Kim Kardashian: my life as a brand

Kim Kardashian: my life as a brand

Kim Kardashian is in a makeup chair under giant rollers, looking down at her phone and intermittently up again, to meet her own eye in the mirror. We are at a studio in a Los Angeles suburb; various stylists and Kardashian hangers-on fill the room. "One second," says the star's assistant, calling the group to order. Kardashian frowns at her phone. "You guys," she says, "what should I say? You guys?" There is a moment's hush; Kardashian is passing a tweet.

For those few who haven't yet had the pleasure, Kardashian is a 31-year-old US reality TV star, lately prominent in Britain, who has, since becoming famous in 2007, ascended to the level of a symptom in the culture. Keeping Up With The Kardashians, currently in its seventh season, is contrived, sensationalist, repetitive and witless, but no more so than a lot of things one enjoys without accusing them of spiritual corruption. The difference in this case is reach. Twitter is an unreliable measure of influence, but Kardashian has nearly 16 million followers, putting her ninth in the world, three places behind President Obama. (Lady Gaga is number one; Taylor Swift number eight.) With her two sisters, Khloé and Kourtney, she runs a chain of clothing stores called Dash, has a Las Vegas-based outlet called Kardashian Khaos, promotes makeup and fashion lines under the label Kardashian Kollection, all of which act as window dressing for the business, merely, of being Kim Kardashian: a woman of above average looks, seemingly rather nice, who along with the rest of her family – emotionally speaking – strips on TV for tips. After the shoot, we sit in a courtyard at the back of the studio and Kardashian tries to explain what the fuss is about.

There is an awful lot of fuss. For Kardashian haters, the tipping point came last year when she filed for divorce from Kris Humphries, a basketball player, after three months of marriage and a blizzard of wedding coverage said to have been worth many millions (she will dispute the numbers). The whole thing looked like a stunt to drum up trade for her TV show, although if it was, it backfired in that for a short while she was reviled as the most cynical woman in America. She seems to aggravate male actors in particular. Earlier this year, Jon Hamm unchivalrously referred to her as a "fucking idiot" in Elle magazine, as did Daniel Craig in GQ the year before. Kardashian takes all this with a certain laconic indifference, the standard LA response, heightened by what is probably an effort not to emote too much and generate wrinkles.

"When I hear people say [what are you famous for?], I want to say, what are you talking about?" she says slowly, her eyes wide as a bushbaby's. "I have a hit TV show. We've shot more episodes than I Love Lucy! We've been on the air longer than The Andy Griffith Show! I mean, these are iconic shows, so it blows my mind when people say that."

But you're not performing; you're just being followed around by cameras…

"But to be able to open up your life like that and to be so… if everyone could do it, everyone would. It doesn't make sense to me."

The day before the interview, I go to Dash in Beverly Hills, the flagship store aimed at Kardashian's teen fan base. A bouncer stands outside letting teenagers in one by one, although the store is almost empty. "There's a line!" he calls out to baffled passers-by, and the teenagers snigger. Inside, the clothes are very nice; soft T-shirts, cute shorts and dresses, but that isn't why people are here. Kardashian says that since the show started airing, the store has become a "tourist attraction" and the stock is angled accordingly. After taking photos of themselves in front of a giant Kardashian family montage, the adolescents buy one of several items within their price-range; a $20 compact mirror; pencils for a few dollars; or a $10 bottle of water with the Kardashian sisters' photo on one side.

"Our water sells out all the time," Kardashian says. "People collect them because each store has a different picture on the bottle."

That's amazing.

"It's really crazy," she says. "I mean, a water bottle? It's crazy." She blinks slowly at the wonder of effortless profiteering.

