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It’s the first week of January, after another holiday thrown into chaos by COVID, and the winter sun is starting to set behind a Vogue team gathered to photograph Kim Kardashian and her four children in the parklike grounds of Kim’s modernist Hidden Hills, California, estate. We’re only 20 minutes north of the thrum of Los Angeles, though you’d never know it watching the cottontail bunnies dart between hedges. Kim’s children, North, 8; Saint, 6; Chicago, 4; and Psalm, 2, whom she shares with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Kanye West, have been playing for the last hour, trailed by clicking cameras. North, dressed in a white Skims tee and an old pair of her mother’s artfully tattered Levi’s, cinched at the waist, has been practicing her free throws on the black basketball court that Kim once built for Kanye, in the marriage’s better days. North’s younger siblings take turns zipping around their sister on the fleet of motorized toy cars at their disposal. A group of caretakers tells Saint to slow down; he’s wearing, appropriately, a lime-green Kawasaki shirt picked out by North, who has styled all the kids. But the witching hour, when mysterious forces turn happy children into inconsolable wretches, is fast approaching, and Kim has yet to emerge from the “glam room” tucked inside her closet, which corresponds less in size to a conventional wardrobe and more to the footprint of a classic six in Manhattan.
When Mother Kimberly does appear shortly thereafter, her arrival is so casual that the energy on the shoot barely shifts.
“Hi guys,” she says, making her way onto the court dressed in Balenciaga Couture denim and spiky black boots, her hair pulled tight in a modern queue, face and décolletage impossibly bronzed. In person, her voice is silkier than the Cali Girl vocal fry she and her sisters are often parodied for—even by Kim herself, when she played older sister Kourtney in a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch last fall called “The People’s Kourt” that sent up the entire Kardashian-Jenner clan.
Glittering as she is, Kim is greeted first and foremost as “Mommy” by her children, and now that Mommy is here, all four want a piece of her, and they want it now. Shrieks of delight coming from the younger three just moments ago instantly morph into crying in a round: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the meltdown remix. And so the witching begins.
Saint, Chicago, and Psalm surround their mother and play tug-of-war with her denim, while North quietly claims her hand. Instantly, one of the most famous women in the world turns into any other mom resorting to bribery to regain calm. “Psalm-y,” Kim asks her youngest, “do you want candy or do you want me to carry you?” Offers of ice cream, L.O.L. dolls, makeup, and Roblox are swiftly tendered in an unwaveringly even tone of voice.
Saint, whom Kim calls The Negotiator, perhaps sees how amenable—and distracted, with cameras whirring—his mother is and whispers a higher price into her ear.
“Five million Roblox?” faux-gasps the CEO of two billion-dollar companies, Skims and a relaunching beauty line (formerly KKW Beauty). She cuts deals in short order, managing to give each child her undivided attention without ever losing her cool—her superpower, she tells me, is staying calm in any situation. The shoot is finished in the nick of time, before the day’s last swath of golden light disappears behind the hills.
Later that evening, freshly showered, free of makeup, and wrapped in a fuzzy white robe, Kim tucks into her breakfast banquette for a plant-based stir-fry prepared by one of her two full-time chefs. Dinner is momentarily disrupted by Chicago, or “Chi,” and her five-year-old cousin Dream, Kim’s brother Rob Kardashian’s daughter, twinning in PJs and braided pigtails, as they sprint back and forth in front of us, screaming, “I never had a boyfriend! I never had a boyfriend!”
“You better not!” Kim yells after them, encouraging the two to venture upstairs to share this news with North and Saint, who are playing together in Saint’s room.
The kitchen is a serene oasis of neutral tones, like the rest of this minimalist retreat designed by Belgian Axel Vervoordt, who has created interiors for Sting, Robert De Niro, and Calvin Klein. The house was purchased by Kim and Kanye (Ye, as he’s now legally known) in 2014 and took almost seven years to renovate—coincidentally, the length of their marriage. Though the home began as the couple’s shared vision, it now feels very Kim, virtually every room rendered in the monochromatic palette that has become her signature, from the Skims she designs to the Balenciaga she consistently wears, down to the cars she owns—a Maybach, Rolls-Royce, and Lamborghini SUV, all in the exact same shade of gray. The design process she and Ye collaborated on with Vervoordt led Kim to a love affair with architecture, specifically Japanese. At present, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Tadao Ando is building Kim’s Palm Springs home, which she describes as “concrete, gray-toned, and really zen,” while Kengo Kuma, who designed the National Stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as well as LVMH’s Japan headquarters, is creating a glass-and-wood lake house for her in an undisclosed location, where Kim travels every Fourth of July.
