Against our better judgement, it seems that The Hills has become our current Netflix obsession. It’s not exactly that we wanted to get obsessed with the lives of overprivileged, inexplicably successful Californian teenagers, but somehow it just happened – and the nostalgia hit is super addictive.
While the show's star Lauren Conrad and sidekick Heidi Montag were inoffensive enough, there were some names that scarred us deeply enough that we still remember the chill they instilled nearly two decades later, without quite remembering why.
Does Kelly Cutrone ring any bells?
Yep, thought so. Kelly was the ferocious boss of Lauren Conrad and fellow intern Whitney Port after they jumped ship from Teen Vogue to work for Kelly’s edgy fashion PR agency, Peoples’ Revolution. As well as appearing on the show and essentially hiring the girls for a plot line, Kelly is a PR legend in her own right - and has fond memories of the show.
Speaking to Huffpost back in 2017, Kelly said, ‘I liked being on 'The Hills. It's one of the easiest jobs I have ever had in my life. I wish every day could be "The Hills" day! How hard is it to go to work and yell at Roxy? It's not that hard!’
Well, she could have fooled us, given the scowl that accompanied her pretty much everywhere during her reign of terror. Remember when she famously told LC, ‘if you have to cry, go outside’, which went on to become such a trademark catchphrase that she named her autobiography it?
Kelly really set the precedent from her very first introduction to the show, when Lauren was sent by Teen Vogue to try and secure two extra tickets for unnamed Vogue editors to a fashion show Kelly was working. As an innocent Lauren waits quietly for the PR mogul – her mistake being not knowing who Kelly actually was – she’s curtly told, ‘Who are you waiting for? I’m Kelly Cutrone.’
But as adults re-watching the show, there’s a certain understanding and, dare we say, empathy, for Kelly’s brand of cut-throat, take-no-prisoners efficiency. Despite later describing Lauren as ‘sweet and diligent and funny’, Kelly does often give the sense on screen of being the only grown-up in the room, doing her best to keep things moving in a pressurised, fast-moving industry.
Speaking to Refinery21 in 2018 ahead of the MTV reboot (which didn’t feature Kelly or even LC), Kelly reflected: ‘People have said so many things about me, like that I make people eat lunch underneath a table in a back room to the fact that they can’t believe I’m a mother — I’ve heard it all. But it’s a very complicated business and it takes a really long time to learn PR.
'I think a lot of times people say, Oh, PR people don’t know what they’re doing. They just talk all day and put people together. But that’s really not what it is. You have to be able to think really far down the road as to how you want something to go, especially now more than ever.’
So perhaps, even now, there's something to learn from Kelly. Even if we're not wishing she'd been our boss...