Page Three, reality TV, kids’ books, pop and perfume – you name it, Katie Price has done it. At the height of her fame in the 2000s, even Kim Kardashian revealed herself to be a fan of the star formerly known as Jordan.
“Instantly watchable,” “smart,” “underestimated” – all words used to describe the living brand that is Katie Price.
Estimated to be worth around £45m at the peak of her career, Price is at once in-your-face fake, yet utterly authentic.
If verification of her global celebrity status was needed, Kim Kardashian – a woman who has played the fame game to perfection – tweeted in April 2009: “OMG Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter are on my flight home from NYC!”
Maximising her natural assets, and using them to propel and sustain her career, Price has ridden the wave of fame for nearly three decades – an impressive feat in the notoriously fickle world of showbiz.
‘Her body is a business’
Author and Times columnist Sarah Ditum told Sky News Price has always been a step ahead of the crowd.
“She’s fascinating for the way she used her body to become famous and successful. And because it always seems quite cynical and calculating the decisions she’s made, to have the biggest boobs and to make that her job.”
But the writer of Toxic, Women, Fame And The Noughties says there is a glass ceiling concealed within Price’s unconventional career choice.
“Over time you run up to the limits of what’s possible. You can’t get bigger and bigger and bigger indefinitely – eventually someone’s going to come along and be even bigger or have even more recklessly huge implants.”
Ditum says she’s long been intrigued by Price, who she first saw on a poster on a younger male relative’s bedroom wall.
“It was interesting that someone had worked out how to turn her body into a business and how to get longevity out of being a Page 3 girl, because this was a time when Page 3 was contentious.”
And she says Price was a rare victor in the cut-throat world of glamour modelling.
“Katie Price was almost unique in that she came up through Page 3, and she found longevity in her career. That was what Page 3 was meant to be – the sell was always ‘this is an opportunity for working-class girls to make their way in the world and use their assets’. That was the fig leaf of it. She was the only person who really achieved it and I found that compelling.”
Ditum goes on: “She’s obviously smart. If you look at what Page 3 does to girls, it was a machine for taking teenagers and getting naked pictures of them, and that’s it – then sifting them out when they got too old. The lifespan of a Page 3 girl was tiny, and the number of them who achieved any kind of ongoing success out of that was infinitesimal, and she was one of them.
“That does not happen if you are dumb. She’s very intelligent at seeking publicity, she’s very intelligent at shaping her profile, and she’s very intelligent at using her body and using the extremity of her body to attract attention.
“But the cost of doing that is personally and physically really unimaginably huge. And there’s no long-termism built into it.”
