IN THE PANTHEON OF INTERNET BULLSHIT, nothing is as absurd as celebrity heights. Search a famous name and “height,” and you’ll be confidently shown either a number someone made up, or one a publicist invented to flatter their client.
I spoke to one stylist and one editor about this story, and they had the same three-word response about celebrity heights: they all lie. This bothers me for reasons that are both moral and idiotic.
A height is not private. It’s a fact that applies equally to all of us, and is equally visible to all of us. So I decided to measure celebrities1 definitively using the same image analysis, known as photogrammetry, that I used to measure Trump’s fingers.
My initial idea was to gain access to red carpets with a special photographic measuring rig. I sought access to a number, but the attitude I met — “prove you are worthy of the great honor of standing near some influencers” — was so unbearable that I decided to go guerrilla.
This involves finding objects of known length in existing images, and using those to find other lengths2. The most measurable event, in this sense, is also the most quiveringly serious: the Met Gala.
I’ll explain. On an ordinary red carpet it’s hard to find objects of known length. The backdrop is custom printed. The carpet is plain red. But the Met Gala’s red carpet takes place on steps. Public steps. And the infrastructure is set up days before the event.
Which is why, the day before, I braved the crowds of teen stans, older ladies in athleisure and TV journalists trying not to film other TV journalists to go and measure the tents and any other fixed point I could use as a point of comparison. I used a Leica Disto laser measure, a set-square, a ruler and a spirit level.
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It was not easy. Anna Wintour has commandeered a large chunk of the city so that a network of marquees can be installed and her guests can avoid the masses. Three or four blocks around the museum were dotted with construction crews and tense and eager security guards in gray suits.
I found that measuring things involves holding odd positions — standing on stuff, reaching, kneeling — for what must be seconds but feels like 40 minutes. I sensed eyes narrowing in my direction.
My ideal response to this kind of scrutiny is a moment in a Bond movie in which Pierce Brosnan is defusing a bomb, or setting a bomb maybe, while being shot at. A bullet comes directly for his head, and he insouciantly turns a fraction of an inch to save his own life, without losing his concentration. I channeled this. It made it worse. I felt like I’d forgotten how to walk.
A security guard accosted me. I develop a perverse sense of honor in these moments, and won’t outright lie. So I told him I was making a scale model of the museum3 for an art project4, and when he asked me if I had permission, I said I had emailed the press office5. And then when anyone else bothered me, I directed them to that first guard and said he said it was fine.
Here are my measurements, in case anyone wants to take issue with them. The tent itself is 12.406 meters wide and the crossbars that support it are 2.672 meters tall. Each step is an average of 13.97 centimeters high, and there are eight of them in each little block of steps.
Just glancing at past images with the knowledge that those blocks are less than 4 feet high shifted my perspective. For a moment the Met Gala seemed to me like a miniature world. Like a detailed model railway, or Hobbiton.
I ran a control measurement, using an image of the front of the tent. I input the width of the tent at 12.4 meters and used pixel height to get a measurement for the two sides of 2.7 meters. But it was not straightforward, as the slightest misinterpretation, particularly of perspective, threw the measurements out by up to 10 centimeters.
I then looked at an enormous quantity of images and video of the event to analyze in more depth. I made a list of the people I was most interested in, and then breathlessly uploaded images of Bad Bunny, because I had to start somewhere, and ran my analysis. I was informed that he is 96 inches, or 8 feet tall.
For ages I could not figure out what I had got wrong. As I scrolled images it started to seem impossible to remedy. People don’t stand in a measurable way. They bend or lean or slouch or move their weight from one foot to the other. They wear hats or wigs or dresses that cover their shoes. Even if they stand straight, red carpet photographers don’t shoot for forensic analysis, so they’ll cruelly crop an otherwise perfect image. How can anyone measure anything? Why would they even bother?
In fact my basic theory of life is that nature is infinite complexity, interacting with yet more infinite complexity. To freeze and analyze just one moment would take more capacity than all of humanity has ever had. And those moments are themselves infinite, and interacting infinitely with other moments. We can sometimes read the swirls. We can pray and cajole and dance and sacrifice to get the patterns to move the way we want. We can freeze eight, or 10, or a million factors in one moment and treat the resulting analysis like it’s a fact. But all in the end is vanity. We’re apes, staring dumbly at the sky, trying to be happy6.
Then I realized that instead of trying to resolve mankind’s place in eternity, I should focus on celebrities who happened to stand directly on one of the steps. This makes them much easier to measure than Bad Bunny, who inconsiderately stood miles away from any of my comparison points, because they’re in the same geometric plane as my fixed height.
Madonna, who kindly stood perfectly in 2011, is 5 feet 1 inch tall in heels. According to Popbitch’s resident expert, people are boosted in height by about half the size of their heel. So let’s say she gained 2 inches and is 4 feet 11 inches. The internet says she’s 5 feet 5 inches.
Jennifer Lopez did the same, in the same year. In heels she was 5 feet. I could not find a direct image of her heels to measure, but let’s be generous and say they also represented a 2-inch boost and she is 4 feet 10 inches. The internet says she is 5 feet 4½ inches.
Olivia Rodrigo is 5 feet 10 inches, but was wearing 6-inch heels in the images I analyzed. That puts her at 5 feet 7 inches, which is nearly exactly what the internet suggests. As this is not really science, it’s well within our margin of error, and is thus quite impressively not bullshit.
Kris Jenner is 5 feet 5 inches in heels, but was wearing an almost bridal-length gown, and so there is no official heel measurement I can subtract. The internet says 5 feet 6 inches without heels, which is definitely an exaggeration.
She did later kindly stand next to Jeff Bezos, who skipped the red carpet and thus could not be measured by my method. Jenner was slightly taller than him that night. I’d estimate his height at 5 feet 4 inches. The internet says he’s an oddly precise 5 feet 7¼ inches.
For context, this is about the same range of heights you’d find in children between 5 and 11. All of these superstars could, if they made the effort, plausibly blend in at a primary school.
I plan to expand this analysis beyond people who either stood on a step or next to someone else who had, and to focus on male celebrities because they seem intuitively more likely to lie about their heights. But that is a more complex endeavor, and requires a second part next week.
This story was published in collaboration with our friends at Popbitch. Subscribe here and brighten up your inbox.
RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.
1 A note on celebrities: I have nothing against them as a group. Mostly they're talented artists who did really well, and now have to cope with the bizarre demands of maintaining that. The best of them find a graciousness under constant attention that I'm not sure I could emulate. But this particular moment in the West, which I'd describe as a great depression plus celebrities as quasi-religious figures, generates a particular combination of pressure and sycophancy. And that is a recipe for dishonesty.
2 Either by building a 3D model, or using a calculation known as pixel height. The latter measures how many pixels make up a length you assign on the image. It can then extrapolate from that to figure out the length of something else in the same image.
3 Sort-of true.
4 Also sort-of true.
5 True, although about something else.
6 We can be genuinely insightful. But I'd argue that any truly pivotal piece of progress (the scientific method) is built on humility.