Does Timothée Chalamet’s masculine rebrand reveal Hollywood’s underground PR apparatus?

In case you weren’t aware, the biggest heartthrob of Gen Z girls is American actor Timothée Chalamet, whose career exploded in 2017 when he starred in the role of a 17-year-old boy who falls in love with his father’s male friend in an Academy Award-winning film called “Call Me by Your Name.”

A lot of Millennial women have scratched their heads at young women’s obsession with Chalamet, as he has been known for quite a while as … well, effeminate. Until she discovered he was dating Kylie Jenner, Allie Beth Stuckey just assumed he was gay.

However, Chalamet appears to have undergone some rebranding. For a good while, it wasn’t unusual to see the “Dune” star in floral patterns, sparkles, ruffles, and feminine silhouettes (like, for example, the candy-apple red, back-bearing ensemble he donned at the Venice Film Festival in 2022).

Today, his style is more “masculine, salt of the earth.”

What spurred the sudden vibe shift?

Allie has a theory.

“I think this is all very intentional,” she says.

“My theory is that he has a really good publicist and a team of publicists that are trying very hard to recover his image from his more feminine days, from ‘Call Me by Your Name’ and some of his red-carpet appearances, and they are trying to masculinize him so that he will continue to be up for these more masculine roles,” Allie hypothesizes, adding that “it is very hard to recover your image after you have played a younger gay man in a movie.”

“I think that so much of what has happened to him over the past year or so that seems like just, you know, natural occurrences are actually a part of an orchestrated PR campaign, and that includes his dating of Kylie Jenner,” she adds, calling Jenner “a strategic dating pick to make him seem more masculine.”

Considering that Jenner’s ex, with whom she shares two children, is “big, broad [rapper] Travis Scott,” the likelihood that she and Chalamet “just met each other and fell in love” is slim.

Allie assumes that “the PDA that they show each other is also part of the PR campaign to make him seem more masculine.”

Chalamet’s recent appearances on ESPN and Theo Von’s podcast have also served to bolster his masculinity and were likely “strategic [choices].”

However, perhaps the evolution of Timothée Chalamet is genuine. Maybe he and Kylie are in love and his outfits reflect his actual preference. We likely will never know.

But even if his evolution is authentic, that doesn’t change the fact that “there is a very powerful unseen network of publicists that exist behind the scenes to subtly and very significantly change the public's opinion.”

To hear more of Allie’s theory, watch the episode above.

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