When I saw Kim Kardashian arrive at the Met Gala this year, my first thought was: Wow, she looks great. By great, Ive since realized, I subconsciously meant thin.
Thats because despite many years of self-help, Ive been conditioned to perceive weight loss as objectively positive and aspirational. So when Kim teetered up the red-carpeted stairs in Marilyn Monroes Jean Louis dress and told livestream host LaLa Anthony that she lost 16 pounds in three weeks just to fit into it, I put down my bag of Doritos and stared at her in awe. Ill admit itinstead of wondering whether that kind of weight loss is even safe for the human body, I was impressed in ways that made me feel like an impressionable tween all over again. I kept eating my chips eventually (you cant take away my joy) but she left me thinking, How did she do it? Can I do it, too?
Khloe Kardashian, too, is suddenly noticeably slimmer. As seen in a recent series of beach snaps from her 38th birthday family trip, the former host of Revenge Bodya show where contestants strive to achieve a smaller figureis not only thinner in her arms and face, but there is a drastic change in the size of her butt. This has lead many to speculate shes had implants or fat transfers, possibly from the Brazilian Butt Lift that the familys curvy rears helped popularize, surgically removed.
The Sun dubbed the two sisters Kardashi-thin. Social media is ablaze with proclamations that Kim and Khloes new figures signal an end to the BBL era. Just like that, the Kardashians have once again defined which body type is popularand now they are actually a barometer of time. As Uncle Ben told Peter Parker: With great power comes great responsibility. How did we get here?
I tried to go back and pinpoint the exact moment we became so fixated on the Kardashian body and Ive landed on February 2012, when Kim joined Instagram. Before that, 32-year-old Kim was a few seasons deep on Keeping Up, and had come out with a series of fragrances and released a fitness DVD called Fit In Your Jeans By Friday. (Some things dont change.) Two years later, she would release her Android gameone of the most successful game releases of all timein which you could literally build the body of an up-and-coming socialite.
But it was Kims aptitude for the selfie that brought us in that much closer to the life we were already intrigued by. And her sisters have followed in her FaceTuned footsteps. Each Kardashian photo is like a hit of dopamine for the social media fiend and 10 years on, we still cant get enough.
At their invitation, weve dedicated years to tracking the ups and downs of the Kardashian and Jenner faces, hair and measurements, which has sometimes lead to a strange sense of entitlement about their bodies. Lets take a quick trip back to 2013. That year, a very pregnant Kim made her Met Gala debut as Kanyes plus-one in the infamous couch dress, a floral gown by Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy that we later learned was given the thumbs-up by Anna Wintour, herself.
It was the height of meme culture, and within seconds the mom-to-be had been visually compared to a large piece of upholstered furniture only the elderly could love. Generally, body-shaming is off limits while women are creating life in their wombs, and yet somehow the internet (thats us) felt extremely comfortable doing so because, in part by her own hand, Kims body had already become cultural fodder, a conduit for our own obsession with how we look.
The Kardashian phenomenon, in my view, is what happens when you hold a mirror up to unrealistic collective beauty standards and sprinkle the fairy dust of fame and unlimited financial means. They are everything we say we wantbig and small, curvy and thin, all in the right places, all at once. Now, I use the word we carefully, because Im hyper aware that the collective we doesnt generally include Black women like me. To me, Kim, Khloe and Kylies figures, which have become a mainstream ideal over the years, seem like a dystopian copy-paste of my aunties and cousins whose bodies were praised at home but shamed in public.
Now that Kim and Khloe are changing their bodies, shrinking their curves, I cant help but think of when Miley Cyrus took a brief, commercially successful jaunt into hip-hop for her Bangerz album, only to distance herself from that scene once she was no longer reaping the benefits. (Two years later, in 2019, she apologized for doing so.)
While I have given side eye to every Kardashian for their actions over the years, my issue with their influence isnt founded in a particular disdain for any of them. In fact, Ive spent hours of my life binging KUWTK and I am the first to rock my Skims loungewear outside of the house. But each time we praise them for how they look, it represents so many double standards: We fetishize the Black female figure but show more appreciation for it on women who arent Black. We criticize women who dont meet our standard of beauty, but shame them when they seek unnatural intervention to do so.
The Kardashians are subject to such contradictions, but theyre also profiting off them. Each one has capitalized off our fickleness in some way. Khloe in particular cant seem to win with public opinion on how she looksshes long been weight and height shamed, and her (presumed) cosmetic surgeries are regularly used against her in discussions about her on-and-off relationshipsbut shes managed to channel all of those opinions about her appearance into the Revenge Body network series and a fashion empire with her size-inclusive line, Good American.
All of them make money because of our cultures relentless quest for physical perfection, despite knowing perfection doesnt existeven for them. And because we are so insatiably fascinated with wealth and abundance and fame, we find ourselves in a chokehold of influence wielded by women who have the means to change their bodies and faces with the tides. Kim has long been one of the most requested plastic surgery inspos, so imagine the panic of the women whove taken the stepsand loansto ensure they look just like her, only to have her flip the script. Are we living in an Anna Delvey-style body image Ponzi scheme? I think so.
As someone who cannot and has no desire to look like any of the Kardashians (no shade), I cant relate to feeling like these women are my body inspirations. But I can relate to feeling like Im on a hamster wheel, endlessly chasing a moving goal post of aesthetic ideal with no real end in sight. If the BBL era is indeed over (which wouldnt be the worst thingthat procedure has a disturbingly high mortality rate), maybe its a good time to fully examine why were willing to go to such extremes to look like someone or something that doesnt naturally exist. Maybe its a good time to banish the idea of physical perfection altogether, to dismiss it as being as unattainable as a Cartier bag or a personal yacht. As someone who loves her chips, this route is much more appealing.
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Kim Kardashian Weight Loss: What Does It Mean For Us? - The Kit