Since she filed for divorce early last year, Kim has said little publicly about the demise of her union with the man she credits for inspiring her present aesthetic interests. Perhaps she is letting the last few years speak for themselves: Ye’s relocation to Wyoming; the July 2020 political rally during his half-baked presidential run, when Ye alleged that the couple had considered terminating their first pregnancy; the subsequent Twitter screed where he accused Kim of trying to “lock me up,” which prompted Kim to ask for compassion for Ye and his experience of bipolar disorder. Though Ye has made no secret of wanting her back, even while making a show out of dating someone new. Kim has refrained from issuing public statements on the split per se, and today, she is philosophical about the marriage’s dissolution.
“For so long, I did what made other people happy,” the 41-year-old explains. “And I think in the last two years I decided, I’m going to make myself happy. And that feels really good. And even if that created changes and caused my divorce, I think it’s important to be honest with yourself about what really makes you happy. I’ve chosen myself. I think it’s okay to choose you.” She pauses before elaborating. “My 40s are about being Team Me. I’m going to eat well. I’m going to work out. I’m going to have more fun, spend more time with my kids and the people who make me happy. I’m going to put my phone down. Unfollow if I don’t want to see something on Instagram. Khloé came up with the best phrase for that yesterday. She said, ‘Post and ghost.’ ” In addition to her family, the people who make Kim happy belong to a protective sorority of girlfriends, organized in group chats as either the “lifers” she’s known since preschool or the “bat chat” besties she’s made since girlhood.
Lifer Allison Statter, whose father Irving Azoff chaired MCA Music Entertainment Group in the ’80s when Kim’s father, Robert Kardashian Sr., ran the promotions department, tells me that friendship loyalty with Kim runs both ways. “She genuinely wants the best for everyone. She’s never been vindictive or mean. She’ll do anything for anyone who comes into her orbit.”
While Kim’s generosity has stayed intact for the four decades of her life, a certain “zero fucks given” attitude has come with age. It’s a family tradition, according to Kim’s older sister, Kourtney, who, at age 42, recently got engaged for the first time to Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. “When Kim and I each turned 40, we got all these text messages from our grandmother and our cousin and people over 40,” she says. “They were like, You’re going to have the best sex of your life. You’re going to be in the best place in your life.”
Reflective of her mature attitude is Kim’s approach to co-parenting and supporting Ye in his role as father to her children. “You could be so hurt or angry at your ex, but I think in front of the kids, it always has to be ‘Your dad’s the best,’ ” she explains. “Make sure you are your co-parent’s biggest cheerleader, no matter what you’re personally going through.” The one time that cheer turned into anything resembling a boo was in early February, after Ye asked his Instagram followers what recourse he had when their daughter North was "put on TikTok against my will." (North joined the platform with her mother late last year.) This shot across the bow was the latest in a month-long, public flurry of accusations Ye fired off at his ex, to which Kim never responded. So it came as something of a surprise when she addressed the TikTok blow-up directly, in a statement posted to her Instagram Stories, where she wrote, "Divorce is difficult enough on our children and Kanye's obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation so negatively and publicly is only causing further pain for all," before reiterating her wish that "all matters regarding our children" remain private.
After being in the public eye for so long, Kim knows a thing or two about keeping certain aspects of her life out of the spotlight. To that end, she doesn’t comment on her rumored new beau, SNL funnyman Pete Davidson, except in indirect reference to the tabloid-documented Bahamas trip the two took at New Year’s. “I was in the Bahamas, and the people I was with said, ‘We’re on fucking vacation. We haven’t been on vacation in a long time.’ And then they threw their phones in the ocean,” she says. “I was like, ‘What? What? What? Am I allowed to do that?’ ”
A plate of tempura green beans is delivered to the Vervoordt-designed walnut table by her chef Gabe. Kim thanks him and asks how he’s feeling, as he’s just recovered from COVID. Better, but still tired, he replies, as she nods sympathetically. Throughout our time today, I find myself struck less by Kim’s obvious glamour than by her kindness. She has strict standards of conduct she lives by, commandments frequently invoked in our conversation. Call them Kimisms: No haters. No assholes. No bullshit. Don’t keep people waiting. Show up for people who show up for you. Root for everyone to win.
