Hailey Bieber and Gwyneth Paltrow may not be as self-aware as they’d like to think.
On Friday, Bieber, née Baldwin — daughter of Stephen Baldwin, niece of Alec Baldwin and wife of Justin Bieber — celebrated her privilege weighed in on the Hollywood nepotism controversy in the most superficial way possible by wearing a white, cropped T-shirt that read: “Nepo Baby.”
“Nepo baby,” short for “nepotism baby,” is a buzzy, albeit condescending, term for children of celebrities who are now famous due partly to their parents’ fame. The topic hit its boiling point in late December when New York Magazine declared 2022 “The Year of The Nepo Baby.”
Soon after Bieber debuted her shirt, she quickly changed into a similar but sloganless tee.
Yet the paparazzi snapped enough photos of the “nepo baby” shirt that it still made its way to Instagram via InStyle over the weekend. And this is where Paltrow — a woman whose family connections in Hollywood are pretty well-established — commented on InStyle’s post of Bieber’s Tee.
“I might need a few of those,” she wrote, confirming the shirt was a hit in the nepo baby community at the very least.
Although the shirt and Paltrow’s comment may come off as tongue-in-cheek ownership of a topic that most celebrities have responded pretty poorly to, it also lacks any further nuance that might acknowledge why some find the idea of nepo babies so bothersome.
Allison Williams offered a much more self-aware and respectful statement on the matter while speaking to Vulture last week. The “M3gan” star, whose father is former NBC journalist Brian Williams, acknowledged to the entertainment site that she was indeed a nepo baby and that she understood why it irks some in the general public, calling nepotism “unfair” while also admitting that “no one’s really working that hard to make it fair.”
But hey, if Paltrow does get a few nepo baby shirts, here’s hoping she sends one to Jamie Lee Curtis.