The Aughts Seem Both Cooler and Sadder in Retrospect

If any image captured the chaos of early-2000s pop culture, it was one viral shot of Paris Hilton, in 2005, wearing a shirt that said STOP BEING POOR. The heiress and reality-TV star grinned and threw her arms in the air in a gesture of calculated abandon. The crowd around her wielded flip phones and digital cameras, then-new tech that turned normies into paparazzi. Hilton’s bronzed midriff peeked out below her shirt’s aristocratic slogan and above the pink folds of—this isn’t a joke—a peasant skirt. Here was an essay in an overlit photograph, connecting 2000s celebrity culture to Bush-era tax policies and mortgage lenders. Here, in other words, was a document of obliviousness being marketed as aspirational.

The picture is fake. Or at least , the real clincher (which ), is. Hilton corrected the record this month . Superimposing her 40-year-old present self in front of the image of her at 24—she has not aged—she explained that someone had Photoshopped the word on top of what had been the word . She then showed the original picture as proof. It’s a small but significant difference: Hilton’s shirt was fun-sassy, not villain-sassy. Suddenly the photo and its implications seem less