So Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet are official. Cue internet outrage, disgust and delight, depending on your social media algorithm.
Rumours of pop culture’s most unexpected romantic pairing have been circulating since April.
But now – thanks to a series of videos and photos of the duo aggressively snogging at Beyoncé’s latest LA concert – the couple is all but confirmed. And people seem set on expressing their shock.
After the evidence broke the internet on Tuesday afternoon, Twitter erupted into a series of memes and snide remarks. “It wasn’t a prank?” tweeted one person.
“So Timothée and Kylie is a real thing omg,” another quipped. One added that they’d “never seen a more random celebrity pairing than Timothée and Kylie”.
Highlighting the internet’s shock was a now-deleted British Vogue article that poked fun at the pairing and how they might spend their time together.
“Does he hold her make-up brushes while she contours?” the writer asked, referring to Jenner’s eponymous beauty empire.
“Does she help him sift through Wes Anderson scripts? Does he give Stormi French lessons?”
she continued, naming Jenner’s five-year-old daughter, Stormi, who she shares with ex Travis Scott. “And how did they end up together, anyway?”
The piece was widely shared and quickly derided as sexist. But its sentiments have been reflected everywhere online.
Because beneath every expression of shock at this pairing lies the same implication: that objectively, Jenner and Chalamet must be intellectually and professionally incompatible.
It’s a narrative that, because of the scale of the pair’s respective fame, has become so furiously deconstructed and memed that it has seldom been questioned or interrogated.
But as the response to the Vogue article illustrated, once you do start to dig a little deeper into where all of these assumptions are coming from, it unearths a rotten misogynistic core.