The other day I walked past a café in Manhattan that had cream interiors and tastefully curated shelves and claimed to be “rooted in Ayurvedic principles” and I thought: “She’s done it again.”
Gwyneth Paltrow always seems to be 10 steps ahead of everyone else.
She started a lifestyle newsletter, called Goop, in 2008—two years before Instagram arrived to launch a million one-woman lifestyle brands, and nearly 10 years before Substack was founded. Before MAHA, and all the talk of “forever chemicals,” there was Gwyneth, in 2012, going on about “toxins” and how we might cleanse ourselves of them. She stopped eating gluten before the term “gluten-free” hit mainstream menus. And she was lambasted in the press for being out of touch long before the term “nepo baby” cannonballed into the culture.
She even found her way into the recent furor surrounding the Coldplay couple who were caught canoodling on a jumbotron at a concert outside Boston. Astronomer, the company that the reportedly cheating CEO and his suspected mistress worked at, hired Paltrow on a “very temporary basis” as its spokesperson. She appeared in a video to shout out its software products and an event it was having, winking at the scandal, while leapfrogging off the interest the otherwise little-known software company was getting. It was, simply, a genius move.
It was only a matter of time before someone wrote the biography of the Hollywood princess, even though she’s only 52. And last week, Amy Odell’s book, called Gwyneth, hit the stands. Sadly, the meticulously researched portrait is a slog. Even I don’t care how many alterations the Ralph Lauren dress she wore to the Oscars in 1999 needed. But the book poses an important question: What is it about Gwyneth?
