Keeping Up With the Kardashians blazed a trail, then helped burn it down.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for the Business of Fashion In August of 2008, I was an associate editor at an upstart magazine that had already folded twice and, in a few months’ time, would do so again.
It was a rambunctious, disordered, and energetic place, blatantly dysfunctional but with a pugnacious esprit de corps. We worked hard and late, often at cross purposes, making what we thought was a funny, cynical, incisive magazine that, it was turning out, not that many people wanted to read. One way to try to fix this was to do what far more successful magazines had always done: feature celebrities. This was tricky in our case because the magazine had long since turned its problems booking celebrities into a badge of honor. It wasn’t just that we couldn’t have them; we didn’tthem. We didn’t want them, so the logic went, because then we couldn’t tell the truth about them . This was the heyday of snark, and the magazine did have a strong tabloid exposé gene, but the truth waswe wanted celebrities in the magazine—just not the kind we could get. So we did what we could to get the kinds we wanted anyway. The house style was covers that featured famous people, without their permission, photoshopped and collaged. Nicole Kidman’s head on a Barbie doll body, for example, had been the cover for an issue about celebrity plastic surgery.everything. 2008 was a long 12 years ago in many, many ways, and our relationship to celebrity is only one of them. The magazine I worked at then was celebrity-obsessed, but in a celebrity-disdaining way that has since gone almost completely out of vogue. The aughts were dominated by what now seems to be a blippish-ly derisive relationship to famous women. It was the era of Paris and Lindsay and Britney and reality TV stars, some of whom were gauchely matter of fact about wanting fame for its own sake and all of whose notoriety was fueled by a new kind of paparazzi-based tabloid coverage. They were rich and hot and young, but they were not aspirational: Their striving, missteps, and public breakdowns were cataloged in incredible detail in gossip magazines and on entertainment news shows that appealed to millions of readers and viewers hopped up on schadenfreudeposture to scoff at this new class of famous person—famous just for being famous!—it was a position that was already caving in, beginning to make way for the more adoring and fannish social media–enabled orientation that would replace it. Of course, at the magazine, we had no idea—which is why we didn’t put Kim Kardashian on the cover, even though we could have. No one encapsulates or is as responsible for the transformation in how we think about celebrities and fame today as Kardashian, who was birthed in the chaotic final days of the old-world celebrity order, but who, alongside her kin, brought us into the new one, like the first sea creatures to set foot on the shore and actually thrive there, as opposed to suffocating on the beach. , the show that made her and her family the most famous one in the world, may be ending, after 14 years and 20 seasons, but the world we live in is the one that they made—one in which to become, be, or stay famous, you just don’t need a platform like TV anymore.Keeping Up With the Kardashians had begun on E! the year before and was already in its third season. The show was popular, but Kim was still most widely known for her sex tape, her former friendship with Paris Hilton, and for generally seeming like another one of these extremely fame-thirsty women with no talents—the C-list version of one to boot. (To wit: these
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