Who the Fuck Gives a Shit About Kate Bosworth

Kate Bosworth has a new collection for Topshop. Actually, it’s her second collection for Topshop. She’s also on the November cover of Lucky magazine. Actually, it’s her second time being on the cover of Lucky. However. Can you recall seeing her in any film besides Blue Crush? Which came out more than ten years ago?

A glance at her IMDB page shows that she’s been working. Technically. But as a person whose friends and coworkers are pop culture obsessed, I can’t think of single soul who would claim to care about, be a fan of, or be even mildly interested in Kate Bosworth.

Timothy Mitchell and Rebecca Suhrawardi have a piece in today’s New York Post that asks a question I’ve been asking for years: “What’s so great about Kate Bosworth?” Apparently insiders believe her new Topshop collection will “fly off the shelves.” And:

Despite the interest, she’s a C-list actress slightly above Mischa Barton on the scale of marketability. Yet she’s a perennial face on magazine covers; this year she’s graced Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle UK, and the November issue of Lucky.

“Icon is a stretch. Kate is no Audrey Hepburn, but she does look great in clothes,” says stylist Robert Verdi.

Right. “Looks great in clothes” is code for “blonde and thin.” Because that’s really what we’re talking about, right? There are dozens of weird/cool C-list stars who are quirky, or women of color, or not super duper thin. But Kate Bosworth? Blonde, safe, pretty, sorta-familiar face with a teeny tiny body you can dress up. Bingo: Magazine covers.

Ever since models fell out of favor for mainstream ladymag covers, celebs have been the go-to choice. But while some stars make sense, others seem to just be model stand-ins. And truly, her small frame is at the crux of this issue, because sample sizes are small, and editors and stylists like when things hang just so, and Kate Bosworth is just so slender. In fact, there was a time when people thought something was wrong with her — including Bosworth herself. From the February 2008 issue of Vogue:

For all her nonchalance and poise, Bosworth is not immune to ups and downs mental and physical. At the height of the media storm surrounding her split with Bloom, the coverage intensified still further when photographs of Bosworth looking gray and gaunt emerged. An intelligent and sensitive young woman was suddenly caught in outlandish narratives of anorexia and the perils of having a body in Hollywood. It was true, Bosworth says, that up to a dozen pounds had dropped off her petite frame; but it was also true that she was distraught about an illness in the family, and that “whenever anything happens that’s very painful or stressful, we all lose weight—my mother, my aunt, my grandmother.”

Thus, on losing all that weight, Bosworth went to a nutritionist (“I honestly thought something was wrong with me”) and, crucially, formed zero attachment to her undersize self. “I was concerned for my health and my fans, the public. I would have said, Please don’t look at this as the standard of some kind of beauty or health.”

And yet! She was then and is now being rewarded as a paragon of beauty and lovingly photographed over and over and over again. Not for acting talent or inspiring contributions to humanity, but because she’s thin and blonde. It’s so much more than just “getting by on your looks” — she happens to embody a WASPy “All-American” look that Western society has decided is ideal. Nothing she did about that. Genetic lottery winner.

The Collection, as it is called, is not bad. A silver skirt, a leather shirtdress, some stiletto boots. Cool. She looks rain-drenched and bedraggled in the promo video. Whatever. It just seems like instead of this same face, over and over, it would be nice to see some new (completely deserving) folks raised up on a pedestal like this. Jurnee Smollett-Bell? Tao Okamoto? Maggie Q? Rinko Kikuchi? Kat Graham? Hello?

What’s So Great About Kate Bosworth? [New York Post]

She’s back! Kate Bosworth unveils a second Topshop collection [Daily Mail]

Rejoice! The Full Kate Bosworth For Topshop Collection Is Here [Refinery29]

Kate Bosworth Debuts Second Topshop Collection [Fashionista]