Sofia Richie-Grainge was recently interviewed by Net-A-Porter where she revealed she asked her sister, Nicole Richie for advice before embarking on a career path that comes with fame. Check out the relevant snippets below:
A “real childhood” was something her parents – legendary singer Lionel Richie and designer Diane Alexander – prioritized for her, and Richie Grainge is appreciative of both the intention and the way in which it fell short. “I knew that, back at home, I had my normal childhood life,” she recalls. “But if I were to step outside… I had that understanding of the bigger picture: my dad’s this megastar, my sister [Nicole Richie] is a TV star.”
A life in the public eye, then, was unavoidable. A career out of the spotlight “definitely wasn’t an option,” she says. “I feel like I was kind of thrown into this world, whether I liked it or not; but I don’t take it for granted. What I’m most passionate about in my life now is fashion, so I have been put in the greatest position to execute that.”
Her introduction to fashion came via her sister Nicole, 17 years older, who was the original reality-TV It-girl in the early 2000s, starring in The Simple Life alongside best friend Paris Hilton. “They were humongous,” Richie Grainge recalls. “And, as a kid, I had a general awareness of how obsessed people were with them.” She was 15 when Nicole was asked by a friend at Teen Vogue if Richie Grainge would be in a fashion shoot, and she remembers enjoying every minute of it. “I was a young kid, being able to play dress-up and take photos. It was so exciting, so fun.”
Campaigns for youth fashion brands followed and, for a while in her late teens, she became a fixture of the LA celebrity scene. “I was just growing up, being wild and – in my head – living my best life; trying to navigate, on my own, decisions that many teenagers would make. But then there was that layer that most teenagers do not have… which is, people are watching. When you’re young, you rebel, you don’t want opinions. I got to an age – I’m going to say around 20 years old – where I was like, ‘OK, this is a reputation I’m going to have [for a long time]. Let me go to my older sister, who’s gone down this road, and pick her brain for advice.’”
She navigates social media with clear boundaries, thanks largely – again – to advice from her sister. “She’s such a veteran; she’s really gone through it all. She reminds me that ‘not everything needs to be shared; things can be private just for you’. My dad preaches that as well: just because you are in a public industry doesn’t mean your whole life needs to be public. When you put something on the internet, you’re opening a door for opinions. So when it comes to products I’m using, or I’m getting ready to go out, I love having an open conversation. Then there are things that I don’t need anyone’s opinion on – if it feels special and sacred to me, I won’t share.”
