Lily Phillips

The background Lily Phillips came from is not the one that usually produces this career path. Private school, ski holidays, a family home in Derbyshire — by her own account, childhood was comfortable and largely uncomplicated. She ended up at Sheffield University studying Nutrition, which is as unremarkable a degree choice as it sounds, and then the pandemic arrived and closed everything down. Lectures went remote, routine collapsed, and somewhere in that gap she opened an OnlyFans account. The money arrived fast enough to answer whatever question she was still asking herself.

She has been candid about the stunt that made her famous internationally — spending a day sleeping with a very large number of men, documented and distributed — without being particularly tortured about it in public. She uses words like 'empowered' and 'happy' in interviews, delivered without visible performance anxiety, which either means she has made her peace with it completely or she is very good at the version of herself she shows journalists. Which of those is true is the thing the interviews never quite settle.