Kim Kardashian and the Marilyn dress
Once again, Kim has everyone exactly where she wants them: gossiping about her.
One can say a lot of things about Kim Kardashian (and her clan) but calling her dumb is not one of them.
A few years back, at the height of the Kardashian craze, I ended up putting my snobbery aside and writing a blog post about the (in)famous sisters, comparing them to the “cocottes” or “grandes horizontales” of the Belle Epoque, like The Belle Otero, La Paiva or Liane Pougy.
Not because I consider the Kardashians to be like high-class courtesans (their s*x life, as far as we know and if we set aside the XXX tape that made Kim famous and a few nude pictures, is surprisingly tame compared to the feats of countless anonymous girls in the Tinder/hook up era) but because cocottes mastered, like the Kardashians do, the art of being famous for being famous.
Belle Epoque parisians courtesans were the talk of the tabloids, led extravagant lives, had an insatiable appetite for diamonds (that is, when they weren’t throwing them in the fireplace just for kicks) and while some of them ended up in poverty after literally burning fortunes, others were business savvy like Kim and were set for life, with the most sophisticated ones even marrying into aristocracy or royalty (those family reunions had to be SO. AWCKWARD. Good golly!).