Kardashian characterises her typical fan as "a younger girl, like 15 or 16, who loves fashion, loves to be a girly girl, loves beauty, glam", and whom she respects as a backwards projection of herself. If you can overlook the vacant materialism, she is in some ways not a bad role model. She points out that she is not "your stick-skinny typical model"; that she doesn't go out on benders; that she tries not to swear too much. "I remember this one time when I used the F-word – and everyone was like, I can't believe you said that! You never say that! I am really cautious about what I say and do. If I look at the message I'm portraying, I think it definitely is be who you are, but be your best you."

Whether or not you approve of the show, she has wrought a successful business out of thin air. It's also worth pointing out, given how snotty the fashion industry is towards Kim Kardashian, that to anyone's knowledge she has never thrown her phone at a personal assistant.

And yet she makes people incredibly angry. "Yeah. I have no idea why. I work really hard – I have seven appointments tomorrow before 10am. I'm constantly on the go. I have a successful clothing line. A fragrance. I mean, acting and singing aren't the only ways to be talented. It's a skill to get people to really like you for you, instead of a character written for you by somebody else."

She is currently dating Kanye West, who might have had a hand in the following analogy. "When rap music first started," Kardashian says, "rappers were not respected and people thought it was just a fad. And people thought reality shows were going to come and go. They have taken over the soap operas. So it's a modern version of a soap opera."

The difference, of course, is that the Kardashians are purporting to sell something real. For bald cheek, nothing matches a recent scene in the show in which Kardashian balked at attending a family therapy session because, she said, she didn't feel like sharing family secrets "with a stranger". Very occasionally, a genuine emotion is caught on camera and stands out in relief to the rest of the show – most recently during a staged discussion about Khloé's paternity; while her mother and sisters mugged centre screen, Khloé, to one side, looked fleetingly devastated.

Despite all the phoniness, rehearsed dialogue and fake scenarios, however, there is some grain of authenticity to the Kardashians to which fans respond: when I asked teenagers at Dash why they liked the show, the most common reason was that, despite all the drama, "they all really love each other and are such a close family". Like the Osbournes before them, the Kardashian family unit is convincingly tight. There is something unexpectedly soothing about this.

For the record then, what is Kardashian's talent?

"What is my talent?" She cocks her head to one side. "Well, a bear can juggle and stand on a ball and he's talented, but he's not famous. Do you know what I mean?"

The mastermind behind the Kardashian empire is assumed to be Kris Jenner, mother, manager and ringmaster of her children's careers, who comes across on the show as a gimlet-eyed monster, wringing every last dollar from the family conceit. Despite her 100% belief in the reality genre, Kim Kardashian has to admit she is very glad she went through adolescence off-camera, unlike her youngest sisters, who were nine and 10 when the show started. (Their father is Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic athlete and Kris's second husband, whose career as a motivational speaker she reignited after marrying him. Her first husband, Robert Kardashian, who died in 2003, was OJ Simpson's lawyer.)

"I feel a little bit sad for my little sisters," Kardashian says. "If there's one thing I'm so thankful I have, it's that privacy of pretty much my whole life until seven years ago."

It was a spoilt childhood, materially – her father was a wealthy entrepreneur as well as a lawyer – and it's a mark of the milieu they grew up in that the Kardashian girls and their brother, Rob, were considered deprived because their parents wouldn't give them their own credit cards.

But her dad bought them each a car, right?

"He gave us a car, but I had to sign a contract with him before I got it."

The contract said she had to have it washed once a week; had to make sure it always had gas. "And my grades had to be at a certain average to keep the car. If I crashed it, I had to be responsible for paying for it." She did crash it, within the first six months, and got a job to pay for the repairs.

This was the beginning of Kardashian's career. She found work in a clothing store and liked it so much that, after paying off the car, she kept the job. She started to design her own accessories. "I would make these headbands that were really popular and I'd sell them to all the fun stores in LA. I would make them after school and go around selling them."
She and her sisters periodically lived with their father at this point, their parents' marriage having disintegrated after Kris Jenner had an affair with a 22-year-old. Fault lines in the family were, bizarrely, crystallised by the OJ Simpson trial. Kardashian's mother had been one of Nicole Brown Simpson's best friends and was supposed to have seen her on the day she was murdered; she believed OJ was guilty. Robert Kardashian was one of OJ's best friends and defended him.

