Kim Kardashian Steals a Towel: Formula One Has Had Enough

Let's start with the one that actually made me put my phone down and stare at the ceiling for a moment. Kim Kardashian, at an F1 race — fine, celebrities attend, that's allowed — somehow ended up walking away with a winner's towel. Not a souvenir. Not something handed to her. A towel that belonged to the moment, to the driver, to the grid. Gone. The backlash was immediate and the comment sections were, let's say, precise. "No sense of respect. She has nothing to do with F1, shouldn't let her through that area." When the fans are writing your press release for you, something has gone wrong. Then came the apology gift — which, depending on your tolerance for Kardashian-scale gestures, was either deeply thoughtful or so absurd it looped back around to being a second offence. The internet chose option two. There is a very specific kind of celebrity who treats access as ownership, and Formula One, which has been carefully curating its glamour since Drive to Survive made everyone suddenly care about tyre compounds, has no patience left for it.

Meanwhile, in significantly warmer news: Tom Holland has confirmed what the internet has known, suspected, screenshotted, and made fan edits about for the better part of two years. He and Zendaya are married. "I found my person. She's my best friend, and I'm the happiest I have ever been." He said it out loud. With his whole chest. The red carpet appearance that followed — their first proper one together in years — was the kind of thing that makes you briefly reconsider your position on love. Briefly. They looked like two people who had privately figured something out and were only now letting the rest of us catch up. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what happened.

And then there is Kim Kardashian and Lewis Hamilton, who have apparently been circling each other's orbit long enough that a timeline now exists. Friends first, the sources say carefully, which in celebrity journalism means: watch this space.

The week's real thesis, though, is this — F1 has become the new front row. The new place to be seen, to be photographed, to steal towels from apparently. Fashion got there first. Now everyone else is catching up, and not all of them are reading the room. Kim Kardashian did not read the room. The room handed her the bill.