In lieu of throwing her phone in the ocean, Kim changed her number, to alleviate the guilt she feels for not responding quickly to everyone, which she considers rude. While it represents a small way in which the self-professed “people pleaser” has decided to choose herself, there have been seismic changes as well. What started in 2018 with a chance scroll through Twitter, on which she came across the story of Alice Marie Johnson serving a life sentence for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense, has become something of a higher calling for Kim Kardashian. It led her all the way to the White House to persuade then president Donald Trump to commute Johnson’s life sentence—which he did. Though her detractors dismissed the moment as a mere photo op, it was anything but, leading Kim to redouble her efforts by enrolling in a Law Office Study Program (LOSP), a law school alternative offered in California and three other states, in which aspiring legal minds must apprentice for four years under a seasoned attorney or judge to receive their degree.
“She’s doing law school in the hardest way possible. She really has to self-learn,” says human rights attorney Jessica Jackson, for whom Kim is apprenticing. “She has to study 18 hours a week, only five of those hours with me.” Though Jackson, who leads two nonprofits aimed at shrinking the prison industrial complex, took her own hard road to a legal career—finishing both college and law school in six years only after her then husband was sent to prison, leaving her a single mother without a high school diploma—she believes Kim’s path is even more difficult. “I wasn’t trying to run a business, film a show, and raise four kids.” The end of Keeping Up With the Kardashians after a 20-season run appeared to take one job off of Kim’s crowded plate, but that respite lasted mere months. A new Hulu reality show starring the family, titled simply The Kardashians, was announced in January (and will premiere in April).
Unlike conventional law students, LOSP students must pass the “baby bar,” or First-Year Law Students’ Examination, before they take the General Bar exam. The baby bar had a recent pass rate of 20.7 percent, compared to the roughly 50 percent pass rate for the General Bar. “I remember Bob Shapiro [who, along with Kim’s father, was part of O.J. Simpson’s legal “Dream Team”] telling me, ‘You’re fucked,’ ” Kim says. But in December, on her fourth attempt, she prevailed, giving her more time to devote her skills to the people who motivated her to pursue a law degree in the first place.
Here within the monastic opulence of her home, amid white Royère sofas and a James Turrell installation bathing the long vaulted-ceiling hallway in pale light, it’s difficult to imagine that Kim might be just as comfortable inside the prisons where her advocacy work so often takes her. Prisons like San Quentin, often referred to as the country’s most dangerous, as well as the Central California Women’s Facility, or “Chowchilla,” which houses the only women’s death row in the state. In 2019, Kim used her considerable platform to pressure Texas governor Greg Abbott to grant a stay of execution to Rodney Reed, imprisoned 24 years for a murder experts widely believed he didn’t commit. Kim happened to be visiting Reed at the all-solitary Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a maximum-security prison in West Livingston, Texas, when he received the life-sparing news from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
About Chowchilla, she says, “Literally every crime the women I spoke to had committed was for their significant other. I heard stories like, ‘My boyfriend told me to pick this up. And I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t question him.’ ” She pauses to eat a green bean with uncanny precision. “I was like, Wow, I probably would’ve done the same.”
“She’s a triple threat,” Jackson explains. “She gets the comms and marketing aspect. She gets the legal issues. And she gets the human issues of each of the cases she gets involved in.” Because of Kim’s ability to approach prison reform from multiple angles, Jackson has her apprentice attend strategy meetings, and together they’ve worked on 14 successful clemency cases for incarcerated individuals sentenced to life or to die.
Whether it’s the money-bail system, mandatory minimum sentencing, or the death penalty, the policies Kim has dedicated herself to changing disproportionately harm Black and brown communities. That part, especially, hits home. “This work has taught me so much,” she explains. “Especially raising Black boys, who are going to be targeted so much more than their white friends.”
