All Icons Are Dying ,Will We Ever Have Our Own?

There are certain names that seem to have always been there. David Bowie, Elvis Presley, Prince, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton. People whose fame feels so permanent that it is almost impossible to imagine a world in which nobody knows who they are.

You don't have to own a single one of their records, know the lyrics to their songs or even particularly like their music to recognize them. At some point in their careers, they became something bigger than the work they were originally famous for. They became part of a shared cultural vocabulary. You just knew them, first and foremost for being iconic.

But as one generation of cultural legends grows older and more of these seemingly untouchable figures disappear, a question becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: Who will we remember in the same way fifty years from now?

What made them iconic was not just the work they produced, but what they came to represent. In different ways, they broke with conventions, challenged expectations and remained unapologetically recognizable in how they looked, performed and presented themselves. Some repeatedly used their public position to speak on social and political issues, even when doing so came with consequences.

They were pioneers in the most literal sense: by refusing to fit into what was expected of them, they created space for those who came after. They pushed boundaries at a time when crossing them could cost you everything, and in doing so helped turn things that once seemed provocative, unacceptable or simply unimaginable into possibilities for the next generation. Much of what feels ordinary in pop culture today exists because someone before had to be the first to do it. They became icons of their time and beyond, changing what was possible for everyone who came after them.

Over the last couple of years the list of those icons still remaining has been getting shorter and shorter. Known for their talent, attitude and the permanence of their place in this world and in pop culture, they all seemed almost untouchable. They were not known for a fleeting moment, only to be replaced by the next face competing for attention. Their fame had staying power. It survived changing trends, generations and, in many cases, long periods without a new hit, film or cultural moment to keep them relevant. 

Their fame was never confined to just one generation. Their names ring a bell from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, their presence and work carrying across decades. Now there are less and less of these icons remaining and of course, this is simply what time does. One generation eventually makes way for another. But watching one icon after another disappear raises the question: Who is taking their place?

Looking into pop culture right now this question seems kinda hard to answer, but not because we are running out of famous people. It is actually quite the opposite. There have probably never been more of them. Social media has made becoming known more accessible than ever before. Fame no longer necessarily starts with a record deal, a movie role or someone in a position of power deciding that a person is worth putting in front of an audience. Anyone with a phone can start building one themselves.

And what someone needs to become famous has changed with it. Talent still creates stars, of course, but it is no longer a necessary starting point. Personality can be enough. So can humor, beauty, a relationship people become invested in, a particular lifestyle, a recognizable aesthetic or simply being entertaining enough that people want to keep watching.

The Kardashians were one of the earliest and most successful examples of a celebrity model in which the person itself became the product. Kim Kardashian's sex tape initially brought her widespread public attention, but what followed turned being watched into an entire career. Keeping Up with the Kardashians made the family's lives the entertainment, and social media later made that same principle possible without the television network in between.

Today, new faces appear by the minute. Musicians and actors still become global stars, but influencers, creators and reality TV personalities have opened up entirely new routes to fame. Some gather millions of followers within months, build businesses around their names and have entire online communities following every detail of their lives.

These are the celebrities shaping pop culture today. But do they have the same staying power as those who came before them?

Famous to whom?

Someone can have 20 million followers today and still be completely unknown to another person of the exact same age. That sounds almost contradictory until considering how the internet actually works. Two people can live in the same city, belong to the same generation, spend the same amount of time on TikTok and Instagram and still barely encounter the same people.

One person's biggest celebrity can be a total stranger to another. The internet created countless small and overlapping publics. Each comes with its own celebrities, scandals, references, jokes and people everyone within that particular corner seems to know. The numbers can be enormous without the fame ever becoming universal. 

And this is where today's celebrity starts to look fundamentally different from the kind of fame associated with the icons that came before. Dolly Parton did not need to be followed to be known. Neither did David Bowie or Tina Turner. Their fame was not restricted to the people who actively consumed their work. They had made it out of their own audience and into a much broader cultural consciousness.

Today, someone can be watched by an audience of millions without ever making that jump. Everyone can be famous now, just not to everyone.

Maybe We Already Have Our Own

Perhaps the problem is not that we are running out of icons. Perhaps we are still looking for them where mass media taught us to.

For decades, being an icon was almost inseparable from being known on a massive scale. The people we remember as icons were able to occupy a kind of shared cultural space that barely exists in the same form today. Their faces, names and work travelled across audiences, generations and social groups because the media through which they became famous did, too.

But if culture itself has fragmented, it makes little sense to expect its icons to remain universal.

Each of these smaller cultural spaces still has people who mean far more to their audiences than their follower counts can explain. People who pioneer something, challenge what is expected of them, give visibility to experiences that previously had little of it and create space for those who come after. People whose influence within their communities reaches far beyond simply being famous.

The importance of taking a stand has not disappeared either. If anything, this might be one of the things that still separates an icon from someone who is simply very well known. Platforms can create reach, virality can create fame and consistency can build an audience. But none of those things automatically give a person cultural meaning. That still comes from what they represent, what they change and what remains because they were there. Perhaps, then, there is simply a different definition of what it means to be an icon today. One that is no longer tied to the logic of mass-media fame. An icon does not necessarily have to be known by everyone anymore. They have to matter deeply somewhere.

Maybe there will never again be one person who belongs to an entire generation in quite the same way.
Maybe there will be hundreds of icons instead, each enormously important to their own communities and almost irrelevant outside them.

That does not make them any less iconic.

It only means that the same thing that happened to culture has happened to its icons: they have fragmented with it. So perhaps the icons are not dying after all.

Only the idea that we all have to share the same ones is.

by Luisa Gabriel

Image: AI-generated illustration, inspired by Elvis Presley.