Sliving
Paris Hilton was the hotel heiress branded famous for doing nothing. But, as Kathryn Madden writes, staying relevant for two decades and building a glittering pink empire that’s surpassed $6 billion in revenue? That's hot.
Paris Hilton is driving a holographic BMW i8 Roadster. She’s wearing a Barbiecore catsuit monogrammed like a designer handbag with her catchphrase Sliving. That’s slay and living (your best life), for the uninitiated. Her miniature pig Princess Pigelette and Bengal cat Cutesie are in tow, and a reggae remix of “Stars Are Blind” is blasting on the CD sound system. Any moment now, expect Lindsay Lohan to appear in a Juicy Couture tracksuit, trucker hat and Ugg boots, and the pair will go for sushi and spray tans in West Hollywood before stumbling out of Les Deux to the flash and click of hungry paparazzi.
It all looks and sounds a lot like 2005, although it’s technically not even 2025. We’re in Slivingland, an alternate universe created by Hilton with metaverse gaming platform Roblox. Here, fans can party with Hilton in the club, watch her DJ in immersive real-virtual concerts, shop for digital wearables (pink headphones; the aforementioned catsuit) and even earn reward points to redeem at real-life Hilton hotels. “I look around my life [and] it’s like a cartoon. I’ve created this fantasy world cartoon,” said the star in her 2020 documentary This is Paris, perhaps foreshadowing the launch of this sparkly virtual universe.
Slivingland somehow captures the enigma that is Paris Hilton: a ditzy and frivolous public persona; a brand built on spectacle and fantasy; a pioneer of modern celebrity and everything that’s wrong with it; a self-marketing genius, a self-described tech geek and a shrewd entrepreneur. According to a report co-authored by 11:11 Media and metaverse research think tank Geeiq, Slivingland was visited by more than 3.2 million users in its first six months and achieved exposure equivalent to a traditional ad campaign worth $95 million. To be clear, 11:11 Media is Hilton’s company (named after her favourite time of day), which she launched in 2021 sans external investors. It encompasses television, audio, licensing and digital verticals, and in 2024 it made approximately $80 million in revenue, with a 50 per cent profit margin. Co-founder and president Bruce Gersh told Axios, “Paris is our Mickey Mouse, and we’re hopefully the next Disney.”
But how did a party-girl heiress, the great-granddaughter of Hilton Hotels founder Conrad Hilton, come to rival Mickey Mouse in the icon stakes? She was the dumb blonde notorious for a leaked sex tape, a 22-day stint in jail and a highly quotable riches-to-rags reality show (“What’s Walmart? Do they, like, sell wall stuff?” Hilton quipped on The Simple Life in 2003). She danced on tables in ra-ra skirts, was splashed across the tabloids under headlines like ‘Bimbo Summit’ and became a punchline on all the late-night talk shows. Except 20 years later she’s omnipresent once again, and this time around she’s sitting – no standing – atop a megabrand that’s surpassed $6 billion in revenue. Was the joke actually on us?
To understand Hilton’s longevity is to understand her fans – an army of loyal followers known as the Little Hiltons. The relationship is built on mutual adoration: they love her, she loves them; they DM her, she DMs
them; they buy her products, she spends hours at launch events meeting every single one. She’s even admitted to having fans sleep over at her house. “It’s nice to have people around me who love me for being me and have no bad intentions,” Hilton told New! magazine in early 2020. “It’s just all about true love.”
Onn, a 34-year-old superfan from Bangkok, Thailand, has looked up to Paris since she was 15. She’s immaculately groomed, wearing a pearl headband atop her long, straight blonde hair – dyed to mimic Hilton’s – with blue contact lenses and fluttery false lashes. “What I admire most about Paris is that she has such a big and pure heart,” she says. “I’ve seen lots of celebrities who don’t really treat their fans right, but Paris treats her fans like a family. I got to meet her at a launch for her Ruby Rush fragrance in 2023, held at Eveandboy, which is kind of like Thailand’s Priceline. I went up on the stage and asked to get my phone case signed. I told her that I have a cat named Paris, and she was like, ‘I know, I’ve seen your Instagram Story.’ And then the security guards were like, ‘Paris, time’s up, we need to go,’ but she stayed and had a photo with every fan. And later she reposted my Instagram Reel and followed me. It was a dream come true.”