Kim’s iPhone buzzes. (Thanks to the new number, it’s hardly vibrated tonight.) It’s North, whom Kim describes as “the most snuggly” of her children, asking Kim to put her to bed. And though it’s the conclusion of another 16-hour workday, the cover model, CEO, and criminal-justice reformer slips on her Skims faux-fur slides and, like any other devoted mother, tends to her child first before permitting herself some much-deserved sleep.
Lest I think this new Kim might disappear from public view altogether to devote herself to good works, I am reminded that she is, in fact, everywhere—her body, her style, her va-va-voom swagger. The day after the shoot, Kim and I have a date for tea at a hotel in Beverly Hills. At the valet, I see her waiting for her car. She’s on her way to—or from?—a workout. Her curves are poured into a sports bra and coordinated leggings in a coral snakeskin print, her long hair parted in the middle and secured at the nape of her neck in a low ponytail. The color, however, is lighter than it was the day before. Did she have time for a hair appointment after putting the kids to bed? In a moment I catch my mistake. It’s not Kim. But it’s Kim, too, and a symbol of the mogul-mom’s impact on the culture. You can’t go anywhere in the world today without seeing these Kimitators.
Balenciaga creative director Demna, who has been working closely with Kim for the last year and designed her meme-worthy Met gala “shadow” dress in September, puts it this way: “I think for many, many years, there hasn’t been anyone who has redefined the standards of beauty, of feminine beauty, as much as Kim has. She did something that is very similar to what Marilyn Monroe did back in the day. She redefined our understanding of what beauty is.”
This year happens to be the 60th anniversary of Monroe’s death, and it’s helpful to consider Marilyn and Kim in parallel when contemplating the latter’s influence. There is the body analogue, those hyperbolically female, hourglass forms. There’s Marilyn’s look: platinum coif, red lips, beauty mark—as unmistakable as Kim’s dark liquid hair, contoured cheeks, and enigmatic gaze. But above all, they both possess a paradoxical beauty of fantasy and reality intertwined. On the one hand, their glamour seems impossibly out of reach. On the other, Marilyn wasn’t born blond, or even Marilyn, for that matter. “Marilyn Monroe” was created—by hair dye, diet, styling, and hard work. Her beauty, as well as Kim’s, undeniably tells a story of good genes, but also one involving a great deal of labor. And beauty as work is an idea to which virtually any woman can relate.
Of course when Kim arrives to the hotel’s restaurant, right on time, minimally made-up, dressed in elevated athleisure—an oversized black leather shirt and matching pants over a black bodysuit—her hair still in a long braid, she looks as if she’s expended no effort at all. The kids are “with their dad” this afternoon, and after Kim orders tea—English breakfast with steamed oat milk and honey—and a basket of bread, I ask how she feels about her role in moving the beauty needle so far, and about all the Kimitators she sees around her.
But she demurs. “I don’t know if I would ever say, ‘Oh my God, this person looks like me.’ I think if someone has dark hair and tan skin people are going to say, ‘Oh, that looks like Kim.’ And that’s not fair, because there are so many people who are just themselves.” I tell her that I’d read somewhere that 30 percent of women visiting one plastic surgeon’s office in Beverly Hills asked to look like her. “Wow,” she says. “I never heard that.”
One reason Kim can’t see herself in her legion of lookalikes, perhaps, is that she grew up used to not seeing herself in the popular culture of her youth. Kim came of age in the ’90s, era of the androgynous grunge waif, three descriptors that bear no relationship whatsoever to her brand of curvaceous sex appeal. She remembers not seeing herself in any beauty icons growing up until Salma Hayek (and shortly thereafter, Jennifer Lopez) came along. That’s when a light bulb went off. “Okay, there’s other body shapes out there. There are other looks that people find beautiful,” she recalls thinking. “My reference for prom was Salma Hayek. I went to the MAC counter and brought pictures of her. It was like, I finally have someone to look up to.”
For every person who credits Kim as a positive influence, however, it seems there’s another who attributes the most toxic aspects of the beauty zeitgeist to her and her sisters. Body dysmorphia. Eating disorders. Plastic surgery. To her critics, she’s Eve offering up a forbidden apple, ruining all that’s innocent. As Kim nibbles on the pretzel roll from the bread basket, I ask about this dark side of her cultural power.
