Many a word, and not many of them flattering, have been used to describe Kim Kardashian. Jonathan Van Meter in the authorized biography, Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future, chooses “multipotentialite”. First coined during a 2015 TED Talk, it refers to just the type of person: one “with untapped competencies lurking within,” often from “an unconventional background,” who would go from being a “19-year-old sales girl with a high school education” – as Kardashian was described in divorce filings for her first marriage to Damon Thomas – to an omnipresent business mogul. Now 46 years old, as Van Meter writes, “she has become a single mother of four children, a billionaire who flies around in her own plane, and a respected criminal justice reform activist. She has completed six years of studying the law and taken the bar – while simultaneously taking up acting and producing. Oh – and she built SKIMS into the most successful apparel brand in history, currently valued at $5 billion.”

“I thrive in a scandal,” Kardashian tells Van Meter. We know, having seen her ricochet from one to the next, many speculated to be orchestrated own goals in pursuit of the holy grail of fame, starting with her leaked sex tape, which was then “officially” released, even before the 2007 premiere of the soon-to-be-juggernaut, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The reality show was ostensibly about the family life – there were six kids – of a formerly famous former Olympian married to a former housewife turned Hollywood manager who had been formerly married to O.J.’s trial lawyer bestie. But it was rising star Kim, powered by a sticky strain of notoriety, who eclipsed them all – an early adopter, she played social media like a Stradivarius, essentially instigating rage bait as a genre along the way. Now, almost 20 years after she shape-shifted her way into popular culture, Kardashian has colonized every aspect of it. No more so than in fashion, where she has turned herself into a commodity which, like sex, sells.

Van Meter, a prolific features writer for Vogue, including a 2019 cover profile of Kardashian, is well positioned to recount how she infiltrated the most rarefied circles of style. “I was in meetings at the 4 Times Square offices of Vogue where Anna Wintour’s eyes rolled nearly all the way up into the back of her head at the mere mention of the Kardashians,” he writes. “She refused to let Kim anywhere near the Met Ball.” Also personas non grata at Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair Oscar Party, the Kardashians, with their attention-seeking materialism, were considered the nadir of taste – and striving Kim, with her lad mag photo shoots, bandage dresses and fake tans, was the avatar of all their vulgarity. 

Enter Kanye West – the Grammy-winning rapper and then-respected fashion force before his anti-Black and anti-Semitic outbursts after a mental health implosion made him a pariah. But in 2012, when he started dating Kardashian, such was his A-list cachet that Wintour wanted him to perform at the 2013 Met Ball gala, and he managed to secure her entrée as his plus-one. West, having already given Kardashian a makeover by purging her closet and repopulating it with high-fashion labels that would have her looking like a fashion editor, enlisted his friend, then-Givenchy designer Ricardo Tisci, to outfit her.

That year’s theme was “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” and the Internet duly melted down when a heavily pregnant Kardashian stepped onto the red carpet in “a skintight Givenchy floral print dress with matching gloves and shoes” – “upholstered like a sofa,” as one critic pointed out. Kardashian cried all the way home as memes poured in, but she had generated “more press hits and social media attention than anyone in the Met Gala’s history.” More crucially, that night at the gala, insider’s insider and Tisci confidant, Carine Roitfeld of CR Fashion Book, asked Kardashian to fly to Paris and be photographed by Karl Lagerfeld for its cover. Resistance was futile. With Kardashian’s first American Vogue cover coming in 2014, she had finally arrived.