A rare interview with Kaitlin Phillips
"She’s one of those New York characters like Arianna Huffington, or Al Sharpton, or Donald Trump."
Good morning everyone!
I clean up well, right? I went to dinner at The Grill last night and saw Andy Cohen and Jon Hamm. Last time I saw Jon Hamm, I was alone on the roof with him at The New Museum for a New York Magazine party, my 4th day on the job at The Cut! I will always remember that. Last time I saw Andy Cohen was my first day interning at NBC, and they didn’t know where to put me so they put me in his office and he yelled at me when he came in because he thought I was someone else. New York is just heaven. Happy Friday. I hope you’re all appreciating every little magical holiday moment.
Ben Smith, a former New York Times media columnist and co-founder of the coming news site Semafor said Kaitlin Phillips is like Al Sharpton. Actually the exact quote was, “I think she’s one of those New York characters like Arianna Huffington, or Al Sharpton, or Donald Trump, who just realizes the rules that everyone else is playing by are kind of made-up.”
Phillips is a publicist who has worked with brands like A24, Burberry, Prada, and the restaurant Lucien. She also is untraceable — she spends time between Marseille, New York, Connecticut, The Hamptons. Her wedding was included on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix (lowbrow/brilliant, the best quadrant). But this is just some background to get you interested in what I’m about to say.
She makes gift guides. Phillips has turned her art of gift guide curation into a very fun corner of the internet that only has its lights on during the holiday season. Lauren Sherman of Puck News has mentioned her gift guides not once, not twice, but three times in her recent newsletters. Laura Reilly of Magasin somehow got Phillips to curate a two-part gift guide for her newsletter readers (it features recs from Chloe Sevigny’s longtime stylist Haley Wollens, Vogue’s Lilah Ramzi, and singer Lorde… cool). She self-publishes a gift guide that lives in Google Docs, which is an oddly analog medium in the landscape of over-budgeted, over-produced, over-the-top magazine gift guides (imagine how time The Times spent on building this). Air Mail published an edited version of her Google Doc guide (they said it was the highest-traffic guide they’ve published).
The top of the guide reads, “You know the rules: If you buy something, Venmo Kaitlin-Phillips. How much? $7-$499. Enough money for a bottle of wine. Even if it’s a bottle of wine in France. If I don’t make any money, I promise never to do it again.” This is someone who really sees the internet as a playground, not a minefield. One of my favooorrrrite traits!
Last night she tweeted about a last-minute gift for the Epstein-obsessed person in your life: a reprint of Jeffrey Epstein's address book reproduced and bound in hot stamped velour covers. It this morning it was sold out.
I spoke to Kaitlin this week about her thoughts on brands paying to be included in gift guides, the few submissions she’s had to redact, and the state of DM’s.