Kim Kardashian and How Fashion is Identity

In the most recent run of Kardashians, there was a storyline of how Kim was struggling with finding her own fashion sense after her divorce to Kanye West. And I’ll be honest, I’ve been thinking of this storyline ever since it aired.

This will be the first foray into reality tv on this channel. For those of you who also listen to my podcast, the Religion and Popular Culture Podcast, will know that I do absolutely love reality tv. I can sit here and explain why its great for anthropology, but really it’s just plan ol’ fun. When people tell me I shouldn’t watch it because it’s trash, it’s kinda like telling someone they shouldn’t eat cake because it’s unhealthy – I know it’s unhealthy, that’s why I’m eating it. I know it’s trash, that’s why it’s so good. But of course, there’s still really wonderful explorations of mythology and storytelling within it, and that’s what we’re really here for.

I think Kim Kardashian, regardless of how you feel about her, will provide a really interesting case study of the storytelling impact of clothing and fashion, especially in relation to the communication of identity and culture.

I think it’s best to start with Kim Kardashian as a person and a character. Kim’s rise to fame is followed by her social perception as a sex symbol. She started on the fringes as a socialite, popping up in photos with Britney Spears as she followed around Paris Hilton.

Her sex tape with then-boyfriend Ray Jay was released just before the premiere of the reality show following around her and her family, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Her image was then blown up in the social sphere, and her image became synonymous with sex and sexiness.

Kim’s image was carefully curated specifically for the male gaze. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how much agency she had in this early in her career, but it became something she took control of and definitely started to manipulate for herself over time.

Perhaps this was due, in part, to her role as a model as her career grew. In a study on the performance of gender in modelling, scholars noted how models act out performances of gendered deference or flirtations in order to book jobs. This isn’t to say that models sleep with potential clients, more that they play up their femininity and sexual attraction to create an impact. Their job is to play into the male gaze, and therefore their performance of their role within that helps to show their potential while on the job.

Kim’s image was also massively impacted by fashion and her relationship to fashion. She was able to use fashion to communicate the presentation of the type of self she wanted to portray, because fashion is an important part of self-communication.

Humans are essentially cultural beings. We are tied to the social and cultural worlds around us, and it’s really difficult to parse out what experiences we are having that are not part of this and which ones are. This is because we kinda are always impacted by our social and cultural worlds – the way we engage with others are always painted from our backgrounds. And more importantly, the way we engage with ourselves is also impacted by our social and cultural worlds. This means our bodies, and what we do with them, is inherently social.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas has a theory about what she calls the “two bodies” which helps to explain this a little. She says that we actually have two bodies: a physical body and a social body. The two bodies can be incredibly close to one another, but they can also be really far away. The social body constrains the physical one, and impacts the way the physical body is perceived. Essentially what Douglas is saying is that our physical bodies are never just understood as they are, but are always filtered through our social lives and social interactions, as well as what society tells us our bodies should be.

Clothes sit at the boundary between these two bodies. They sit on the physical body, but they transform the physical body into the social spaces we move in. Our clothing is always situated in places and spaces – we think about these things when we get dressed. If we’re not leaving the house for the day, we may wear something very different than when we’re going into the office. The social body regulates what the physical body can wear, and what is considered appropriate for those spaces. In Florida, where I grew up, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to wear a bikini to the beach in the summer, but it would be incredibly inappropriate to wear the same outfit to church on Sunday. The social body is what constrains what the physical body is allowed to wear, and therefore understanding which bodies are “appropriate” and which ones are not.

Clothing’s position as the intermediary between the physical and the social body also means it’s the prime way we communicate with the world around us. Clothing becomes the link between our individual identities, our social world, and the physical body we inhabit. Fashion scholar Fred Davis argued how clothing frames the self, and serves as “a kind of visual metaphor” for our identities and avenues of social belonging. We “read” others based on their clothing, and in turn, we are “read” by others.

A lot of the theories on subcultures focuses on this – we use clothing and other aspects of adornment or bodily marks to inscribe our social belongings onto our bodies. Punk, for example, is marked by clothing choices, and you can instantly read someone as punk by looking at what they’re wearing.

But it’s important to note that choices in clothing is not always pure expression and creativity. Like the rest of our interactions, we are impacted by outside factors, such as our class, location, gender and income. Location we’ve already briefly discussed, but this can also be impacted by more broad aspects of location as well: what materials or styles we have available to us in our given country, for example, can limit our choices. Class and income may restrict what type of clothes we have access to, and what types of clothes our society tells us we are allowed to wear or not. And gender, a concept which like class and income is also socially constructed, often dictates to us what society expects us to wear. Even if you reject what you is “appropriate” for your gender to wear, you are still feeding into the same expectations by choosing actively to ignore it. These rules and regulations of the social are always inscribed on our bodies and our clothing, whether we choose to accept them or not.

But what this means is that we learn to understand these rules and aspects of communicate. We learn what stories which pieces of clothing tells, and which ones resonate with us. It also means we can learn to manipulate these stories in order to tell the stories we want with what we put on our bodies.