“You and your sisters have been blamed for promoting—”
“Everything,” she says, finishing my sentence. She considers this phenomenon for a moment without defensiveness. “There’s definitely an influence, both positive and negative, on how a whole group of people view themselves because of social media. I can see that. I’m not blocked off to the idea that it exists.” Measuring her words, Kim continues. “But I try to think, Okay, if I’m raising my kids, how would I react if I felt like there were things on TikTok or Instagram that I wouldn’t want them to see and be a part of? We would have those conversations.”
She doesn’t devote much energy to analyzing her effect, for better or for worse, on the culture. For Kim, this is an act of self-preservation. “I just try to live my life and be happy for people,” she says. “And I think when you just live your life like that, you block it out. It’s like a racehorse that puts on blinders so they can see clearly and straight. You’ve got to just be that racehorse, put on those blinders, and go. And if you start trying to see to the right or the left of you, you’re going to trip up.”
Living her life means eating plant-based and rising daily for a 5:30 a.m. workout—typically after only five hours of sleep, Kim’s baseline to function. The fact that she lost her beloved father (“the best dad in the entire world”) to cancer as she entered adulthood is always at the edge of her thoughts, especially now that she’s a mother. And though she says she’s in the best shape of her life, Kim’s most-heralded looks of late have been ones that expose very little of the body that once upon a time “broke” the internet. Consider the gown she wore to the Met gala, where even her face was completely obscured in black jersey. It was a conceit that she initially resisted.
“I fought against it. I was like, I don’t know how I could wear the mask. Why would I want to cover my face?” she recalls. “But Demna and the team were like, This is a costume gala. This is not a Vanity Fair party where everyone looks beautiful. There’s a theme and you have to wear the mask. That is the look.”
There was something fitting about wearing a mask to the Met ball during a pandemic defined by mask-wearing, but it’s not the corollary that Demna, also the cofounder of the label Vetements, had in mind. The mask, he tells me from his base in Zurich, was “conceptually speaking, quite important. People would know instantly it was Kim because of her silhouette. They wouldn’t even need to see her face, you know? And I think that’s the whole power of her celebrity, that people wouldn’t need to see her face to know it’s her.” Citing the fact that he and Kim speak “the same fashion language,” he has anointed her the face of Balenciaga’s spring/summer ’22 campaign.
When Kim does choose to reveal more these days, it’s often as much for work as it is for Instagram. “Probably my proudest moment in terms of my body recently was when I was on a billboard covering the whole side of a building with Kendall and Kylie [Jenner], who are half my age, when we did a Skims underwear campaign together, and I could stand next to them and feel confident,” she recalls, referring to Skims’s provocative Valentine’s Day campaign last year.
The shapewear, intimates, and apparel line she cofounded in 2019 with Jens Grede, of Frame denim, came out of Kim’s personal need for garments in the right colors and feel. Which explains why in two short years, Skims has inspired an almost cultish devotion among its fans and received a $3.2 billion valuation. Its recent collaboration with Fendi took in $1 million in the first minute of its release (and quickly sold out), and a partnership with Team USA was just extended to provide Skims underwear and loungewear for this winter’s Beijing Olympics. “The business is truly hers, and truly a reflection of her vision of how it should look and perform,” says Grede, the business yin to Kim’s creative yang. “I think she’s underrated as a creative director. I don’t think people understand who she is.”
After years spent feeling like a fashion outsider, followed by more years experimenting with the work of different designers, from Balmain to Rick Owens to the late Thierry Mugler, now it’s Kim who wears the proverbial clothes, and not the other way around. “I always think, What will be next?” she ponders. “Because I always had Kanye, who knew exactly what the next fashion era would be for me. And there’s something scary about being out there on your own, but also something so liberating.” She finishes her tea and dabs neatly at her lips. “Who knows? I might just be in Skims and be so comfy and casual and wear no makeup, and that might be what I feel like representing to the world. Maybe it’s just not that serious.”
On that note, the real Kim leaves the restaurant, without fanfare, past the lookalikes in whom she doesn’t see herself. She’s got her blinders on, and she’s running her own race.
In this story: hair, Chris Appleton; makeup, Mario Dedivanovic; manicurists, Diem Truong and Kim Truong.
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