Four days before Kim Kardashian was held at gunpoint in a private apartment in Paris and robbed of jewellery reportedly worth £9m she posted a selfie on Instagram. You’ll recognise it as the photo accompanying most of the news stories about the robbery. There’s the bottom half of Kardashian’s face, lips expertly parted to reveal a mouth full of gold, left hand adorned with a diamond the size of a honey and lemon Locket. Ever since Kanye West gifted Kardashian the £3.5m, 15-carat Lorraine Schwartz ring last month – a ring it is believed could be one of the pieces stolen in the raid – it has played a starring role across her social media platforms, which boast millions of followers and almost as many diamond emojis.
Now police in the French capital are linking Kardashian’s notorious habit of flaunting her luxury lifestyle – and especially her jewels – on social media with the crime, claiming the robbers focused on “possessions that had been seen and noticed via social media”. And though no victim is responsible for the crime committed against them, Kardashian isn’t exactly the first rich or famous person to use social media as an advertisement of their wealth. Basically, celebrities showing off their bling on social media are about as rare as diamonds in Hatton Garden.
The first target of the Bling Ring, the group of California teen thieves who burgled the Hollywood homes of several stars between 2008-2009 and ended up – oh, the irony! – having a Hollywood movie made about them, was Paris Hilton. The original reality TV star and rich heiress, whose home has been burgled several times, has a lifelong history of conspicuous consumption, whether it’s posing with pink Bentleys, updating her dogs’ Instagram feeds, or posting the 19 suitcases she took on a trip to Ibiza. In 2013 she declared (on Twitter, naturally) “I have bad luck when it comes to thieves … They tried to steal my new collection of @PHpurses from my Malibu house”. Which manages to be both victim statement and brand advertisement at once.
Earlier this year it was reported that a spin-off bling ring could be in operation as the Hollywood homes of Kevin Hart, singer Chris Brown, socialite Scott Disick and model Blac Chyna were burgled. Disick, who is reportedly one of the richest men on Instagram, often posts pictures of, say, Khloe Kardashian sleeping under a blanket of money or the $100 bills he uses as bog roll. The 32-year-old was said to have had thousands of dollars worth of watches and jewellery stolen from his Los Angeles mansion earlier this year.
Also on the exclusive rich-men-of-Instagram-who-have-been-robbed list is boxer Floyd Mayweather whose Las Vegas home showcased on MTV’s Cribs was robbed of $7m worth of jewellery in 2008. At one point in the episode, Mayweather, who gave himself the nickname “Money”, held up two boxes from a famous jeweller and said: “Right here, we’ve got about a half a million (dollars) in two rings”. A typical Mayweather selfie might be of the boxer in bed, nude chested, cap on (with his name on it), surrounded by wads of $100 bills. The most recent one shows him sitting in front of $1m in cash… posted just one day after the Kardashian robbery. Plus ça change.
