I was reading your book while scrolling through my Instagram feed and I had a thought: So many of these images have millions of likes and that signals, at least to me, what we value.

I think it’s very easy to be — particularly for someone sitting in Cambridge, in my position — very sniffy about almost all these images. But the fact that they are widely consumed by people who are not stupid, including me, and the fact that they’re sort of successful images in some way, means that we’ve got to think about what they’re saying.

When I saw Rihanna “doing the ironing,” I thought very instantly about an ancient story of the Emperor Augustus, in the first century, and how he had his wife, Livia, sitting in the front hall of their house, weaving at her loom. Now, you know, one thing is for sure: Rihanna never does the ironing, and Livia did not need to weave in the loom. But nevertheless, how do we present the relationship of the celebrity, the empress, in relationship to these apparently traditional tasks?

You never quite know who the joke is really upon. Does the plain workaday, ordinary, domestic background simply serve to make her outfit look even sillier than it would anyway? We know that she’s not like us but this combination is actually provoking people to think. Quite often when people like things, they’re actually not just saying, “Oh, you know, I really like Rihanna.” These images become successful if they go a little step further than that.

The Royal Family Is Relatable