And manipulate is exactly what Kim Kardashian did. Whether she started her career manipulating her image, she definitely was manipulating later as time went on. She actively changed her physical body to present a different social body that made it more acceptable to become famous and widely accepted. She altered her voice, electing a higher-pitched voice with Paris Hilton-esque vocal fry, which she noticeably dropped by the time she was older. And obviously, her fashion was also carefully curated to match the image of the sexualised woman. She posed nude at times, and for Playboy, but the presentation of her image as the sexualised woman was more than just these instances – she actively chose her outfits, makeup and hair to feed the male gaze that gave her money.

Kim’s self-catered image begins to change, however, when she begins her relationship with Kanye West. As is portrayed on Keeping Up With, as well as more generally, Kim’s identity becomes morphed and moulded by Kanye as well as herself.

Kanye’s manipulation of her image, while similar in approach to Kim’s to herself, is different do Kanye being a different person. His control over her image also was a demonstration of control over her person – draping her form in Yeezy was a way of marking territory. She used her body as advertising for his business, and by doing so was also a marker of ownership over her body and identity. She became the one married to Kanye, rather than Kim as a individual to herself.

When discussing her robbery in Paris, Kim recounts how the robbers referred to her as “the rapper’s wife” rather than knowing her as Kim Kardashian. I think this is a really important in understanding the shifting of identity. Kim’s fashion was telling a different story about who Kim was than the one it was before: now she was Kim, the dutiful wife of rapper Kanye West, rather than Kim Kardashian.

As their relationship started to fall apart, so did Kanye’s control over Kim’s look. In an episode of Keeping Up With, Kim was getting ready for the 2019 Met Gala. Her outfit was supposed to convey the sense of coming out of the water, and how the water would just run off the body, giving the appearance of almost no dress at all. Kanye argued with her about the dress, saying he didn’t want his wife wearing such a dress. Kim rightfully argues back about how both of them, and especially Kanye, had crafted her image to make her the sex symbol she became.

Here, she admits the image of herself is one that is constructed carefully, and one that had a lot of input from Kanye. His reaction also shows how much he was used to the dynamic of the malleability of his wife’s image to reflect the way his eyes appreciate her. The primary issue, however, is in the shifting nature of her identity in relation to him, and how it is not reflecting in her identity with the outside world. He saw her as wife and mother, who should therefore drop the sexual imagery. Kim, however, still was seen as the sexy celebrity despite her age and status as mother. For Kanye, her outward appearance should reflect the identity of mother. For Kim, it should continue to reflect her status as a sexualised woman.

The dynamics of United States society that means that the identity of woman is somehow incoherent with the identity of sexy is a far more detailed conversation than I’m willing to have here. But for Kanye, and for other parts of society as well, the social body of Kim as object of male gaze is incompatible with the mothering body. But Kim sees the ability to continue the image she has spent years cultivating.

For me, what makes Kim inherently interesting the interrelationship she has with systems of social power. Earlier, we talked about how our fashion choices are inherently limited by outside forces such as gender, class, income and location. Some of these are obviously not as pushed onto Kim as it is, say, me. Income, for example, is definitely something she doesn’t have to worry about. You would also think class as something that’s not limiting, however it kind of is. Kim would be mocked endlessly if she was caught wearing cheap t-shirts she bought at TK Max. While income and class limits me in what I’m able to actually access and afford, it limits Kim in keeping her from being socially accepted to purchase cheaper and lower-class items. I mean, I don’t feel sorry for her for that, but it’s worth pointing out.

Kim is also impacted by her body which is gendered as female. We’ve seen the impact of this on her entire career. She used the male gaze to her advantage, crafting an image that pleased it – in voice, demeanour and clothes – in order to raise her status. The effect of her raise in fame is echoed in changes to some of the social considerations of the female body. It’s hard to now look through online shops or fashion magazines and not see models who are clearly Kardashian-look-alikes, women whose bodies are attempting to mould the same forms that Kim and her sisters have fitted in. In some ways, they have used the male gaze to transform the perception of the male gaze – shifting the look of models from thin hips to bigger hips and rear. However, this form of woman has always been sexy in the male gaze, but wasn’t always seen. The Kardashians did help to see these. While they do have the power to change some smaller aspects, they cannot go outside the norm of the sexualised woman. Khloe, for example, was criticised regularly for her larger size compared to her sisters – who, by the way, wasn’t very big anyway. While they are the epitome of sexy, they are the epitome of sexy within the constraints of the social view of sexy that already exists. They can’t change sexy, they can only change themselves to fit into the window. What’s interesting, is seeing the individual who often is seen as someone who can change the system being simultaneously trapped by it.

So we started this exploration into Kim Kardashian with an episode from the replacement of Keeping Up With, just called the Kardashians. We see Kim struggling with her fashion identity, being suddenly unsure of the way she’s presenting herself.

She’s struggling not just with what to wear. She’s struggling with her identity. Which way does she portray herself? Is she the portrait of a lawyer and businesswoman – a type of woman who typically hides her sexualised body? Or does she embrace the sex symbol she had cultivated? Or is she the mother figure Kanye wanted her to be? These are all aspects of her identity that she embraces – a business owner, a lawyer, a model – and yet are all portrayed in very different ways in the social world.

She is also no longer owned. Her identity as being “the rapper’s wife” has been stripped from her. Her being draped in yeazy as both an act of advertising and act of claiming is no longer present. Her identity is in flux, and therefore so is her fashion. And finding her fashion may help her to understand her own identity a little better. She has to suddenly re-learn how to tell her own story – how to craft her own personal mythology that is spoken of through clothes.