"We were kids – 14 and 15 years old, me and Kourtney," Kim says. "We took my dad's side. Just because my dad was not married and my mum kind of broke his heart. It was personal. And we thought that my dad was the smartest man in the whole world. And if he thought he was  innocent, we were going to be on that side."

One day, their father came to them and said, "Girls, this is a huge trial and is going to be a part of history, and I think you guys are old enough to handle it." They went into court with him and sat in the OJ camp. "And my mum had gone with Bruce and she was sitting on the Brown side – on Nicole's side. And she turned around and gave as a stare like, I don't even want to see you guys when you get home. We wouldn't even look her way. She was so mad."

This was the beginning of the family's life in the spotlight, although Kardashian had always wanted to be on TV. She watched the first MTV reality show, The Real World, and thought that's what she wanted to do.

What, be on a reality show? "Yes. I wasn't thinking fame. I was just thinking how cool." Why? "I don't know; I just thought my life seemed interesting. I thought, if only people knew the crazy things that go on in this household, it would be so funny. And everyone kept saying that. They'd come over and be like, 'Oh my God, you need your own reality show.' I was always on board. Kourtney was the one who wasn't."

Kim inched farther towards her goal when she started knocking around with Paris Hilton, and then, in 2003, she made a sex tape with her then boyfriend, the singer Ray J. The tape was eventually leaked and a star was born. (In a rare moment of coyness, Kris Jenner, in her memoir, glosses over this momentous turning point in the family history: "There was so much media coverage swirling around Kim then, both positive and negative.") Anyway, to "take advantage of the moment", Jenner made a pilot of the family and took it to Ryan Seacrest at US TV network E! Word came back that there were too many characters, too many siblings and that it was confusing. But Seacrest ultimately backed the show, correctly intuiting that, as with band members, young fans would be able to choose which of the three sisters was their favourite: blank but beautiful Kim, sweet Kourtney or sarcastic Khloé. Meanwhile, Jenner's conniving entertained adults and, for comic relief, there was Bruce, bobbing around in the background, looking more startled with each season and new wave of plastic surgery.

It's no small thing to keep a reality show afloat, and even Kardashian admits that by season four the family was getting panicky about content. "I was like, 'You guys, I don't know that I have much more to give. I can only be myself, like… we're so boring now, we've shown everything.'"

And? "And then Khloé got married, Kourtney got pregnant and everything else just happened organically."

OK. So here's the thing: surely, living under that kind of pressure to feed the beast, one is tempted to say yes to things one might otherwise say no to, for example marrying Kris Humphries and then divorcing Kris Humphries. It doesn't even have to be mercenary; just a matter of needing to Make Something – Anything – Happen.

"Not really. We had done filming our season at that point, so we decided to film for the wedding. And that was a decision that he and I made together. But I think that, with any decisions in life [brace yourselves], like, I spoke to a girl today who had cancer and we were talking about how this is such a hard thing for her, but it taught her a big lesson on who her friends are and so much about life. She's 18. And I was like, that's how I feel."

There is no ethical dimension to Kardashian's defence of her marriage, merely the rationale that it would have made bad commercial sense to have faked it. "Getting married and divorced quickly, if that was my goal the whole time – I'm not an idiot, I obviously know that that would be a bad business decision. If anything, I probably would have left sooner had I not been filming, because I didn't want to end the relationship on TV." The sums of money she was said to have made are "completely outrageous and not true", she says. "No, I mean even with the money we made, we still had to pay for the wedding. We  didn't even make enough for that."

So if you married again, would you sell the rights? "I would definitely do it differently. Just all the scrutiny that I got. You don't plan to go through all of that willingly. For money." Her voice rises out of its Californian drawl and sounds momentarily urgent. "That's just not what a sane person would do. So. Would I get married on TV again? No."

