In 1996, when I was in college, Esquire magazine brilliantly pranked the world and invented an entire starlet named Allegra Coleman. They gave her the cover, and wrote a profile about her. (Ali Larter played the part of Allegra Coleman, and she says this actually did get her a manager and “open[ed] so many doors” for her.) This was many moons ago and I’ve never forgotten it. And as I look at the red carpet for last night’s Billboard Women in Music Awards, it occurs to me that any number of the folks in attendance could also be fake. I do not recognize them, I do not know who they are. Some of this is because music is and always has been my weakest area of pop culture knowledge, some of this is because I am middle-aged, some of it is because there are simply too many celebrities now for one person’s brain to hold them all. There are so many more ways to be famous than there used to be, thanks to new social mediums — and the death of the print version of Entertainment Weekly means I don’t even have a weekly primer for who is doing what now. Fame is more silo’ed than it used to be. OR ALL OF THESE PEOPLE ARE FAKE! Think about it, sheeple!!
Anyway, here are a bunch of folks that I’m pretty sure are real.
