Anastasia Karanikolaou is a person who exists, mostly on Kylie Jenner’s Instagram. She is a model, and dreams of being “more prominent in the fashion and beauty world” so she can “help change the world we live in,” probably via a proletariat uprising or something. She was also briefly married to former Netflix heartthrob Noah Centineo for exactly five minutes, before the rumor was quickly quashed. What a woman of mystery and intrigue!
Various gossip outlets reported on Wednesday that anthropomorphic Old Spice deodorant Noah Centineo had eloped in Las Vegas with Instagram model and Kardashian hanger-on Karanikolaou, also known as Stassie Baby. The news quickly swept through the Jezebel newsroom, where I sifted through cries like: “Wait, the girl from Vanderpump Rules?” No, she is not the girl from Vanderpump Rules, but they have remarkably similar energy. No, this is the girl from Kylie Jenner’s Instagram feed, or Youtube, where you can learn many helpful things, like a Crunch Wrap Supreme recipe she’s probably made for Kylie Jenner.
Amidst the frenzy, I quickly tried to explain Stassie Baby to Jezebel. She is an Instagram model and Good American jeans ambassador. Sometimes she is brunette and sometimes she is blonde. She has been friends with Kylie Jenner since middle school, and because the laws of physics and biology are extremely powerful, the two have slowly transformed into a joint Mighty Morphin Power Ranger robot of Instagram filters and Facetune.She is also maybe dating, or even just having sex with, Noah Centineo, to whom she was (briefly!) rumored to be married. They are not, sadly, as it would have been the second most interesting thing to talk about concerning Stassie Baby, whose primary personality trait is existing on other, more famous people’s Instagram accounts.
That’s not shade. I genuinely think it’s a feat that the best friend of the world’s most famous zoomer slash millenial has kept her secrets just that—secrets. You’ll see Stassie Baby out and about, but you will not hear about any scandals surrounding her and Kylie Jenner, nor will you find out much about her day–to–day life, besides the fact she apparently spends most of it changing between various swimsuits. She does have a sense of humor, though, like her best friend, which is a proclamation I’m sure will scandalize many. Yes, Kylie is actually funny sometimes. I can even feel myself wretching internally at the statement, but I’m both a journalist and a scientist. I must speak the facts.
There is possibly a reality where Stassie Baby keeps herself close to Kylie Jenner for the fame, business opportunities, and the side hustle of selling all Jenner’s secrets off to TMZ and The Blast. Personally, I think these two are just friends, which is the more scandalous and shocking reality to live in. Just read the birthday wish Kylie left Stassie earlier this summer, while the two spent the early lockdown together:
happy birthday to my fairy 42 sister @stassiebaby!! you are the rarest of all time.. truly a gift to this world & the best aunty to my babygirl. i can’t believe we are celebrating your 23rd birthday. i cherish every year we’ve spent together and i thank God for putting you in my life. i wouldn’t be able to do it without you. i have your back till the end of time. today and every day.. we celebrate you ♀️
I also find it generally fascinating that around Kylie Jenner and Stassie Baby exists an entire cadre of other influencers and models and famous children who look exactly like Kylie Jenner. It’s almost as if every single mildly rich girl in the Valley has been sucked into orbit around them. It’s not Kylie Jenner that attracts someone like Stassie Baby. It’s Stassie Baby that attracts everyone like Kylie Jenner.
So who is Stassie Baby, really? The more I tried to explain her to the Jezebel staff, the more lost I became. She is a blank canvas, or she is an amalgamation of approximately one million things, and really, nothing at all. It reminds me of art theorist David Batchelor’s idea from 2000’s Chromophobia of a sort of all-white aesthetics most popular among Kylie and her friends. The kind of white that “looked endless. Endless like an egg must look endless from the inside; endless because seamless, continuous, empty, uninterrupted, or rather: uninterruptable.” In Batchelor’s hypothesis, Stassie Baby would be the “kind of white that is more than white,” a void that “passes by you, renders you inconspicuous and insignificant.”
But more than that, Stassie Baby is just a girl, in the world, vibing in both the foreground and background of everyone else’s lives.