Uncorking The Complicated Politics of Chrissy Teigen's Cabernet
The cookbook author and former swimsuit model was flambéed online Wednesday after she copped to spending $13,000 USD on a bottle of wine.
Like most Twitter users, Chrissy Teigen contains multitudes. She’s a social media star who sometimes hosts television shows, a mother of two who sometimes parties with Beyonce, a former model who sometimes shares photos of her stretch marks. She is famous in a way that is genuinely hard to fathom. She has 13.6M Twitter followers and another 33.9M on Instagram. And yet she started as a relative unknown. For years she operated in the same universe as Spike TV and Maxim magazine, a place almost unilaterally engineered to reflect the male gaze. One of her earliest modelling features, back when she was known as Christine Teigen, was on the video game website IGN. Somehow, that turned into bigger breaks; holding a suitcase on the premier season of Deal or No Deal, and repeat appearances in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition.
But while most people might associate her with looks or likes, for me Teigen evokes thoughts of food and flavour. In 2011 she launched a WordPress blog called So Delushious with the intent of creating “a place where we can talk and share our love of food and maybe some other random things here and there.” It touched on everything from David Chang’s Porkbelly, to the food she and husband John Legend ate on their trip to Italy, to a fairly candid post about dieting as a model. I didn’t read So Delushious at the time, but a lot of people did. Her foray into foodie-dom was sealed in 2016, when she traded the cover of SI for the cover of her own co-authored cookbook, Cravings, which promised “UNFORGETTABLE” recipes, “without a jillion ingredients”. It quickly became a New York Times best seller. The follow-up, Cravings: Hungry for More, found similar success and saw the multi-hyphenate star launch a Target-exclusive line of cookware (disclosure, my better-half and I own both cook books… and most of the Target line).
With this culinary context in mind, it seemed par for the course when, on Wednesday, Teigen asked her Twitter followers “What’s the most expensive thing you’ve eaten that you thought sucked?” It’s the sort of open ended influencer question that exists solely to drive engagement, fun for the few people who care and only mildly irritating for those who don’t. Unfortunately for Teigen, the thread became a flash point when, in an effort to elicit replies, she admitted that she and Legend were once recommended a bottle of Cabernet that cost “13,000 dollars”, and that they “didn’t even finish”. And so the Parasite screenshots began to circulate.
For the rest of the day Teigen was a trending topic on Twitter. Users accused her of being “out of touch”, flaming her for flaunting the ill-informed and outlandish purchase amidst a global pandemic that has left many people, particularly Americans, out of work and out of money. Despite the high volume of responses, most takes fell into one of three categories. Some saw the tweet as a win for the working class, applauding the waiter for his ability to deceive rich people into overpaying. Many more viewed it as yet another reason to “bust out the guillotine” and “eat the rich”. But a rare few took it as further confirmation of Teigen’s apparent personal flaws, proof that she is an “insufferable” “rich asshole” who is “dumb as rocks” and needs to “shut the fuckkk up for once (sic)”. “Go get more injections into your fat fucking face” wrote user @_trudle (AKA daddy long balls). “Hope you dye in your sleep (sic)” replied @lisafixation (the spelling was likely to avoid suspension). “What a fucking pig loser cunt” added @Daniell63501905. “You drank until you killed your baby lol”wrote another, pretending to be former CCP Chairman Jiang Zing.
Even as a troll, that last tweet feels uncomfortably cruel, given the other thing Teigen tweeted that day. In October, she and Legend received an outpouring of support, after it was revealed a “partial placenta abruption” had resulted in the death of their unborn child, whom they named Jack. Photos taken in the hospital as the couple said goodbye show an emotionally raw scene, with Teigen hunched in her hospital bed weeping and, in another, cradling a bundle that is presumably Jack with Legend nearby. In a blog post explaining her decision to capture the moment, and eventually share it, Teigen wrote “I explained to a very hesitant John that I needed them, and that I did NOT want to have to ever ask… I knew I needed to know of this moment forever”. In a tweet sent about an hour after she copped to the Cabernet, but before the thread really exploded, Teigen explained that Jack “would have been born this week” and that she even felt “kicks in my belly, but it's not phantom.”
And so, I’m conflicted. Do I think $13,000 is a stupid amount to spend on wine? Yes. Do I think her tweet was tone deaf given everything that’s going on? Absolutely. Do I think she deserves the guillotine? Or to be bullied over her appearance? Or to be reminded of her dead child? No.
Not at all, actually.
For starters, Teigen’s tweet implies that she thinks the price tag is ridiculous. The story is not relatable, but I’m not sure it was intended to be. Within the context of her thread, the tweet functions as an ice breaker, a way to generate conversation. In this regard it succeeded, albeit in ways the star clearly never intended. That $13,000 dollars could change the lives of so many Americans is an important and unfortunate reality to consider – but also one that feels slightly beyond Teigen’s scope. Like yeah, she should be taxed more. But she’s not misappropriating public funds. She’s not breaking a promise of $2,000 in COVID relief. If anything, her purchase reflects a failure of our current system of power. One which rewards people like Teigen for their ability to monetize everyday existence.
Teigen’s fame stems in large part from her desire to draw the curtain on the clandestine world of the 1%. Whether you think she deserves to be bullied for her lifestyle or not, fact is you only know she spent $13,000 on wine because she told you. I personally find the information unsurprising, given Teigen and Legend’s A-list status, reported incomes, and love of food. But I think transparency is preferable to the shadowy alternatives being floated by some Twitter users. In fact, the repeated suggestion that rich people would be better off de-camping to a different platform, tells me Twitter’s problem isn’t actually the current system of power.
Their problem is seeing someone like Teigen spend $13,000. Period.
2021 has seen numerous examples of extreme wealth, but few have attracted the degree of vitriol aimed at Teigen, who is an American of Thai and Norwegian descent. At Biden’s inauguration, the husband of Kamala Harris’ niece wore a pair of Dior Air Jordan 1’s valued at $10,000; his drip was almost unilaterally praised. Weeks later, paper trading financial analyst Keith Gill became a Reddit superstar, when his $53,000 investment in GameStop rocketed to roughly $48M in value (he is now currently under investigation). Lil Uzi Vert, too, pierced his forehead with $24M pink diamond and was met with a primarily tongue-in-cheek response.
At the risk of being permanently branded a class traitor, the repeated references to France’s Reign of Terror in Teigen’s mentions are not so much cute as they are concerning. Yes, a lot of Twitter users evoked the image of a guillotine as a joke. But a quick survey of Teigen’s replies reveals a dark underbelly of misogyny and potential extremism. Many of her harshest critics are men, or at least Twitter accounts posing as men. As online anger manifests into offline threats of violence against women, including incidents involving Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it’s not hard to imagine similar plots against celebrities like Teigen.
While it elicits visions of equality and harmony, the language of the French Revolution is also inherently the language of violence and extremism. It implies a blade is necessary to enact real change. That may have been true in the 18th century, and it could even be true now. But it’s worth questioning where that violence is being directed, what it would accomplish, and most importantly, for whom. As the last four years have shown us, the capitalist patriarchy and red wine have a lot in common. Each soaks deep into the fibre, and stains everything it touches.