(Credit: Steve Finn/Getty)
Katie Price is, ostensibly, in the news because of her finances. But Price has rarely been out of the news since the Nineties, when she became famous as a Page 3 girl. Determinedly, assiduously, she crafted herself into the perfect celebrity for her time: someone it was almost impossible to look away from.
The face, and the body, she has now is very different from the one she had when we knew her as Jordan. In her first Page 3 appearance in 1996, she was 18, fresh-faced and natural-breasted. Today, her breasts are enormous architectural domes constructed over 17 operations (her last was a slight reduction after a 2022 procedure gave her the “biggest breasts in Britain”). After facelifts, fillers, nosejobs, Botox and veneers, her face has long crossed the line from “enhanced” to “done” to, now, an alien kind of hardness.
She has been called a plastic surgery “victim”. But Price sees it differently. She has made the choice to look “fake”. “Why do you think I spent all that money on it?” she asked in one of her autobiographies. “That’s how I want to look!”
Pre-surgeries, she was a perfectly attractive girl. But she was only a perfectly attractive girl, and the supply of those outstripped demand so much that (according to Price) in her early days of Page 3 modelling, her take-home from a photoshoot after agent’s fees and travel was just £30. It was only after she had her first set of implants that she began to be something exceptional. As she wrote: “I finally got the boobs I wanted and they brought me a great deal of work and made me famous, so respect to the boobs!”
Price’s profession was model. But her career was really in something different: she’s a body entrepreneur. She understood herself as an object, and she understood that the value of that object consisted in pushing it to its most extreme form. It was not beauty that she offered. It was shock. Her gigantic breasts were not a promise of fertility or an exaggeration of youthful perkiness. They announced exactly how much Price was willing to undergo in the service of making herself attractive to men — a willingness to undergo a gratifying level of pain and inconvenience.
The sharp edges of her implants declared her submission, and her submission secured her elevation. Page 3 girls almost never became stars in America: the concept didn’t translate. But Price was put on the US cover of Playboy and labelled “London’s legendary bad girl”. She also caught the eye of the century’s sharpest student of celebrity. In 2009, a starstruck Kim Kardashian tweeted: “Omg Katie Price aka Jordan and her husband Peter [Andre] are on my flight home from NYC!”