What The Hell America!

Kim Kardashian always knows what people want to see. In the early 2010s, what people wanted was Kim, and Kim obliged. She was everywhere: on her show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians; on other people’s shows; on magazine covers; and, mostly, on the internet. There, she built an apparatus of self-surveillance out of newly available technology and newly acquired cultural hunger for unfiltered celebrity. Other stars were on social media, sure, but no one used it quite like Kim, endlessly and seemingly without shame. The effect was a magic trick: Kardashian had tens of millions of followers, and each felt like they were getting a special peek into a charmed world. Her feeds from Paris Fashion Week 2016 are a representative sample—a pacifying stream of cream and white, diamonds and lace, outsize wealth made as banal as breakfast. Here is Kim getting ready. Here are Kim’s outfits. Here is Kim’s engagement ring, a gift from her then-husband, then known as Kanye West, its stone as clear as glass and as big as a grape.

It was all breezily aspirational, and then it really wasn’t. A few hours after posting those Fashion Week photos, Kardashian was getting ready for bed in a Paris apartment when five men wearing balaclavas burst into her room. They duct-taped her mouth, bound her with zip ties, held her at gunpoint, locked her in a bathroom, and went about stealing millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry, including that engagement ring and a watch given to her by her late father. They had abducted the building’s night watchman and forced him to lead them to Kardashian’s room; she begged him to tell her attackers, in French, that she had young children at home. She was hoping that if they knew, they might spare her life.

They did—Kardashian emerged from the attack physically fine. But then came the news cycle. People magazine built a story around quotes from a security expert suggesting that Kardashian had made herself a target by “advertising what she’s doing and advertising her wealth,” as though that wasn’t exactly what people (and People) had been rewarding her for this whole time. The New York Times wondered why Kardashian had been traveling with such expensive jewelry. (The fairly obvious answer to the question is that she was on a work trip, and her work is wearing expensive jewelry.) Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel both made cruel jokes on late-night TV. The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, for some reason, spoke to the press about the incident, voicing what seemed to be on everyone’s mind. Kardashian is “too public, too public,” he said. “You cannot display your wealth, then be surprised that some people want to share it.” The mainstream consensus solidified: The robbery was karma, comeuppance, a corrective to all that vacuous extravagance and clueless exhibitionism.

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If the attack was some kind of cosmic lesson for Kardashian, she appeared to have learned it. She stopped posting her real-time whereabouts and dressing so ostentatiously. She went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and sounded less like the survivor of an unprovoked, violent assault than like a child apologizing for misbehavior. “It was meant to happen to me. Things happen in your life to teach you things,” she said. “I was definitely materialistic before, but I’m so happy that my kids get this me, because I just don’t care about that stuff anymore.” The very things that had made her famous were a liability, and she knew it. A few years later, she revealed on her own show that since the robbery, she hadn’t “really been about wearing jewelry.”

Until recently, it seems. Last week, Kardashian appeared in a Paris courtroom to testify against her alleged attackers. She wore—along with a vintage John Galliano dress, six-inch Saint Laurent slingback heels, and Alaïa sunglasses in an exaggerated cat-eye shape—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 brand synergy: Samer Halimeh, the jeweler who’d designed the necklace, sent a press release to journalists as Kardashian testified. The necklace was also a message, and not a particularly subtle one—Kardashian is reclaiming her freedom, and for Kim Kardashian, freedom is diamonds.

The Times called Kardashian’s outfit an “unconventional” choice, but for the most part, the response was fairly neutral. To some degree, this is a reflection of the kinder and gentler moment we are in, at least as far as the mainstream media is concerned: In the near-decade since the robbery and the backlash, an entire subgenre of content has sprung up to reexamine, and atone for, the viciousness that society inflicted on female celebrities in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. Much of the press simply knows better than to openly hate women in the same way it used to. Kardashian was in court to share new details from a horrific assault in the name of seeking justice; to comment meanly on her outfit would have been a weird move.

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But also, such a comment would have revealed a grave misunderstanding of the world we live in, the world Kardashian built. It’s one where every moment is a photo opp, every uncapped lens is a tool for brand building, every iota of attention is a chance to make money, and every flat surface is a red carpet. The rapper A$AP Rocky wore head-to-toe Yves Saint Laurent daily during his February trial for felony assault, and he looked so good doing it that the brand shared paparazzi photos on social media even before he was acquitted. In 2023, Gwyneth Paltrow captured the internet’s attention with the clothes she wore during her trial for reckless skiing, to the degree that Town and Country ran a feature on where to buy them, as though the Park City civil court were a fashion shoot. (Paltrow was found not at fault.) “Is this a courthouse or the Cannes Film Festival?” a court security guard asked Le Parisien as a scrum of reporters waited for Kardashian. The answer, of course, was both.

In this case, the star witness is a woman who has been selling her family, her likeness, her glamour, and her trauma for almost half her life. She writes her narrative through her appearance, and she’s great at it. In the language of Instagram—a language she helped invent—she knows her angles. (Not for nothing did she release a 445-page book of selfies.) In the mid-2010s, she became a symbol for a certain kind of highly conspicuous consumption and was lambasted for it; in 2025, she has reclaimed her right to engage in that same conspicuous consumption. The critics have had it wrong: As it turns out, there’s no such thing as being “too public” about your wealth. Here are Kim’s outfits, here are Kim’s diamonds, still as banal as breakfast.