Korporate Kardashian Burnout Is Real
The Kardashians are so omnipresent that their antics typically function as pop culture white noise, something that can be easily tuned out as you'd please. But, especially over the past month, it's become impossible to avoid: a Kardashian here, a Jenner there, famous boyfriends everywhere.
This is a once-, maybe twice-a-year phenomenon that I like to call Kardashian Overload and it occurs whenever the hijinks kicked up by America's first family all stack up into a single overwhelming... pile. A pile of hijinks?
What makes Kardashian Overload 2023 unique is that there's a corporate edge to the happenings, as companies founded by, tapping into, and supporting the Kardashian-Jenner clan pile on to cash in on that Kardashian Klout (better use of "pile," I'd say).
Kylie Jenner's love life and designer duds were the driving force behind quarterly Kardashian burnout last time, for instance, but it's now the omnipresent launches of KHY, Kylie Jenner's new "affordable luxury" brand, and Kim Kardashian's SKIMS fueling exhaustion this go-round.
Take KHY as an example. The low-priced clothing line's abrupt rollout in late October was, in and of itself, normal. An ordinary headline-grabbing Kardashian launch.
But KHY's debut was a multipronged affair pegged to a big cover story that positioned Kylie Jenner as one of 2023's great innovators (?!).
This appointment, in turn, blasted KHY (and Kylie's contoured mug) across every corner of the fashionsphere. Add in a dash of controversy and you've got a recipe for an unavoidable cultural juggernaut.
Simultaneously, Kim Kardashian was Godzilla-stomping across the internet with a head-spinning series of SKIMS reveals: NBA partnerships! Swarovski collaborations! Nipple bras! Uh, nipple bras.
Perhaps the biggest SKIMS breakthrough was the shapewear line's first dedicated men's offering, which commanded headlines so splashy that Kardashian was even appointed co-host of a big year-end menswear party.
Huge reaction for what's essentially men's underwear and tights but that's what I'm saying: every move Kim and co. make is blown up and draped across the digital realm en masse.
Once in a while is fine, expected even, but all this Kardashian klutter at once is utter khaos.
Without a moment to breath, Kim was reappointed the face of Marc Jacobs in early November, keeping the Kardashian-Jenner's streak of top-tier modeling gigs alive (as if it was ever in any danger of it fading).
Merely a month prior, sister Kendall Jenner was the omnipresent face of Kardashian Domination on the runways of Milan and Paris, taking center stage (literally) for labels as luxurious as Schiaparelli and Chanel.
Kendall's inimitable model glare was statuesque — and I mean literally statuesque, as in her blank-faced, sterile expression may well have been carved from stone — but Kylie, whose recent Acne Studios campaign fueled a stylistic rebrand, stole the Fashion Week scene without even stepping on the catwalk.
You couldn't shake a facetuned stick without hitting a retweeted photo of Kylie's (admittedly excellent) Fashion Week outfits.
In fairness to Kendall, she's sometimes capable of turning it on, like when she wowed Fashion Twitter in Stella McCartney's horse-filled Fall/Winter 2023 campaign a month or two prior.
Oh, and Kendall also gave one of her better performances with beau Bad Bunny in a rare public outing that just so happened to be a Gucci ad.
All that Kardashian promo material isn't even touching on the Kardashian-Jenner familiy's paparazzi-baiting birthday parties, Halloween costumes, and many, many brashly expensive street style photos that pepper the internet like so many cute cat pictures of old. And then there's the tabloid fodder, the gossip, the exclusionary group chats...
The Kardashian era truly will never flame out. The family is just too damn good at fanning the sparks of konversation into a bonfire of attention, including kommerce, kontroversy, and the many other forms of social kapital that kome from being konstantly in the knews — I'll stop.
The Kardashians, like death and taxes, are inevitable and that's okay. That their big breaks are omnipresent is proof that their mastery of the media machine is utterly complete. If only they would work on spacing out their big reveals.
