine.” For the first time in a while, I finally feel full.
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