We know Kim Kardashian and her family love a headline—good or bad—and they love claiming the spotlight at any controversial cost. In many cases, their ambition is entertaining to enjoy from afar, and in others, their overzealous hunger for attention gives us a bad case of schadenfreude. In a handful of these cases, though, the repercussions of Kardashian antics are alarming, even dangerous, and now it’s time to talk about the Marilyn Monroe Met Gala 2022 debacle.
For those who have not spent the past 24 to 36 hours obsessively poring over the details of the scenario, here’s what you need to know: Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s historic, sparkly, nude “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress to Monday’s “Gilded Glamour”–themed Met Gala.
Let’s be real: It was a gutsy move that transcends boldness and essentially ensured a trending Twitter topic. Even those uninitiated in the language of fashion nerdery would be impressed to learn that the dress holds the record for being the most expensive one ever sold at auction—in 2016, Ripley's Entertainment purchased the dress for $4.8 million. It has since been safely stored in a darkened, temperature- and humidity-controlled vault at Ripley's Believe It or Not! in Orlando. The dress has been displayed only a few times since it was acquired, and only on its original mannequin in a bulletproof, shatterproof case. Requesting to wear it to the Met Gala was a calculated move, one that guaranteed plenty of hot takes on the appropriateness of cosplaying as a Hollywood legend in one of said legend’s most legendary garment.
But here is where the Kardashian controversy train may have unintentionally derailed (or intentionally—who knows what they know they’re doing at this point?): Kardashian didn’t just wear the dress and pose; she detailed the pre-event prep she felt was necessary to fit into the dress. On the red carpet she told friend and Vogue livestream host La La Anthony, “I tried it on and it didn't fit me. I had three weeks and I had to lose 16 pounds.… It was like a role. I was determined to fit into it. I don't think they believed I was going to do it, but I did it.” Kardashian then got into the nitty-gritty of that process with Vogue, saying, “I would wear a sauna suit twice a day, run on the treadmill, completely cut out all sugar and all carbs, and just eat the cleanest veggies and protein. I didn’t starve myself, but I was so strict.” When the dress fit a few weeks later, she says, “I wanted to cry tears of joy when it went up.”
To say there’s a lot to unpack here is the understatement of the disordered-eating century—and what a century it’s been. I should know, considering I just painstakingly chronicled the fallacy of the “ideal” body over the last 100-plus years and—surprise, surprise—Kardashian and Monroe both made significant cameos in the article. For the average media consumer, Kardashian’s crash diet and subsequent commentary could be perceived as nothing more than an eye-roll-inducing publicity stunt or a harmless short-term crash diet before a big event. For those of us who have suffered through any form of disordered eating or are well versed in the undeniable and profound impact these stunts can have on the mental and physical health of millions, this is serious.
I’m not here to accuse Kardashian of having an eating disorder—as someone who has spent more than half my life coexisting with one, I’m not exactly in the position to point fingers or further stigmatize those who may be in the same boat. I’m not even really blaming Kardashian for publicly celebrating her rapid weight loss as some sort of badge of honor and gleefully recounting the blood, sweat, and tears it took to achieve her goal, no matter how fundamentally screwed up that goal was to begin with. Kardashian exists in the same twisted society we all do, and she’s consumed the same fatphobic, thin-obsessed poison we’ve all been fed since birth. That said, Kardashian also now has the power, influence, and means to take a sledgehammer to that stale societal paradigm that conflates weight and worth. And yet here we are reading headlines about her joyful, dutiful denial of sugar and carbs. Why are we still doing this?
“Look, obviously, I think we all know it's not acceptable to go on a red carpet and announce that you barely ate for three weeks and were doing saunas twice a day to lose weight,” says my friend and frequent expert source on all things body-image-related Alyssa Mass, MFT. “Of course, most people in 2022 are going to balk at that. ‘Kim, how could you?! Kim, you're a mother!’ If she had gone up there and said she just put the dress on and it fit like a glove, the audience would have balked at her setting unrealistic standards. Do you know how many clients I've had walk into my office and say, ‘But these celebrities just look like that’? Either rhetoric is hugely problematic for different reasons.”
Like me, Mass isn’t thrilled about Kardashian’s latest body-centric misstep (there have been others), but we both agree that Kardashian alone isn’t the root cause of our cultural obsession with weight. In fact, there was a glimmer of hope for us millennial women who survived the low-rise jeans, baby tees, and six-pack-abbed pop stars of the early aughts, when the Kardashians came onto the scene. At the time their acceptance and even pride in their curves was a refreshing departure from the heroin-chic era we’d emerged from and the stick-thin (Eurocentric) ideal so many of us were somehow still pursuing.
“Embrace your curves and who you are,” Kardashian told Harper’s Bazaar in 2010. “I feel proud if young girls look up to me and say, ‘I’m curvy, and I’m proud of it now.’”
And now we’re back here. One might argue that Kardashian simply lost the weight for a specific goal, that her three-week restrictive diet and punishing workout regimen was really no different from the brutal training regimen of an athlete or actor—after all, as she said, “It was like a role.” It’s easy to write it off as an isolated incident (“Fashion is pain!” they say). But there are actual lives at risk here.
If you think Kardashian’s behaviors and comments are shallow or inconsequential, I urge you to reconsider your perspective and acknowledge the grim reality that Naomi Wolf encapsulated in her landmark 1990 book, The Beauty Myth: “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” It’s nearly impossible to take in the shiny spectacle of the Met Gala and the newest iteration of Kardashian-gate without hearing the echoes of Wolf’s words as the threat to overturn Roe v. Wade looms over us.
Reinforcing thinness at any cost—for anyone, but particularly for women at this time—isn’t superficial fluff. It’s an age-old tactic to distract, demoralize, and exterminate women (by the way, eating disorders are among the most lethal of psychiatric illnesses) and to profit off our insecurities (see: every “flat-tummy tea” and waist trainer the Kardashians have ever sold). Kardashian didn’t invent this strategy nor is she necessarily responsible for dismantling a rotten system, but as a public figure and supposed role model, she has the opportunity to challenge all the toxic bullshit that got us here; so far, she hasn’t seized it.
The upside here is that Kardashian has ignited a passionate debate from all sides (some of the more enraged commentary is fueled by her audacity to wear Monroe’s museum-worthy delicate dress in the first place, but that’s another issue). “Her comments opened up a discussion about health and body and weight,” Mass says. “How do we decide what's okay and what's not okay? When do we decide that? And how do we develop our relationship to food, body, and exercise so that comments like hers don't make us feel negatively about ourselves?”
Those are critical questions to consider, and we should all take them seriously—the stakes are too high to chalk this one up to a fashion faux pas.
Still, there's an unspoken rule in the Kardashian universe: Any publicity is good publicity and it’s somehow imbued them with the superhuman ability to not only ride tsunamis of negative press but to reclaim their own narratives, often making us mere mortals question our own sanity for ever having doubted their intentions.