The tag ‘famous for being famous’ – of which Hilton is the OG poster
girl – is usually thick with derision. “In a ravenous celebrity culture,” opined The New York Times in 2003, “Ms Hilton’s rise shows how far celebrity itself has been devalued. Reality TV shows have outdrawn genuine star vehicles by exploiting the willingness of regular people to endure gross humiliation. Ms Hilton is the first celebrity to claim that exploitation for the elite.” And yet, Hilton has one thing that traditional celebrities often lack: a natural aptitude for fame. She’s attention-loving, unafraid of scandal (and yes, she’s had a few, with a history of racist and homophobic remarks), open and vain – traits shared by Hilton’s former assistant/closet organiser Kim Kardashian, who eventually swooped in and stole the rich-girl-on-reality-TV blueprint. As the noughties gave way to the 2010s, Hilton faded into relative obscurity.
This, in many ways, marked the most interesting stretch of her career. No longer the hottest fodder on blogs like, well, Perez Hilton, the flailing It-girl could have holed up in a Bel-Air mansion, collected Birkins, hosted charity lunches, got herself a cosmetic surgeon on speed dial and appeared sporadically on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alongside her aunts and mum. Instead, she quietly built an empire. She grew her fragrance dynasty, which now encompasses 30 perfumes and reportedly ranks second only to Elizabeth Taylor in celebrity-branded scent sales. And in the shadows of the recession, when clubs stopped paying stars to party, she became a DJ, spending 250 days a year travelling the world and commanding up to $2.9 million per gig. She launched dog clothes, lip glosses, sweatpants, pots, pans and prosecco, all painted Paris pink and dripping in rhinestones. Her brand is kitsch and the products are cheap – never luxe, chic or edgy like you might expect from a grown-up nepo baby, usually desperate to prove their cultural cachet. As Ochuko Akpovbovbo wrote in her business and culture Substack As Seen On, “She’s playing a different kind of influencer game, sacrificing coolness for commerciality, and it feels very her. I respect it.”
Hilton’s also earned respect for her advocacy work striving to end institutional child abuse and empowering survivors of the troubled teen industry. Shipped off to a correctional boarding school at age 16, she testified at a 2024 Congressional hearing about being violently restrained, force-fed medication, thrown into solitary confinement and
sexually abused by staff during her stays. stays. In December, her Stop
Institutional Child Abuse Act bill passed through Congress. Outside the Capitol Building in Washington DC, Hilton wore a hoodie stating ‘Legislation is hot’.
What’s crystallised is that, behind all those Swarovski crystals (that chainmail Julien Macdonald dress), Hilton was never actually dumb. Her coquettish baby voice, she’s revealed, is a trauma response and protective mask, and her clueless act was carefully crafted to shield her shyness and adult-diagnosed ADHD. Hilton’s even admitted that she came up with the “What’s Walmart?” zinger on The Simple Life to build out her character. It’s a streak of brilliance – equal parts self-aware and self-interested – that cult food writer Alison Roman noted while reviewing Netflix’s Cooking With Paris in 2021. “Some of those who watched the lasagna video that launched 5.2 million views ridiculed Paris’ technique for ‘searing’ meatballs,” she wrote. “As I watched her struggle to remove ricotta cheese from its container, I remember thinking, ‘Damn, Paris Hilton is truly so smart. So quintessentially good at being Paris Hilton.’ Come on – obviously she’s opened a container of something at least resembling ricotta. Right? While you were laughing at her, she was laughing at you for laughing at her.”
Whether masquerading as an airhead is really all that genius is, of course, up for debate. Playing a spoilt princess or a sexy baby-doll while #girlbossing all the way to the bank might be as regressive as it is subversive. “I don’t want [my daughter] to think it’s cool to be a dumb blonde,” Hilton admitted on Meghan Markle’s Archetypes podcast during a rather earnest discussion about bimbos. And yet, when you drag up some of the misogyny levelled at Hilton in the noughties – particularly a 2010 GQ interview where Piers Morgan asked questions like, “Are you good in bed? I guess it’s a rhetorical question because I watched [your] video this morning for research purposes and the answer is clearly affirmative” – the armour she wrapped herself in makes more sense.
And she’s stayed tirelessly true to the bit. While pop stars reinvent themselves to remain relevant and Kardashians shape-shift with the times – even your awkward cousin with 272 TikTok followers is in the midst of a rebrand – Paris, now 44, has always been unashamedly Paris. If not the authentic person, then the caricature. Like her performance in last year’s The Simple Life reboot, Paris & Nicole: The Encore, where she turns to the camera with doe eyes and deadpans, “I now know that Walmart doesn’t sell walls,” slipping back into a breathy, saccharine purr. “They sell Paris Hilton cookware.” ◼
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