She thinks about it for a moment. "Well, I guess you never say never. Because who knows? So many other people I know have gotten married on TV and it has worked out amazing for them."

There is a pause. "William and Kate got married on TV," Kardashian says thoughtfully.

Not all the endorsement deals have been successful. There was a debit card ("the Kardashian Kard") that had high hidden fees and from which, after a firestorm in the press, the family distanced themselves; and a diet product that is currently the subject of a lawsuit. Of the card, Kardashian says, "definitely not the right deal for us. It sounded like a good idea when we went into it, but there were all these hidden fees and costs that even we didn't know about. Although, if you looked at it, it was still a lower percentage than the bank gives you on a credit card."

(It's true that $10 a month fees for prepaid debit cards are not unusual, although there were other fees attached – $1.50 to ring the service centre for example – which looked, given the age of the target market, a little ungenerous.) In Kardashian world, attracting bad PR is a moral failing. "For us, we just didn't want that negative press, so we backed off." As for QuickTrim, the diet product, "If you look at every diet product, there's tons of lawsuits. So that is a successful product, actually."

Kardashian has probably attracted more criticism for her decision to pose topless in Playboy and W magazines, something she hesitated over, but her mother talked her into. Good old Kris. Her father would have been horrified, Kardashian says. "He would have killed me."

But her mum? "Oh, she was all for it."

Doesn't she think it undermines her credibility as a business person? "No, sex is powerful and I think it's empowering, so I don't. I would have thought that before, but now I don't. I go back and forth about it."

The point is that men in her position would not be asked to pose naked. "Yeah!" she says with wonder, as if we have hit upon yet another feminist advantage in the world. "I think it's empowering and I'll do what I want!"

She has at least been consistent in this. In her early 20s, long before the show, Kardashian was married to a musician called Damon Thomas, a fact she shared with her family only after the event. When I ask why she didn't tell her mother she was getting married, she has what looks like a rare, unstudied reaction. With a shuttered look, Kardashian says, "Just a bad choice on my part."

For months after the second marriage debacle, Kardashian says she stopped Googling herself, as near to a breakdown a member of that family can get. She changed her email address. She lost friends. "All these people who were so on my side completely turned on me, and they're now trying to come back and be friends."

Her pairing with Kanye West is odd; he so outspoken and political, Kardashian so neutral on almost everything. The first time she voted in her life was for Obama. "I loved being part of that decision-making process, but I never voted in prior years when I was legally eligible. I don't know why." She is, she says, a "liberal Republican", put off Mitt Romney because of his stance against gay marriage. This election, she says, "I don't know which way I'm going to go." Her favourite politician of all time is Kennedy.

Kanye will appear intermittently in the next season of the show. They are taking their relationship "season by season". "It's what we're both comfortable with, and it's all about making a group decision. Him and I, as a team."

I imagine Kris Jenner might be in that decision, too. Won't the day come, I ask, when Kardashian rises up and overthrows her mother? She actually breaks out an annoyed facial expression. "We are totally equal. She listens to what I say. She follows my lead. She works for me. I mean, on the show maybe it doesn't come off that way…"

Meanwhile, another generation of Kardashians is emerging to fill the endless hours of scheduling. Kourtney's child Mason, a toddler, now takes up a good part of many episodes. Khloé and her husband Lamar have their own show, Khloé & Lamar. The other day, Lamar went to the dentist. If Kardashian had a baby, she says, she would probably put it on TV, with certain caveats. For example, with Mason, "he can come in and say, hi/bye, and that's it", but isn't allowed to drive story lines.

The point is, she has more perspective these days. The marriage crisis changed her. "I'm leaning more towards being a little more private."

So she might potentially say no to another season? Kardashian blinks. "I never said I wouldn't do the family show." But it's very possible, she says, that the universe has shifted enough for her to say words she couldn't have imagined herself saying a year ago, an extraordinary break with Kardashian family values: "I'll never do a spin-off."