Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s familymoon in Paris feels like a royal tour – no complaints – with much better fashion. And just as highly produced. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
Here’s a fresh load of photos from the last 24 hours of Bennifer and their kids out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, shopping, museum-touring, and walking through the gardens, and obviously for every stop on the itinerary there’s an outfit change…which brings me back to my point about the production, basically the planning involved for a trip like this to happen.
Let’s start at the beginning: who put together the itinerary? Do people like Bennifer work with a travel agent? Did their children – Emme, Max, Violet, Seraphina – come up with a list of things they want to do in Paris? How far in advance do their reservations have to be made? You know how for regular people we make our holiday dinner reservations in advance and work the rest of our schedules around it? This probably doesn’t apply to Bennifer but a phone call does have to be made ahead of time to alert the restaurant that they’re on their way…
So they’re not just travelling with bodyguards but also at least an assistant who's in charge of making those calls and calling down from the hotel suite to get the cars ready out front, and all the other sh-t that has to be laid out step by step to make sure a celebrity’s day goes smoothly. And that work happens well in advance. I get it that this is privilege, immense privilege, to have people taking care of these kinds of tasks – but they are necessities on occasion. The cars and the security, for example – if not for that kind of logistics, it could be a safety compromise. I’ve been around enough celebrities through my job just interviewing them to know that if the car isn’t pulled around on time, the crowds will be uncontrollable. If JLo was just standing at the front of a hotel for several minutes while the paps snapped away, attracting attention and then more and more people start converging…? Chaos can ensue.
So this is the background, what we can’t see when we look at these photos but it’s the kind of detail I’m obsessed with. Like God I wish we could have more “day in the life” features of specific celebrity assistants and coordinators. There are anonymous ones that are published from time to time but what really counts is when you know who the celebrity is, so that you can pinpoint it to their work and/or those moments captured by the paparazzi that have become so familiar in the culture.
