Kim Kardashian at all times is aware of what folks wish to see. Within the early 2010s, what folks wished was Kim, and Kim obliged. She was all over the place: on her present, Preserving Up With the Kardashians; on different folks’s reveals; on journal covers; and, largely, on the web. There, she constructed an equipment of self-surveillance out of newly out there expertise and newly acquired cultural starvation for unfiltered movie star. Different stars had been on social media, positive, however nobody used it fairly like Kim, endlessly and seemingly with out disgrace. The impact was a magic trick: Kardashian had tens of thousands and thousands of followers, and every felt like they had been getting a particular peek right into a charmed world. Her feeds from Paris Vogue Week 2016 are a consultant pattern—a pacifying stream of cream and white, diamonds and lace, outsize wealth made as banal as breakfast. Right here is Kim preparing. Listed below are Kim’s outfits. Right here is Kim’s engagement ring, a present from her then-husband, then often known as Kanye West, its stone as clear as glass and as large as a grape.
It was all breezily aspirational, after which it actually wasn’t. A number of hours after posting these Vogue Week pictures, Kardashian was preparing for mattress in a Paris condominium when 5 males sporting balaclavas burst into her room. They duct-taped her mouth, sure her with zip ties, held her at gunpoint, locked her in a rest room, and went about stealing thousands and thousands of {dollars}’ price of jewellery, together with that engagement ring and a watch given to her by her late father. They’d kidnapped the constructing’s evening watchman and compelled him to make them Kardashian’s room; she begged him to inform her attackers, in French, that she had younger youngsters at house. She hoped that in the event that they knew, they could spare her life.
They did—Kardashian emerged from the assault bodily advantageous. However then got here the information cycle. Folks journal constructed a narrative round quotes from a safety skilled suggesting that Kardashian had made herself a goal by “promoting what she’s doing and promoting her wealth,” as if that wasn’t precisely what folks (and Folks) had been rewarding her for this entire time. The New York Occasions questioned why Kardashian had been touring with such costly jewellery. (The pretty apparent reply to the query is that she was on a piece journey, and her work is sporting costly jewellery.) Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel each made merciless jokes on late-night TV. The style designer Karl Lagerfeld, for some motive, spoke to the press concerning the incident, voicing what appeared to be on everybody’s thoughts. Kardashian is “too public, too public,” he mentioned. “You can not show your wealth, then be stunned that some folks wish to share it.” The mainstream consensus solidified: The theft was karma, comeuppance, a corrective to all that vacuous extravagance and clueless exhibitionism.
If the assault was some sort of cosmic lesson for Kardashian, she appeared to have realized it. She stopped posting her real-time whereabouts and dressing so ostentatiously. She went on The Ellen DeGeneres Present and sounded much less just like the survivor of an unprovoked, violent assault than like a toddler apologizing for misbehavior. “It was meant to occur to me. Issues occur in your life to show you issues,” she mentioned. “I used to be positively materialistic earlier than, however I’m so glad that my youngsters get this me, as a result of I simply don’t care about that stuff anymore.” The very issues that had made her well-known had been a legal responsibility, and she or he knew it. A number of years later, she revealed on her personal present that for the reason that theft, she hadn’t “actually been about sporting jewellery.”
Till not too long ago, it appears. Final week, Kardashian appeared in a Paris courtroom to testify in opposition to her alleged attackers. She wore—together with a classic John Galliano gown, six-inch Saint Laurent slingback heels, and Alaïa sun shades in an exaggerated cat-eye form—diamond earrings, a diamond ear cuff, a diamond ring, a diamond anklet, and a $3 million white-gold necklace set with 80 diamonds. The necklace was meticulously engineered model synergy: Samer Halimeh, the jeweler who’d designed the necklace, despatched a press launch to journalists as Kardashian testified. The necklace was additionally a message, and never a very delicate one—Kardashian is reclaiming her freedom, and for Kim Kardashian, freedom is diamonds.
The Occasions known as Kardashian’s outfit an “unconventional” selection, however for essentially the most half, the response was pretty impartial. To some extent, it is a reflection of the kinder and gentler second we’re in, no less than so far as the mainstream media is anxious: Within the near-decade for the reason that theft and the backlash, a whole subgenre of content material has sprung up to reexamine, and atone for, the viciousness that society inflicted on feminine celebrities within the Nineties, 2000s, and 2010s. A lot of the press merely is aware of higher than to overtly hate ladies in the identical method it used to. Kardashian was in courtroom to share new particulars from a horrific assault within the title of searching for justice; to remark meanly on her outfit would have been a bizarre transfer.
But additionally, such a remark would have revealed a grave misunderstanding of the world we reside in, the world Kardashian constructed. It’s one the place each second is a photograph opp, each uncapped lens is a instrument for model constructing, each iota of consideration is an opportunity to generate income, and each flat floor is a pink carpet. The rapper A$AP Rocky wore head-to-toe Yves Saint Laurent every day throughout his February trial for felony assault, and he regarded so good doing it that the model shared paparazzi pictures on social media even earlier than he was acquitted. In 2023, Gwyneth Paltrow captured the web’s consideration with the garments she wore throughout her trial for reckless snowboarding, to the diploma that City and Nation ran a characteristic on the place to purchase them, as if the Park Metropolis civil courtroom had been a trend shoot. (Paltrow was discovered not at fault.) “Is that this a courthouse or the Cannes Movie Competition?” a courtroom safety guard requested Le Parisien as a scrum of reporters waited for Kardashian. The reply, after all, was each.
On this case, the star witness is a lady who has been promoting her household, her likeness, her glamour, and her trauma for nearly half her life. She writes her narrative by her look, and she or he’s nice at it. Within the language of Instagram—a language she helped invent—she is aware of her angles. (Not for nothing did she launch a 445-page e book of selfies.) Within the mid-2010s, she turned an emblem for a sure sort of extremely conspicuous consumption and was lambasted for it; in 2025, she has reclaimed her proper to have interaction in that very same conspicuous consumption. The critics have had it fallacious: Because it seems, there’s no such factor as being “too public” about your wealth. Listed below are Kim’s outfits, listed here are Kim’s diamonds, nonetheless as banal as breakfast.
