Creative industries are starting to have an inbreeding problem
I’m a fashion and lifestyle journalist - hear me out.
One of my favourite historical dynasties to gossip about is the House of Habsburg (pin in that - great title for a trashy clothing brand) and mainly King Charles II of Spain.
I feel a little bad saying this, because it literally wasn’t his fault, but he’s most famed for being inbred beyond belief. In his 1963 book, historian John Langdon-Davies wrote that “from the day of [King Charles II’s] birth, they were waiting for his death”.
You may have heard of the ‘Hapsburg jaw’ - compromising a protruding chin, enlarged lower lip and a prominent nose - largely caused by consanguineous marriage culminating in high levels of genetic homozygosity.
Poor Charles died at only 38. His autopsy revealed extreme physical deterioration. Contemporaries famously described his body as having no blood, a “head full of water,” a single black testicle and a “peppercorn” sized heart. He likely suffered from hydrocephalus, kidney failure and severe developmental disorders.
I talk about this because much like the collapsed dynasties of Europe, the creative industries are now facing a similar downfall, thanks to what I’ve coined as, ‘consanguineous marketing.’
I don’t know if I’m the only one that’s felt claustrophobic lately when it comes to the creative world? It seems fashion campaigns are all fronted by the same small pool of celebrity children.
It seems sad in a way, would Lila Moss have wanted to become a model if it wasn’t for her mum? Maybe she’d like to have gone into biochemistry? I guess we’ll never know.
Increasingly, the same surnames circulate through fashion, film, music and media like aristocratic bloodlines.
And maybe that’s why so much of fashion and culture feels stale.
Because creative industries - industries supposedly built on originality, disruption and fresh perspective - are becoming family businesses.
This occurred to me when I was scrolling Instagram and saw Chloé announce the face of their new campaign: Apple Martin, daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin.
The caption declared: ‘Featuring actress @AppleMartin, whose luminous presence embodies this poetic surrender to summer’s spell.’
Actress? Is that all it takes now? If your mother works in film, do you simply absorb the profession through blood? My friend’s dad was a dentist, does that mean she can write ‘dental practitioner’ on her LinkedIn?
It’s not just Apple Martin, there’s also North West, daughter of Kim Kardashian and antisemitic rapper Kanye West. She’s just released an album on May 6 at the age of 12, immediately charting in countries including Venezuela, Poland, Turkey, South Korea and the United States.
When I was 12, I was thinking about becoming an interior designer for 60 Minute Makeover - granted I’m sure my peers aimed higher than me even - but the point is we weren’t actually achieving those. Perhaps that would be different if our parents were globally-famed rappers or reality stars.
Another one, discussed by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman on the podcast The Rest Is Entertainment, is ‘Brand Beckham’. The football dynasty have reportedly trademarked “Haikoo by Harper”, a future beauty and skincare brand linked to David and Victoria Beckham’s daughter, Harper Beckham, who is 14. Because apparently tweenhood today now includes brand architecture, IP law and product development.
None of this is surprising anymore, which might actually be the most depressing part.
We’ve moved beyond celebrity children occasionally wandering into the fame parallel to their parents à la Phil Collins/Lily Collins or Eve Pollard/Claudia Winkleman. That has always existed. What’s different now is the industrialisation of nepotism. Fame itself has become hereditary infrastructure.
Children are no longer simply benefiting from connections but are being professionally incubated from birth. Even subtle - remember when YouTube stars Aflie Deyes and Zoe Sugg set up the Instagram handle of their daughter before announcing her name officially online? You know, just in case she wants to follow in their footsteps.
The problem with nepotism in creative industries isn’t just fairness, though that matters too. It’s that creativity depends on newness. Fashion, music, art and film are supposed to be fueled by people arriving with different references and ideas, regional accents, ugly experiences, niche obsessions and genuinely fresh points of view.
Instead, modern celebrity culture increasingly resembles the European aristocracy: the same surnames circulating endlessly around the same institutions.
Fashion campaigns star celebrity children who all look suspiciously identical; music launches arrive pre-verified before anyone has heard a note; entire careers are announced through PR mailers before the person involved has even developed a frontal lobe.
And because these people are raised inside the machine, they rarely disrupt it, not because they don’t have the balls (although that may be the case) but because they genuinely don’t know how. That’s why so much contemporary culture feels flattened. Everyone has the same references because increasingly they all come from the same social ecosystem.
The irony is that fashion once thrived precisely because it relied on outsiders.
The great supermodel era of the Nineties wasn’t exactly free from nepotism - celebrity adjacency has always existed in fashion - but the industry still depended on the mythology of discovery. Croydon-born Kate Moss was discovered at JFK airport, Naomi Campbell was scouted while window shopping in London.
On top of that, designers still mythologised eccentricity, the likes of Lee Alexander McQueen and John Galliano brought eccentricity and interest to contemporary luxury fashion. These designers were able to be championed because newspaper and magazine editors were able and encouraged to cultivate taste rather than engagement metrics - but that’s a rant I’ll save for another time.
Nowadays, most fashion week front pages are saturated with shows by Stella McCartney (daughter of Sir Paul McCartney) or Harris Reed (child of Nicholas Reed) as opposed to smaller scale designers like Patrick McDowell or Edeline Lee.
Now the algorithm rewards familiarity above all else.
A celebrity child already arrives with established press interest and inherited brand trust. Hiring them is less risky than discovering someone genuinely new. The industry keeps telling us it values originality while structurally rewarding recognisability.
And this extends far beyond fashion.
Studies in the UK repeatedly show that industries like media, publishing, acting, politics and finance are heavily dominated by people from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds.
Research from the Social Mobility Commission has found that journalism, law, finance and the arts remain among the least socially mobile professions in Britain (that makes me ever so slightly smug knowing neither of my parents are/were journalists). Around 70% of senior judges and finance executives attended private schools, despite only around 7% of the UK population being privately educated.
The creative industries particularly favour unpaid internships, social networking and informal hiring structures - in other words, industries where having wealthy or connected parents is practically an employment qualification.
But I should say, oddly, I don’t think people object to nepotism universally.
Nobody cares if a family has run the same bakery for four generations. Or a farm, or a tailor. In fact, we romanticise it. There’s something reassuring about inherited craftsmanship. Skills passed down feel earned because actual labour and knowledge are being transferred.
But creative celebrity nepotism feels different because often the thing being inherited isn’t craft - it’s visibility. Not “my father taught me how to make shoes”, but “my mother’s surname got me the campaign”.
And maybe the saddest part is what this does to the children themselves. Celebrity culture now funnels children into personal brands before they’ve had the chance to become actual people.
Surely the entire advantage of having rich and famous parents is freedom. The freedom to disappear for three years and study ceramics in St. Ives or go to the Galapagos Islands to become a marine biologist. To have the time and opportunity to explore and/or fail privately. To have far-reaching ambitions without worrying about rent.
Instead, these children are turned into prepubescent CEOs before the’ve had the chance to decide they’re more into English than Maths.
At fourteen, should your primary concern really be trademarking your name and launching a beauty line? Or should it be having catastrophically bad eyeliner and an unrealistic dream of being on Loose Women? (Just me?)
Maybe that’s what feels so bleak about nepotism today. It doesn’t just shut outsiders out but simultaneously traps insiders too.
Everyone becomes content and a brand before they become interesting. And, rather predictably, culture suffers for it.
Get Apple Martin’s new-nepo Chloé-inspired look, here:
