When Kim Kardashian hit the 2022 Met Gala carpet in Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress, people had A LOT of feelings. Some were thrilled to see the star in the iconic dress, while others were horrified that she’d wear such a delicate and significant garment. But perhaps the part of the outfit that caused the most backlash was the intense diet she went on to fit into it.
“Two weeks before [the Met Gala], I was 10 pounds down and I was so proud of myself,” she told Allure for their August 2022 cover story. “Then I got down 15 [pounds] and it fit. I couldn’t believe it.” Kardashian stressed that she was under the supervision of a nutritionist and trainer, promising she wasn’t “starving and doing it really unhealthy.” Even so, her diet, she said, caused a painful psoriasis flareup.
Critics lobbed many accusations at Kardashian, saying she was yet again promoting unrealistic body standards by changing her body to conform to a dress (“There are so many things out there that are so not accurate and not true,” she said) And at the Met Gala 2024, the star returned to the carpet in a corset so tight that she seemed barely able to breathe, yet again, emphasising unrealistic and potentially harmful body ideals.
Kardashian wore Maison Margiela couture with an extremely tight corset, her waist squeezed to tiny proportions. But unlike the immediate backlash to her diet comments for her Marilyn look, early reactions online seem to praise Kardashian for being tiny — yet another marker of how we’ve regressed to early-aughts body norms in the Ozempic era, tying thinness to beauty and worth. We’ve seemingly become more aware that our bodies are both inherently personal and political, that what we look like is both an intensely private choice, and a statement about ourselves and the world around us. And Kardashian does look incredible; in fact, she looks unreal — and that’s the problem.
Raymond Hall