“My job is to take my family’s 15 minutes of fame and turn it into 30,” Kris once declared. “I want to take a selfie with her,” a girl in Barnes & Noble said excitedly.īehind the Kardashian’s lifestyle, there was a mother, but it wasn’t Kim it was Kris Jenner, Kim’s own mother and tireless manager, who took 10% of all her daughters’ incomes. It was to get tens or even hundreds of thousands of likes on all your selfies. The Kardashian lifestyle was the fulfillment of a new American dream which had been embraced by many girls and young women, unsurprisingly enough, at a time when everything around them supported it as an ideal: it was to be beautiful, famous, rich, have amazing clothes, bags and shoes and tens of millions of followers on social media. “I get letters from little girls begging me to adopt them,” Kim once told a reporter. And entertainment media, from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to Keeping Up With the Kardashians, provided them with ample opportunities to do just that.įor a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation’s multi-billion dollar line of ‘princess products’, the five sisters of Keeping Up With the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle. The latter is a national fixation spawned in the “luxury revolution” of the last thirty-something years, in which most of the wealth of the country traveled into the hands of a few, with the rest of the population looking on longingly as the beneficiaries of a new Gilded Age flaunted their high-end stuff. For a generation of girls raised on the Disney corporation’s multi-billion dollar line of “princess products”, the five sisters of Keeping Up With the Kardashians were real-life princesses who lived in a Calabasas, California, castle, unabashedly focused on the pursuit of beauty treatments, expensive fun and luxury brands. There was reality television, which stoked a thirst for more and more intimate details of the lives of celebrities and newly minted reality show stars. 64% said their first or second goal was to become rich.Ī girl waiting in line for Kim said, “I want her life.” A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 51% of 18-to-25 year olds said their most or second-most important life goal was to become famous. The Kardashians, a family of American girls, had come upon the scene, swept forward by the gown of Princess Kim, in a kind of perfect cultural storm: there was the fascination with fame that had always danced at the edges of American identity, and now, with the explosion of a celebrity news industry fueled by internet blogs and TMZ, had taken over the aspirational longings of the young. A girl waiting in line for Kim said, 'I want her life' “She’s amazing,” said another girl in Barnes & Noble. It was now enough to know how to become famous purely for the sake of fame. Or perhaps what served as talent had transformed. The Kardashians tried, in their mild way, but they couldn’t quite seem to explain to Walters, who had come of age at a different time, that this was actually the point – talent didn’t matter much in becoming famous anymore. “You don’t really act, you don’t dance, you don’t sing, you don’t have any – forgive me – any talent.” “You are all often described as famous for being famous,” Walters leveled at sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and their mother Kris, who sat before her in sleek couture. “I have never heard more anger and dismay than when we announced that the people you are about to see were on our list,” Barbara Walters told viewers before airing a segment on the Kardashian family in her 10 Most Fascinating People show of 2011. Still, she was called “vain”, “shallow”, “frivolous”, “egotistical”, “materialistic”, and many other more vulgar insults in endless media pieces and online rantings. Some seemed furious at her success, which in 2015 included TV shows, endorsement deals, makeup, fragrances, clothing lines, one of the most popular of all mobile apps – in which a Kim avatar showed you how to become as famous as she – and a net worth of $85m. What was the meaning of Kim Kardashian? Why was she here, and why wouldn’t she go? Why did anyone care about her, and how had she become so ubiquitous? Throughout the years of her ascendance, people had been trying to figure this out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |