How the Kardashians Became Flesh-and-Blood Memes

Corey charts the many different pop-cultural archetypes that the Kardashians, and Kim in particular, have played with through the years, often by playing dress-up: the all-American romantic doom of Marilyn Monroe, the ethnically ambiguous curvaceousness of Disney’s Princess Jasmine, the wifely devotion of Jacqueline Kennedy, the girl-group antics of the Spice Girls (when Kim dressed up as Posh in high school). Kim excels at metabolizing the idols of past eras—“performing the particular thrill of borrowed glamour,” Corey writes—but she is also a bellwether of the present. Extravagantly mutable and well maintained, the Kardashians’ very bodies have morphed to take on trends. Their self-transformations include Kylie’s filler-stuffed lips, Kim’s rumored Brazilian butt lift, and Kris’s recently publicized facelift, all of which helped inject such cosmetic procedures into the mainstream. “Kim’s ass . . . seemed to expand in tandem with all the growing interest in her body,” Corey writes. The more ass, the more attention—at least until that particular semiotic bubble popped, and the Kardashians appeared to deflate their rear ends, around 2022. Swapping paramours, hobbies, and physical features, the Kardashians shape—and epitomize—the Zeitgeist.

Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their vast audience. They are aspirational American consumers, flaunting their luxury-brand logos, in addition to being models of the American dream, as billionaire entrepreneurs. (The Kar-Jenner sisters have benefitted from collabs between their respective companies, such as a KKW x Kylie “lip set,” and from posing for Kim’s Kardashian-silhouette-inspired shapewear brand, Skims.) They are relatable mothers, daughters, sisters, and stepsiblings, as a blended family whose tumultuous relationships are documented on reality TV. The book is studded with amusing pieces of Kardashian lore that might be familiar only to devotees. Do you remember Kimoji, a $1.99 mobile app that provided two hundred and fifty Kim-themed emoji? The family once used prosthetic costumes to blend into the normie crowd on a Hollywood bus tour, only to make a run for it to escape photo-takers. Kimye’s 2022 divorce saga was effectively styled by Balenciaga, incepting the label into the public consciousness, one paparazzi photo at a time. Corey pithily sums up Kim’s pattern “of accommodating the public’s appetite for private affairs, and of making reality out of make-believe.”

Yet “Dekonstructing the Kardashians” is also a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative. It can read like social-media commentary, with disjointed riffing on one subject after another, and familiar critical ideas trotted out repeatedly. Corey references McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message” in the book’s preface, then repeats it three times in the first chapter, then once more, for good measure, in the sixth. In a final “Archives” section, she writes, “Now is a good time to bring in good old Marshall McLuhan.” (The McLuhan is the message.) The book seems designed for an online follower of Corey’s, who already knows the details of the Kardashian story and craves exegesis. The lay reader would benefit from a more sustained, linear biography of Kardashianism, but even in the latter half of the book, which proceeds roughly chronologically, the text darts among subjects and eras, often in the span of the same paragraph. A passage about varieties of self-concealment skips from ninjas to Odysseus to Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.” Ironically, the Kardashians themselves, usually so expert at capturing attention, get lost in the mix.

Corey is generous in quoting the works of other writers (myself among them) and includes many Kardashian-fandom social posts as a kind of vox populi, but an overabundance of references disrupts the flow of larger ideas. The book is more dekonstruction and less manifesto; its credo may be contained in the line “To me, the Kardashians are no different from other enduring national institutions such as Las Vegas, Disney, and the WWE,” which is not a particularly controversial statement about a family that has long been accepted as American royalty. One of the book’s more sustained, intriguing scenes comes, several hundred pages in, when Corey describes how she came to start posting videos about the Kardashians. She was staying at her mother’s home in Arizona during the pandemic and began filming herself in the carport, after getting advice from a Gen Z friend that “pop culture-tok” could be a good home for cultural commentary that she had begun to do on Instagram. She went from having fifteen thousand followers on Instagram to more than a hundred and eighty thousand on TikTok. “If I’d learned anything from the Kardashians, it was that diversifying mediums is a wise move,” Corey writes. The Kardashian scholar had become a Kardashian-style content creator.