Fashion Publicist Kelly Cutrone, In Five Easy Quotes

Can it be said again that Kelly Cutrone is awesome? Perspicacious, hard-headed, and demonstrative of the hard work that goes into an often frothy-seeming job? I’ve often wondered what someone as smart as she is doing on reality television.

But if The City keeps Cutrone in the public eye so that she can occasionally go and say things like, “Who would have thought we’d pay five dollars for a coffee and get our news for free?” then I can make peace with that. (Perhaps she just enjoys giving girls like Whitney Port complexes.) Somehow, Cutrone has virtually always escaped the editing process of the various shows she’s been involved with — The Hills and The City — unscathed. While she could have been cast by the producers and written off by the audience as a bitch, instead she mostly just looks like a hard-working woman interested in efficiency. “You’re going to need to move a lot quicker than this if you’re going to work in the fashion business,” was the first thing she told Lauren Conrad, whom she’d stumped with an obvious query, back in Season One.

The Awl’s Choire Sicha did the Internet a favor and posted a “slightly rough” transcript of a conference call Cutrone participated in to promote her new book, and the premiere season of her reality show, Kell On Earth. Cutrone gamely fielded queries from Us Weekly (“Kelly: You Twittered about me this morning! Us: Did you see that yourself? Kelly: Yeah, no, I have other people to do that for me”), Life & Style, and from whatever unidentified dolt asked her, “What’s your recurring trend, in the fashion scene?” Before the lot gets processed into tabloid sausage, let’s examine the quotable raw materials:

On Her Looks

You know, people have strong connotations of what women on television should say and what they should wear and how they should look. And I’m just not into it. The Bravo shot of me on the couch? It looks like I had sex with Heather Locklear and five margaritas.

On Feminism

I never thought of myself as a feminist because I believe in equality.

Amazing, isn’t it, how many people use that word without knowing what it means.

On How To Tell The Difference Between The Hills and Kell On Earth

Well, on The Hills, I’m on with a bunch of blonde girls. And on this one I’m on with a bunch of black-haired girls.

On ‘Dopey Bloggers’ And The Future Of Media:

I think that, the media as we know it, the world that we knew 5 or 10 years ago, just does not exist any more…I think it’s the wild wild west and it’s free game and who would have thought we’d pay five dollars for a coffee and get our news for free?…But my fear is that Twitter is the new American literature. Or I can only watch things on the Internet for 30 seconds, because that’s all the viewer’s going to watch on the Internet. It’s a very, very bizarre time.

On Being ‘Scary’ To Work For

I’ve been doing this a really really long time and I’m a for-profit company. I’m not a college professor. I’m thinking about opening a college! This is a joke. And I’ll start charging interns to work here.

When asked if she had learned anything from her interns, she snapped: “I’ve learned that I don’t want to send my daughter to college.” Perhaps if Cutrone widened her net — and paid her interns something, so she wouldn’t be reliant for free labor on NYU privilege cases who’d rather be shopping — then she might end up working with some people who were more than just socialites in headsets, filling the gap between college and marriage to a hedge-funder. Some people more like herself. But I digress. And who better than a woman in her job, in her industry, to critique society’s unshakable notions of “what [women] should wear and how they should look”?

Some Highlights From Today’s Kelly Cutrone Press Call [The Awl]

Earlier:
Fashion PR Lady Kelly Cutrone Is So Boss
The Hills Kelly Cutrone: “In Christianity, Mary Gets Pregnant On Her Own. She Doesn’t Even Get Fucked.”